Chapter 4 describes the debates that took place in the press immediately after the Balkan Wars (1912–13), which drew attention to the relationship between new concepts of the able body and the militarization of discourses of productivity. In the first Balkan War, the Ottoman armies were soundly defeated, and the empire lost its last landholdings in the Balkans. The perceived infirmities of the “Ottoman body” became a common thread in social critiques calling for all-out mobilization. This chapter traces the relationship between conceptualizations of the healthy, productive, and able body and discourses on the formation of an ideal citizen, as articulated by moralists, journalists, public figures, and memoirists of the Balkan Wars. I expose how calls for a productive body militarized a social issue during a time when Ottomans faced imminent threats of invasion. The militarization that characterized the last decade of the Ottoman Empire and the first decades of the Turkish Republic cannot be understood without first considering the process by which the body of the citizen became a site of national anxiety.

Focusing on the murder of Mitra Ostad, the Prologue sheds light on the ways that various sociopolitical institutions reduce women to the corporeal, instrumentalizing the female body to political advantage without viewing individual women as autonomous subjects. It also examines the manner in which news and social media handled the murder of a woman, pushing the elimination of the female body to the margins (and to a great extent this marginalization of a woman’s murder), contributing to the normalization of such gendered domestic violence and murder cases. Again, the way that these political parties approached this murder and the portrayal of the murder in the news outlets, including reformist and hard-line newspapers, speaks to not only the normalization of the murder of a woman who was a potential threat to the so-called greater good, but it also speaks about the ways that this female body has been commodified and commercialized in a capitalist system to become a tool of payback for opponent political parties and newspapers while the murder and the elimination of the murdered woman’s body and her rights have been forgotten. The Prologue draws connections between various chapters of the book and this murder case and brings the readers’ attention back to one of the main arguments in the book, which is the mapping out of the sociocultural, religious, and political corruptions of a society upon the female body.