In the 1990s a small number of memoirs by the Armenian "left overs of the sword," or survivors of the death march of 1915 were published in Turkey. These narratives challenge what Fethiye Cetin, who authored the most celebrated of these texts called, a national policy of "forgetting," and they contradict notions of the homogeneous nation.This paper seeks to explore, with a gender perspective both the context and content of these texts. I am in particular interested in the questions of who is speaking for whom and to whom and what s/he is trying to accomplish by speaking. I am equally interested in exploring why these books could be published at that particular socio-political juncture in Turkish history. Finally the author examines the larger implications of the notion of Armenians organically being part of the Turkish nation.

We are interested in popular culture, including visual rhetoric and image-based narratives of the veiling/anti-veiling conflict between secularists and Islamists in modern Turkey, and how they influence the formulation of autobiographies of Turkish women intellectuals. Specifically, our paper will concentrate on the visual rhetoric of Professor Türkan Saylan’s iconography to examine how visual images communicate and summarize contentious positions, and how through her presentation of self and her own self-narrative Saylan struggled and negotiated with contentious imagery and discourse. One of the most vocal and visible opponents of women’s head coverings in Turkey was Professor Türkan Saylan (1935-2009). As a medical doctor she fought against the disease and the stigma of leprosy. As a secular intellectual, educator and feminist activist she fought against the systems of oppression developing under Islamist political arrangements permeating from political structures to everyday life in Turkey. She established the secularist Association for the Support of Contemporary Living to provide educational grants for poor children, especially girls, and to serve as a public forum, and a vocal opposition to the “turban,” a form of head cover that has been adopted by Islamists in Turkey. Among the main centers of contention over the meaning of headcoverings in Turkey is the Turkish Higher Education Commission (YÖK), created in the 1980s. Türkan Saylan was appointed to the Commission, and expressed pointed opposition to headcoverings in universities. YÖK itself became a battleground for the question of headcoverings in universities. YÖK banned headcoverings in 1982, then lifted the ban in 1984, only to reinstate it in 1987, lift it in 1988 and reinstate it in 1989. In 1990, the National Assembly passed a law allowing headcoverings in public spaces, then repealed it in 1997. Just as the “turban” has become the symbol of the AKP and its Islamist supporters, the iconic image of Saylan, has become a metaphor of the conflict between secularists and Islamists in Turkey. Focusing on the image and writings of Türkan Saylan as a feminist intellectual and vocal and active opponent of the headscarf in Turkey, we examine how the secularist-Islamist confrontation over head coverings has become a symbol in defining feminist intellectuals’ place in political debate and influenced her own self narrative.

I address the interrelationship of the nation and its cinema, particularly during the early years of national independence during which time the cinema was used as a tool to cement national identity and unity—as is the case in Morocco’s post independence cinema history. Spurred by long-term debate over whether a national cinema is necessary to or able to represent the nation to its populace and others, I investigate the link between national films and national identity during this important post-independence, nation-cementing era for Morocco and the representations afforded of women and women’s potential statuses in the post-independence nation. I provide the initial orientation to the cinema developments in Morocco inherited from French colonization--particularly because the French left behind a conception about cinema, a model that Morocco would follow, and a nascent infrastructure. Schlesinger supports Hagerstrand's thesis that ‘management of audiovisual space has important consequences for the construction of social identity’ and that media should be used to ‘reawaken and reinforce a sense of local history, of time and place.’ (Schlesinger, "On National Identity: Cultural Politics and the Mediologists," p. 147.) In developing countries such as Morocco, film occupies a very particular place in the State's efforts to define itself and its people. Unlike literature and newspapers that require advanced literacy, Moroccan films (along with television and radio) reach illiterate audiences. Film distribution outside urban areas is ameliorated by the use of cinema caravans. One benefit of film is that, once produced, films can be circulated in theaters, in community centers, in public squares, via mobile units, etc., and have a long life span. Films can be aired on television as well. Thus, on one hand, in national terms Moroccan films could be significant because Moroccan audiences would see and hear themselves and their unique concerns expressed on screen. Thus filmic representations of Moroccan women would potentially resonate strongly with the newly independent audiences seeking to define themselves. In this paper I will discuss early independent film representations of women, from short films designed to be “educational” to feature films such as Bamou that address the independence movement and the particular role that women in rural areas played in that movement, to films such as Life is a Struggle in which “modern” women’s representations also reflect class and urban differences in women’s efforts to define themselves in post-independent Morocco.