The essay deals with Zabel Yesayan's supposed feminism, both in her literary production and her political activity. It shows that any attempt at a discourse of reconciliation on the basis of women's solidarity became impossible after 1909. This explains the tone of her 1911 testimony on the events in Adana and the powerful appeal to her Turkish compatriots for a future citizenship. Here Yesayan spoke as a witness, not as a woman any more. The fact that after 1911 Yesayan slowly opened for herself a new field of “feminine” writing should be interpreted along that line, as an unexpected consequence of her turnabout.

This article calls for a critical scholarly engagement with women's participation in the Kurdish movement. Since the 1980s, women have appropriated the political sphere in different gender roles, and their activism is mostly seen as a way of empowerment and emancipation. Albeit legitimate, such a claim often fails to account for the social and political control mechanisms inherent in the new political gender roles. This article presents the life stories of four Kurdish women. Although politically active, these women do not necessarily define themselves through their political activity. Thus they do not present their life story according to the party line, but dwell on the different social and political expectations, state violence and the contradicting role models with whom they have to deal on a daily basis. Therefore, the status associated with their roles, especially those of the “new” and emancipated woman, does not necessarily represent their own experiences and subjectivities. Women who openly criticize the social and political constraints by transgressing the boundaries of accepted conduct face social as well as political sanctions.

The Circassian Beauty, attributed to the women of the Caucasus, is a historical image of idealized feminine aesthetics that has prevailed in Orientalist literature, art and knowledge production as well as Turkish popular culture. This article argues that this image has been central to the gendered construction of diasporic identity among Circassian diaspora nationalists in Turkey. It aims to explore the multiple meanings attached to the image of the Circassian Beauty, and the ways in which these meanings are historically transformed in line with the political and historical transformations of the Circassian diaspora in Turkey.

This paper explores the historical transformation of masculinity and male intimacy in the Ottoman Empire, with a special emphasis on ethnic, class and gender subtexts of same-sex relationships. Focusing on two significant historical narratives—one written by the historian Mustafâ Âlî in the late sixteenth century, the other by the nineteenth-century historian Cevdet Paşa—I will discuss the ways in which both historians produced narratives of transition and decadence and deployed a problematic historicism that does identify same-sex intimacy. Coming to terms with the inadequacies of both essentialist/identity-based and constructivist approaches for understanding historically specific gender and sexual identifications, I will argue for a new set of concepts that will allow us to appreciate the continuing instrumental significance of same-sex intimacy in a wider discussion of friendship, masculinity and conduct. I will also interrogate the extent to which we might read historical narratives, in spite of their historicist, silencing effects, from a new perspective on subjectivity—a perspective that accounts for the potential of historical subjects to weave webs of identification and sociability, as well as to create relational modes that escape the regulatory, hetero-normalizing agenda of historicism.

This paper is a sequel to Fischel and Kark's study on the private lands owned by Sultan Abdülhamid II (1842-1918, ruled 1876-1909) in Palestine and analyzes their fate after his forced abdication. In particular, we examine the court cases that arose around these lands, cases which were initiated by his heirs after 1920. For 28 years the heirs, led by his eldest son, Mohammad Selim and his daughter Amina Namika, approached half a dozen governments in the Middle East and Europe to regain the properties they claimed. The appeals represented a test of the British colonial legal system as well as issues of land settlement and the role of foreign courts in interpreting Turkish and Ottoman law. We furthermore examine the disposition of the sultan's lands from his abdication in 1909 to the last attempts by his heirs to recover them from the State of Israel in 1950, the general context of his lands in the Middle East as a whole, and the legal precedent set by the Mandatory Palestine court cases.

In the history of Ottoman institutions, their roots in a “timeless Islamic culture and mentality” have been emphasized to such an extent that Ottoman state institutions appear as perfectly defined and applied ideals and myths rather than real entities. The myth of Ottoman guilds controlling all of the empires economic activities is one of these. As court records, which show the details of the guilds' functioning, as well as other relevant records have been examined more often after the 1980s, a new image of institutional change has emerged, and the myth of continuity has been challenged. For the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, numerous sources demonstrate transformations in various local guilds; however, for the first half of the sixteenth century, from which scarcer records have survived, it is more difficult to disprove the myth of the guilds' static nature. In this study, I analyze the court records of Rodosçuk in order to explicate the type of changes that occurred in craft organizations between 1546 and 1552. The textual analysis of the designation records of bakers and other documents concerning the crafts help to bring to light modifications to the conditions of membership of the bakers' guild by 1551, challenging the assumed myth of the monopoly over membership, or the professional restrictions on crafts.

This paper discusses two issues, the first being whether “feminization of poverty” in Turkey exists at all, and the second the reasons behind the feminization of poverty. The Household Budget Survey (HBS) for the years 2004 and 2006 serves as data to investigate similarities and contrasts between men and women in terms of poverty and other socioeconomic and demographic factors. Furthermore, econometric estimation techniques (logit and probit) have been employed to find out the determinants of poverty for men and women separately and together. Findings indicate that feminization of poverty does indeed exist in Turkey; however, a number of social, economic and demographic factors are universal determinants of poverty indifferent to sex.

Blood, sexual honor, and “Muslim-ness” are related discourses that in Turkey produce national subjects in the service of the state. The national narrative brands a subject's perception of self, attributes of the body, and everyday practices with highly resonant markers of belonging. The maintenance of a national identity requires continual vigilance against the threat of forgetting, losing the coherence of the narrative, and disappearing. I will examine the role of purity and boundaries in reproducing Turkish national identity, with particular focus on two key metaphors of threat: the missionary and the headscarf.