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Outlaws and Outliers: Female Criminal Protagonists in Late Ottoman and Early Republican Literary Narratives (1860-1930)
Abstract by Dr. Gizem Sivri On Session I-15  (Feminism and Fabulations)

On Monday, November 11 at 11:30 am

2024 Annual Meeting

Abstract
This paper targets creating its own concepts against the underestimation-based meta-discourses on women’s criminal acts (especially serious offenses) and their repetition as a notion in the language of Turkish literary productions. The feminist-criminological approach will be driven to explore Ottoman women and crime relationships which have overwhelmingly depicted passive, downtrodden, and incompetent women self-defenders and victims in the published pieces of late Ottoman and early republican Turkish literature. This also resulted in having mainly two types of female delinquents’ representations victims and cruel offenders (doers) by using special formulaic languages, discourses, and repetitious vocabularies for the depiction of women criminal characters in fictional narratives. In this regard, this presentation will initially navigate the true definition of Ottoman women’s criminality and revolutionary approaches to their delinquency with feminist works that criticize the mundane discourses hiding their criminal potential regarding their motherly and nurturer positions and lower numbers in penal institutions. Not only underestimation against women’s perpetrations but also depersonalization and dehumanization by identifying them as wild tigresses, deviant witches, and cruel villains as a way of rejecting women’s criminal competency, especially in serious offenses, have overwhelmingly invaded literary works. It is crucial to note that I will provide many examples from the late Ottoman and early republican literature such as The Woman with a Dagger: A Strange Story, Bloody Fairy, Grasshopper Zehra, Fox Leman, Selma and her Shadow that all will help to trace the ways of displacement of female criminals and powerful women villains with the attribution of the passive and vulnerable characteristics that enhanced the losing agency of women in fictional narrations.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Ottoman Empire
Turkey
Sub Area
None