Baran German, PhD candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, "Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Narratives of Victimhood, Affect, and Politics."
"My dissertation, “Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Narratives of Victimhood, Affect, and Politics,” follows the transplantation of this victim from secular aesthetics to conservative politics. Identifying melodrama as the paradigmatic narrative mode of Turkish modernity, I embark on this project to recover the aesthetic history of Turkish politics with reference to narratives of gendered victimhood. My project takes seriously the primacy of personal and social imaginaries in shaping our everyday reality, as noted by feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa: “Nothing happens in the ‘real’ world unless it first happens in the images in our heads.” As the abovementioned examples attest, the instrumentalization of gendered victimhood participates in the formation of heteropatriarchal social imaginary and state politics in Turkey by rendering the vulnerable female body as the bearer of national values in need of protection."
Melodramatics of Turkish Modernity: Narratives of Victimhood, Affect, and Politics
In 2013, at the height of the Gezi Park protests, several national media outlets reported a shocking case of public harassment in Kabataş, a central neighborhood of Istanbul. The alleged account that approximately a hundred shirtless male protestors attacked a veiled woman with a six-month-old baby was immediately taken up by the then Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. “They attacked my veiled sister,” said the injured Erdoğan repeatedly in a brotherly alliance with the victim of the so-called Kabataş attack.