The obsessions and anxieties of the late Ottoman state and society over adolescent female sexuality resulted in the emergence of various attempts for developing mediums to regulating it by the government and its ideological allies in medical and intellectual circles in a more pervasive form especially during the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and World War I. (1914-18). During the years corresponding to these two socially destructive events, the wartime government’s pronatalist policies, which was based on the norms of heterosexual sex and conjugal bonds between a man and a woman, emerged as one of the main priorities in the state’s political agenda to cope with the war effort. This increased importance of encouraging reproductive sex as an extension of the wartime politics of sexuality caused to the condemnation of any form of sexual behavior or desire falling outside of reproductive purposes. Among these, lesbianism or “sapphism,” the term deployed in the mid-twentieth century Ottoman medical and advice literature as a synonym of female same-sex behavior, was the most dangerous one that needed to be averted through a collaboration of state, school, medicine, and parents. At the very source of this vice, according to the prominent male pedagogues, medical experts, and literary men of the time, was the “improper intimacies” that occur between two adolescent girls or an adult woman or teenage girl at schools and public realms such as cafes, factories, and theaters that were not "proper places" for "decent girls" to frequent. Based on the context above, this paper analyzes the medical, political, and literary discourses on the female same-sex intimacies and their representation in the medical and literary advice manuals in the early-twentieth century Ottoman Empire. I argue that the political and social anxieties surrounding female same-sex affections, or “sapphist relations” as defined by the male elites of the time, was an extension of fear around uncontrolled female sexuality and its potential to undermine the patriarchal order of the Ottoman society. By using medical and literary texts published between 1912-1923, this paper discusses two questions: First, how did the wartime Ottoman politics and male elites perceive and define the female same-sex behaviors and friendship concerning adolescent sexuality? Second, how did the demonization of lesbian desires and intimacies resonate among the larger society? By investigating these questions, this paper analyzes the social and political receptions of female same-sex desire in the making of sexed imperial subjects.

Part of a larger project on representations of non-normative sexualities in Turkish cinema, this paper focuses on the discourses of class and female sexuality in Turkish feminist auteur Yesim Ustaoglu's 2016 feature film, Clair Obscur (Tereddüt). Ustaoglu's film lays bare both the societal norms that govern female bodies in Turkey and the narratives of honor and sexual desire we associate with rural and urban spaces, all the while deconstructing and complicating these very categories through her feminist filmmaking practices. In this paper, I concentrate on Ustaoglu's filmmaking practices like the staging, camera angles, editing and lighting, and argue that she constructs a feminist visual narrative that works against the very discourses of sexuality that constitute the raw material of her film. Rather than read her film as a standalone feminist text, I take into consideration the larger context of Turkish cinema, which has hitherto depicted female bodies and female sexualities in markedly different (and often exploitative) ways. As an independent film with considerable national success and transnational circulation in international film festivals, Clair Obscur serves as an excellent case study for how feminist filmmakers from MENA create a new feminist visuality that departs from the male-dominated independent film industry in the region.

This paper focuses on the national and global geopolitics of Veysel Aksahin’s short documentary, Hala (2012), which centers the life and struggles of the gender non-conforming Ihsan Hala from Kayislar Village of Manisa, Turkey. Aksahin’s documentary is intended to spectacularize the exceptional acceptance of gender non-conformity in a conservative and rural town of Turkey. However, the documentary’s politics of representation raises serious implications concerning the reproduction of the colonial ethnographic gaze, the asymmetrical circulation of the Global North’s politico-cultural capital, and the collision of the rural and the urban in neoliberal Turkey. I argue that the documentary obscures the complex entanglements of the biomedical transgender modernity and the peripheral gender non-conforming lived experience against the backdrop of the neoliberal and neoconservative transformations that Turkey has undergone since the 1980s. Through a critical reading of the documentary as well as several interviews published before and after its release in 2012, I contend that the figure of Ihsan Hala exposes both the corporatized universalization of transgender rights as human rights discourse and the limitations of metronormativity. By analyzing the epistemic erasures enacted through the ethnographic gaze and the Eurocentric knowledge production, I situate the mediated representation of Ihsan Hala within the shifting national and global discourses of gender, sexuality, class, and religion while ensuring that the referential gender non-conforming subject does not disappear in their invocation.

The First World War engendered a multiplicity of anxieties about sex and sexuality during and after the Entente’s occupation of Istanbul. According to one doctor named Mehmet Ali (Kasim) writing in 1924 on the moral disruption brought about by the war, “Today, the danger to which youths are exposed is graver than the gunfire caught by soldiers.” Indeed, doctors were on the front lines of what many male observers believed to be a veritable moral crisis in the fledgling Turkish Republic. Bestowing upon themselves the role of scientific leaders of the new Turkey, doctors seized upon postwar unease surrounding the nation’s perceived moral wantonness to ensconce themselves in high level decision-making processes about sex and sexuality and how the nation could recover from defeat. As another doctor named Muhib Nureddin explained, it was insufficient for doctors to “struggle” in hospitals and examination rooms; it was incumbent upon them to take on “a wider, more public” role in public health, specifically as it related to sexual health. In this paper, I analyze the works of Dr. Kasim and others, writing about a variety of ‘symptoms’ of the postwar ‘moral sickness’ described by Turkish observers. These symptoms included soliciting prostitution, syphilis, and masturbation. I argue that doctors’ desire for a wider role in public affairs dovetailed with the increasing level of surveillance and emphasis on ossifying gender roles that state actors considered necessary to revitalize a nation ravaged by nearly a decade of continuous war. Dr. Nureddin explained the problem in stark terms: an “an impure generation” emerged out of World War I, for whom “the fatherland (vatan), the nation (millet) are among the words he does not comprehend.” As a member of the Istanbul Police Ministry named Mustafa Galip further explained, women who committed “disgusting acts” such as prostituting themselves were “essentially diseased,” ensconcing perceived sexual deviancy as a medical problem. In addition to calling for further police surveillance of such women (and men), Galip redoubled doctors’ calls for a wider role for medical authorities to scrutinize both male and female bodies and sexual habits. This scrutinization, I argue, was a key site upon which Turkish efforts to chart out the path for the new nation-state’s viability occurred.