"Gender and Memory in the Films By Tomris Giritlio?lu and Ye?im Ustao?lu" During the 1990s and early 2000s, politically active female film directors have acquired increased visibility in Turkey. This talk will discuss works by two of the most important, Ye?im Ustao?lu and Tomris Giritlio?lu, whose films deconstruct the narrative of “national history”. Through the depiction of national traumas, both Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu highlight the subordination of all those who occupy precarious positions within the nation-state: the non-Muslims, Kurds, and poor men and women. Both directors challenge assumptions about the homogenous “Turkish and Sunni-Muslim, yet secular, modern nation-state” through a gendered position. I argue that Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu impart a distinctively “feminine” (if not an exclusively female) gaze, which deconstructs the patriarchal arrangements in the mainstream society, and the vernacular of its national history. Their films make room for individual and group accounts which have been otherwise subordinated to the grand narrative of national history. Archiving messy human and group emotions, Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu complicate the neat picture of the modern nation-state through stories of individuals encountering trauma. References to strings of trauma (E.g. to tax of 1942, pogroms of 1955, Kurdish conflict of the 1990s) identify the nation as a construct of history in a state of continuous reproduction through moments of silence and subordination, rather than a product of one catastrophic moment of origination (e.g. a war of liberation). Ustao?lu and Giritlio?lu represent a reversal of fortunes, a transition from the object to the authorial position for women in cinema. Women are no longer just ambivalent objects of desire in melodramas and “man’s films” of the 1960s and 70s; nor are they questions posed by “women’s films,” of urban male directors in the 1980s. At least some women no longer need a sympathetic male gaze on the facets of their victimization; instead, they explore how gender informs and is informed by the network of hegemonies (e.g. religion, ethnicity, class) in the mainstream of modern Turkish society.