The Kemalist revolution privileged the construction of an “ideal woman” for the Republic over that of an “ideal man.” Although the 1926 Civil Code regulated the lives of both men and women, discussions concerning issues such as equal rights to inheritance, testimony, legal marriage, and the ban on polygamy primarily revolved around their effect on women. Yet the role and appearance of men also had to be redefined in the context of a Turkish society that sought to portray itself as modern and “civilized.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who carefully constructed and communicated his image as a modern charismatic leader domestically and internationally, came to represent and embody the new nation and the “new man” that the republic aimed to create. As the Kemalists worked hard to define and disseminate their idea of what the new Turkish woman should look and live like, how was the image of the new Turkish man conceived and circulated? What were the components of the new Republican masculinity, as compared with Ottoman masculinity? Focusing on a turbulent era marked by social disruption and political crisis, this paper will investigate visual representations of men in vernacular photography in an attempt to dissect the characteristics of the ideal “Republican Man.” I will examine the roots of the image of the ideal Turkish man in the making of the modern Ottoman man as represented in literature and the press from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. Compared to the large number of scholarly works in Women’s Studies, scholarship in Men’s Studies in Turkey, particularly scholarship focusing on the molding of the modern Turkish man in the early Republican era, is relatively scarce, this paper aims to contribute to the scholarship on representations of Turkish masculinities in general, and in the early Republican era more specifically. Identifying a set of genres that played a pivotal role in the construction of these modern Turkish masculinities, such as military and family portraits, I will look at how urban middle-class men used photography to perform their desired selves as modern citizens, modern fathers and modern husbands in the 1920s and 1930s, collectively shaping the ideal image of the Turkish man as a loyal supporter of the Kemalist regime. Accordingly, this paper will study what the making of this new modern masculinity meant for the establishment of the Republic as a critical component of its nation-building process.

Born in Damascus in 1931, Zakariya Tamir is a renowned Syrian short-story writer, columnist, and the author of numerous books for children.. Focusing mostly on stories from three of Tamir’s latest collections (Sanadhak, al-Hisrim, and Taksir rukab), this paper explores the evolution and the transformations in the representations of masculinities and gender roles in the short stories of this writer, and looks at the literary devices and symbols employed to signal the decline of a traditionally strong and virile masculinity, and the emergence of a new male identity. R.W. Connell’s concepts of hegemonic masculinity equip us with the vocabulary and background to approach the evolution in the stories of this writer, making an original contribution to the study of contemporary Arabic literature. Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity underpins the analysis of the main themes explored in this paper: the political significance of gender roles and masculinities vis-à-vis a persistent authoritarian regime; the mutually informed representations of femininity and masculinity; as well as representations of homosexuality as complicity with and/or subversion of a patriarchal and authoritarian worldview. I explore how male protagonists and symbols associated with their masculinity in Tamir’s trajectory have evolved from idealized figures that embody positive values in the context of increasing urbanization and class segregation to helpless and emasculated, delusional characters, as well as an object of derision and disdain in his most recent works. The paper addresses turath, authoritarianism and patriarchy as elements shaping the subjectivity of Tamir’s male protagonists, and examine the ways in which Tamir’s protagonists have interpreted the highly polarized standards of behaviour that patriarchy dictates for the male and the female, and the inextricable link between patriarchy and authoritarianism. The analysis of this theme in Tamir is motivated also by a desire to scrutinize the themes and the stylistic devices through which his works of this period retain a significant political charge, despite the supposedly diminished ideological charge that the decline of emancipatory ideologies has brought about.

From the very beginning of the anti-regime protests in Egypt in January 2011, there was a notion that one must ‘be a man’ to take part. The proliferation of terms such as ‘gada’a / جدع (a term that is difficult to translate into English, but roughly refers to characteristics that are associated with masculinity), dakkar / دكر (stud) and battal / بطل (hero) to describe protesters reflects how a particular imagination of gender roles was central to the uprising. As I will show, entrenched notions of gender and a reliance on popular culture as a reference point for revolutionary groups meant it was very difficult to break with existing forms of gender representation. This paper seeks to understand how men (and women) in Egypt sought to represent and imagine masculinity in a changing and turbulent political context. The revolution rarely, if ever, put forward a subversive or radically different representation of masculinity than what already existed. This is in contrast to feminist groups who were somewhat more successful in using popular national culture to maintain a degree of public visibility. The mythology of the revolution in song, imagery and film was quickly masculinised. The paper will also, therefore, explore how narratives of heroic masculinity were embedded in class-based depictions of chivalrous middle-class heroes and thuggish working-class men.

In 2012, through a sex panic brought on by right-wing nationalists in Armenia, the figure of the homosexual came to occupy an important space within Armenian national anxieties. This figure does not necessarily correspond to any real LGBTQ+ experience, but is rather one configured through biopolitical frames, especially through anxieties about demographic crises like mass emigration, a declining fertility rate, and an increase in female feticide through sex selective abortions. While not exclusively masculine, the figure of the homosexual predominantly haunts imaginaries of masculinity in Armenia’s present and future. Within public imaginaries – especially through popular and right-wing media – this figure’s propensity for non-reproductive futurity, his disturbance of the boundaries between gender roles, and his production of ideas and possibilities that rupture understandings of a proper Armenianness place the survival of the nation into crisis. In this way, the figure of the homosexual has become one aligned with other figures of perpetration of violence against Armenia, such as the Turk and the Azeri, bringing various existing threads of national anxieties concerning social and biological reproduction in the future into one crisis. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic fieldwork conducted amongst LGBT activists as well as right-wing anti-homosexual activists in Armenia from 2012-2013. I explore the figure of the homosexual as a part of a larger proliferation of figures of threat through an analysis of the traumatic national spatiotemporality of the nation, where present anxieties become condensed with past national traumas and fantasies about national annihilation in the future. I argue that the ways in which postsocialist political, economic, and social crises are condensed with other crises – such as genocide and war – have led to the emergence of this hypermediatized figure and that in this context of crisis and national traumatic spatiotemporality, the figure makes possible displacement of attention from political and economic problems in the nation-state, marking what are political economic crises as ones about crises in proper masculinity.

This paper investigates homohistoricism as a platform on which political claims are articulated, debated, and contested in contemporary Turkey. By historicism, I mean to mark the mode of thinking about a given state of affairs as an historically developing entity that is to be understood in some sort of a (time and space contingent) narrative totality à la Chakrabarty. By homohistoricism, I mean to distinguish the kinds of articulation which see in the past a meaningful and developing narrative of queer desire that culminates in a present state of affairs. Through this lens, I analyze two sets of primary materials about queer contention from amidst Istanbul's Gezi Park Uprising: Protest records (fliers, brochures, zines, pictures, pickets/banners/posters) from Kislak Center's "Gezi Park Protests 2013" collection at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the meeting minutes from 657 neighborhood meetings kept by Gezi protestors and compiled online at Direnis Forumlari (Resistance Forums). I suggest that queer homohistoricism (as opposed to other forms of homohistoricism) developed in Turkey as a contentious repertoire that combines romanticized visions of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, a rejection of Republican militant masculinity, and a claim to an explicitly non-Western (therefore, authentic) source of historical urban civility. I argue that queer homohistoricism as contentious strategy may do the work of articulating certain political translations of authentic civility for the sake of avoiding accusations of Western influence during moments of political crisis, but would do so at the expense of perpetuating just as authentic mechanisms of oppression that make up the ossified texture of permanent crisis in the city.