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Yesilçam’s Other Daughters: Armenian Women and Ungendered Ethnoreligious Alterity
Abstract
In this paper, I focus on the visual spectacle of otherness and close read the representations of Armenian women in the 1960s and 70s films in Yesilçam, the large and prolific film industry of Turkey. Drawing on transgender phenomenology, critical race theory, trans of color critique, and black feminist theory, I argue that those filmic representations consolidated the ungendering of Armenian women by commodifying their bodies and casting them outside of heterosexual romance plots. I show that the category of gender presented in those films is constructed not only sexually and racially but also ethnoreligiously, which exposes the contiguous relationship between ethnoreligious status and gender positionality within the post-imperial modernity of Turkey. Critiquing the erasure of the role of ethnicity and religion in the construction of (heteronormative) gender in Eurocentric gender, sexuality, and film studies, I contend that a critical analysis of Armenian women’s ethnoreligious otherness in Turkish visual culture in the 60s and 70s reveals how the exclusions from normative gender structures have, more often than not, been determined non-biomedically. I conclude by discussing how those filmic representations tell us a different story about gender and sexuality, one whose boundaries and conditions of (im)possibility are not demarcated by the sexological archives of the West.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
Queer/LGBT Studies