Rethinking Modernity and National Identity in Turkey: Chapter 8

1997

8. Gendering the Modern On Missing Dimensions in the Study of Turkish Modernity _*

Studies of modernization in Turkey have generally privileged the juridico-political and institutional realms, starting with the Ottoman reform era and continuing through the Kemalist period to more contemporary developments. I argue in this chapter that comparatively little attention has been paid to the less tangible effects of processes of social transformation on the emergence of new identities and forms of subjectivity, and there has been little critical awareness of the specificities of the “modern” in the Turkish context. I develop this contention with reference to a relatively restricted field of inquiry—namely, discourses about the modern family and the construction of gender—in order to make the broader methodological point that “ethnographies” of the modern that deal with the full complexity of the contemporary cultural landscape are long overdue.

The relative impoverishment of this field has not been altogether accidental. The polemical perspectives adopted both by apologists of Turkish modernization—Kemalists in particular—and by its critics have inadvertently limited our conceptual horizons by falling short of interrogating the notion of the “modern” itself and charting its local specificities. Instead, a substantial literature, popular and academic, appears to revolve around two opposed narratives, with their respective demonologies, that could arguably be said to represent two sides of the same discursive coin.

On the one hand, perspectives emanating from official Kemalism equate modernization and nation building with progress and the irresistible forward march of civilization. The heroic figures of the idealist kaymakam (district officer) and the village teacher bringing enlightenment where obscurantism and superstition prevailed, the effort to eradicate malaria, and the move toward the emancipation of women all appear as part and parcel of the same ideological package. Critics of modernization, on the other hand, interpret this package as a totalizing and authoritarian project that marginalizes and even destroys the life-worlds of those purported to represent the “traditional.” The Western orientation of reformist elites has lent substance to the notion that state-led modernization is an alien and alienating project, inviting local attempts at resistance or subversion. New social movements, including Islamism, could thus be reinterpreted within the framework of a critique of modernity. Doing so, in turn, risks bringing us full circle to positing notions of lost authentic “indigeneity” and inviting forms of neo-Orientalism that are inimical to an understanding of complex historical processes.

There is little doubt that interrogating central tenets of modernity such as science, secularism, nationhood, and individualism has had a salutary effect and has destabilized artificial modern-traditional dichotomies. We are, however, faced with the task of moving beyond this critique and grappling with the actual content and meaning of complex contemporary cultural forms. Some crucial questions need to be raised in this connection. How has the field of meanings and practices designated as “modern” been constituted in Turkey? Have these meanings shifted and altered through time? What sources of legitimacy did discourses about the “modern” seek? How did they construct and define what they sought to displace? What sorts of relationships between the indigenous and the foreign, the local and the global were at stake? Did these relationships coalesce into items of taste and style and into discernible cultural codes?

These questions open up a broad field of investigation within which I confine myself in this essay to analyzing how and why sexuality, family relations, and gender identities came to occupy a central place in discourses about modernity. I pursue three distinct yet interrelated lines of inquiry as a means of mapping out this terrain. First, I examine discourses about the “modern” family with respect to the forms of regulation of interpersonal relations and sexuality that they imply. Second, I attempt to disentangle some of the concrete, everyday practices that go into the making of class, status, and gender codes that, at the same time, denote different insertions into the modern. Finally, I explore the extent to which different expressions of gender and gendered identity have themselves become both products and signifiers of modernity.

The “Modern” Family as a New Regulatory Discourse

The Dictionary of Turkish Costume and Self-Adornment features an intriguing entry with accompanying illustrations under the rubric “Young Man’s Veil.” ₁ Two young men are depicted, one in janissary costume, the other wearing a turban and shalwar, each carrying an impressive sword and sporting a face veil. The entry explains that after the popular classes gained access to the Janissary Corps in the later part of the seventeenth century, young men (novices) between the ages of fifteen and eighteen began applying to join in large numbers. At that time, the discipline of the corps had been eroded to the extent that janissaries lived outside of barracks, in rooms, hostels, and coffeehouses, and some befriended and became the “patrons” of young novices who roomed with them as their servants. In order to protect these young men—who, we are told, were of popular extraction and pleasing countenance—from the importunate gazes of ill-intentioned people, they covered them with face veils made of golden or straw threads. This fashion lasted for more than fifty years, only to disappear in 1826 with the abolition of the Janissary Corps.

This tantalizing vignette offers us a glimpse of a by-gone age when social ranking, ethnic particularities, and sexualities merged to create myriad identities, some more permeable and transitory than others: male and female slaves, eunuchs, concubines, and patriarchs and military men who may themselves once have been palace “boys.” Was it in the nature of these premodern identities that we should have so little access to them or that they were largely unspoken of and unwritten about except in the necessarily partial testimony of European visitors? The answer must be affirmative in view of the veritable explosion of discourses on marriage, the family, and appropriate gender roles that erupted during the nineteenth century. The unwary observer might be excused for thinking that modernization was primarily about reordering the domestic lives of a new citizenry, which must now include women.

In an impressively detailed study, Alan Duben and Cem Behar opened new vistas on Ottoman modernization by examining demographic data and texts on marriage and the family in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ₂ What their material revealed about the propagandistic emphasis on the companionate, child-centered conjugal family as the epitome of both modernity and nationalistic social responsibility was not unique in itself. Beth Baron has provided strikingly similar evidence from turn-of-the-century Egypt, and the history of bourgeois domesticity in colonial Bengal presents important parallels. ₃ I have also argued elsewhere that the “woman question” and, more broadly, the “politicization” of gender arose in contexts of heightened national self-consciousness in which crises of postcolonial (and, in the Ottoman case, postimperial) identity could be articulated as crises of gender and domestic organization. ₄

Duben and Behar’s work, however, reveals something further that the authors themselves do not comment on sufficiently, namely, the extent to which such polemics were overlaid by a quasi-scientific discourse on “appropriate” reproductive heterosexuality. During this period of vigorous growth of the print media, advice and information could be obtained from newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and books on topics ranging from home economics and good child-care practices to marital etiquette. ₅ Islamic regulations of the body and social space were increasingly being encroached upon by a new discourse that removed the body from the realm of the sacred to medicalize and secularize it. Early marriages and large age differences between spouses were condemned because they made for an unfavorable milieu, in both psychological and “hygienic” terms, for the healthy conception and rearing of the young. Expert medical opinion was invoked to determine the proper age for marriage. Likewise, arranged marriages and polygyny were assigned to a world of reprehensible and “unhealthy” custom.

In view of demographic evidence pointing to the actual prevalence of the idealized family model (marriage age in Istanbul households was fairly late for both men and women, families were small and mainly of nuclear composition, and polygyny was negligible), Duben and Behar rightly puzzle over this concern about polygyny, adolescent marriages, and joint families, which could be construed only as a misconception on the part of commentators and polemicists. They state:

The advice and recommendations which appeared in the popular press and in books and magazines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century corresponded almost exactly to the demographic realities of the time. Most of those who wrote on this topic, however, were somehow convinced that the practice—and the unspoken rule—in Istanbul was teenage marriage. Many of the articles and books we have quoted were written in criticism of teenage marriages, and there is little doubt that, though most of them are anonymous, they were penned by the “modernists” of the time. ₆

It is not in the realm of misconception, however, but in the urge to articulate a new morality that we must look for explanations of such preoccupations. Like all regulatory discourses, the ideal of modern bourgeois domesticity needed its civilizational “others,” and the normalization of certain forms of sexuality and gender was predicated upon a critique and stigmatization of others. The “modernists” could formulate their vision of the modern family only with reference to an assumed prior state that was defective and in need of reform, regardless of whether the patterns in question actually obtained in their society. Focusing on the emulation of Western patterns of domesticity as a driving force for family reform conceals from view a more hidden preoccupation with local forms that were destined to become marginal or deviant and, in due course, like the veiled boys, wither away.

The civilizational “others” of the modernists were dual rather than singular: they resided both in an already modern West and in the local customs associated with an ancien régime that became the target of vociferous and sometimes self-denigrating condemnation or of wounded and defensive apologia. The nationalistic moralism of the early modernizers could condemn both the license and freedom associated with the West and what they interpreted as elements of degeneracy in the patriarchy of local tradition. Defining responsible social adulthood in terms of monogamous heterosexuality was not only a matter of proscribing co-wives, concubines, and child brides but also of taming other, unruly forms of male sexuality. The world in which the former palace boy could become a respected patriarch and in which sexualities and life cycles could merge and mingle in fluid ways had passed. A rising nationalist elite was giving voice to and shaping a new normative order. Although a history of Ottoman sexualities remains to be written, we must acknowledge that the emergence of contemporary gender identities cannot be fully grasped without being informed by this history.

It must also be noted that discourses about modernity underwent a series of transformations. During the reform period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the West represented both the emancipatory potential of the modern (in contrast to the traditional Ottoman order) and the dangers of excessive individualism, selfishness, and narcissism. ₇ After the demise of the Ottoman regime and the establishment of the republic, the modernizing gaze turned inward toward the rural hinterland, which became the repository of immobility, tradition, and backwardness, best represented in the figure of the overfertile and brutalized rural woman. Depictions of rural women contained revealing ambiguities. They were idealized as the bearers of the pre-Islamic Turkish egalitarianism that featured prominently in Republican ideology, but they were also portrayed as victims of local customs that kept them ignorant and downtrodden. ₈

In time, rapid urbanization and the influx of rural populations into the cities created a bewildering array of styles and subcultures. New modes of dress and consumption became complex signifiers of class, gender, place of origin, and, more recently, ideological predilection. The boundaries of the traditional and the modern became open to both multiple interpretations and contestation. These interpretations are constructed through the perspectives of social actors who are differently located with respect to class, status, gender, ethnicity, and residence. Any engagement with the complexities of this new field of meanings must therefore pass inevitably through an examination of tastes and styles.

Habit, Modernization, and Style

Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.

—Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction

As I reflected about the subtler implications of processes of modernization, a childhood memory suggested itself as a useful starting point. My family and I used to spend our summers on an island about an hour away from Istanbul where women and children could relax by the seaside while the men commuted to work by boat. On weekends, crowds of Istanbul residents who could not afford holidays elsewhere came to the island to escape the summer heat and rest under the pine trees. They came as families equipped with carpets, cushions, pots and pans, cooking stoves, and, sometimes, musical instruments. Once at the picnic site, the carpets and cushions would be laid out and the area would be transformed into a cozy interior. The permanent residents of the island, walking past the picnickers in their tennis or beach outfits, were greeted by sights of men in their pajamas, women cooking, and children playing or being rocked to sleep in makeshift cradles. Sounds of popular music and smells of cooking formed the sensory backdrop of this scene. ₉

Through my child’s eyes, the alterity of these day visitors was encapsulated in a single item of clothing—the pajamas worn by the men, garments associated with the intimacy of the bedroom. This was how I formed one of my first, nebulous (and misguided) understandings of the category of “traditional,” a category that was vaguely coterminous with certain items of popular taste and style. Yet what could have been more novel than what I was witnessing? A new form of leisure was on display involving open-air, mixed-sex, family entertainment, denoting rhythms of work and rest unknown in the rural areas from which most of these new urbanites came. What, indeed, could be more sensible than wearing pajamas and bringing cooking utensils from home if your budget and personal inclinations did not favor the purchase of specialized leisure wear and picnic equipment? It was easy to mistake a new style of living for an expression of difference that could be articulated in the language of custom and tradition. But where did the stuff out of which I had constructed “difference” come from? Was it in patterns of consumption? Or was it in more complicated notions of propriety and behavior in public places that formed some implicit code of class and gender? Finally, how did the “West,” from which most items of fashion and modern material culture emanated, contribute to this construction?

Commenting on changing urban mores at the turn of the century, Duben and Behar draw our attention to the way the “Europeanization” of the Ottoman upper and middle classes created a split between the alaturka and the alafranka (respectively, the Ottoman-Turkish and European “frankish” styles) that penetrated the inner workings of family life. ₁₀ The appearance of Western implements and items of furniture and clothing clearly had a bearing upon intimate bodily habits. Sitting in high-backed chairs engaged different sets of muscles, eating in the alafranka style involved new rules that introduced a certain distance and even formality among family members who previously had dipped into the same bowl of food, mealtimes became more regular, and new rules of etiquette demanded that women be served first, a total reversal of Ottoman proprieties.

Such changes implied not simply a refashioning of tastes but also a hierarchy of worth whereby former habits, such as eating with one’s hands, could be redefined as unhygienic or even repulsive and older patterns of deference could be deemed uncivilized. As Bourdieu notes, the redefinition of apparently banal physical practices constitutes an attempt to refashion habit among social groups seeking to shape new subjects. ₁₁ In Turkey, this transformation also involved the creation of new notions of the “private.” One source of the obsessive preoccupation with family life referred to earlier resides precisely in the fact that the domestic became the terrain on which this “private” was being both constructed and contested.

In practice, modernization involved a selective appropriation of items of material culture, habit, and taste by different strata of society, creating styles that were also insignia of social status. Ekrem Isin traces this process to changes in the urban landscape of Istanbul in the nineteenth century: the decline of local trades, the appearance of bon marché high-street stores in the Pera district displaying imported goods, and the differentiation of tastes, fashions, and leisure in conjunction with changing patterns of stratification. ₁₂ In a recent study, Sencer Ayata offers important insights into how tensions between images of tradition and images of modernity are being lived concretely in Turkish households as a literal split between the styles of formal dress and consumption displayed in the guest room and those adopted in the intimate inner space of the rest of the house, which is a place of informality and closeness. ₁₃ This description also denotes a petit bourgeois style in contrast to that of the more thoroughly Westernized house interiors of the upper and professional middle classes. Incongruous combinations of the local and the foreign can be made into objects of derision, hallmarks of the parvenu or the newly rich—such as drinkers of whisky who also eat the humble lahmacun, a local pita bread. Preferences in fashion, food, music, and general aesthetics thus map out a complex topography of status, which is the subject of running social commentary in cartoons and popular satirical magazines.

In short, different constructions of what it means to be modern have come to inform not only the most intimate aspects of daily life but also subtle codes of class and status. I suggest that gender emerged as one of the key arenas in which such differences could be articulated and expressed. Both individual expressions of masculinity and femininity and different norms and styles of cross-gender interaction gained new meanings in a field powerfully defined by these new parameters. I next attempt to show that changing identities for men and women, which had become part and parcel of the modernist project in Turkey, now expressed a substantially transformed reality.

Masculinities: Old and New

The polemical literature of the turn of the century about Ottoman domestic mores appears to single out one main victim, the woman. Her ignorance and seclusion and the indignities of polygyny and repudiation were major objects of criticism. The denunciatory voice was that of the male modernist reformer. Implicit in this critique was also the belief that men were condemned to loveless matches arranged by their kin and inadequate spouses who could not provide intellectual companionship.

My initial interpretation of this apparent male feminism was that men were using women’s plight to bemoan their own disenfranchisement in the face of paternal autocracy, a disenfranchisement that was mirrored in the political arena by the absolutism of the Ottoman state. ₁₄ I subsequently became concerned with the added possibility that these generational tensions also corresponded to changes in the expression of hegemonic masculinity in Ottoman society. ₁₅

The Ottoman patriarch represented central features of the old order: hierarchy, fixity, and absolute authority. The “new” man was aspiring to a domestic setting in which these values were overthrown, in which emotional distance between spouses was replaced by love and companionship, in which both men and women were emotionally involved and close to their children, and in which the conjugal pair could claim some autonomy from their elders. The Ottoman patrician, the paterfamilias of the konak (mansion), was being challenged by a younger generation whose aspirations for modernity were expressed partly in a preference for single-family apartment living and Western styles of entertainment.

Yet there is no question that the passing of the Ottoman patriarch elicited profound ambivalence, not to say nostalgia. In an insightful book about the Tanzimat novel, Jale Parla argues that the early Ottoman novelists expressed this nostalgia through the metaphor of the fatherless home, where the novelist himself took on the role of paternal guidance vis-à-vis his disoriented society. ₁₆ Early depictions of Westernized, upper-class men were, indeed, far from flattering; the züppe (snob) of the Tanzimat period emerged as effeminate and foppish. ₁₇ He represented simultaneously a departure from solid, sober Ottoman masculinity and a threat to the Ottoman communitarian conservatism that shunned ostentation and mandated that the wealthy take care of the less fortunate.

The figure of the Ottoman patrician had his popular counterpart in the kabadayi (literally, “tough uncle,” meaning a neighborhood tough). Ref’i Cevat Ulunay describes the phenomenon in colorful detail as a form of urban chivalry whose context was the traditional mahalle, or urban quarter. ₁₈ Mahalles were small, well-entrenched units of residence, divided mainly along ethnic rather than class lines, with a strong sense of communal identity and territoriality. ₁₉ Like the household and the family, the mahalle had an honor to be defended. The kabadayi ensured that the women of the quarter were protected, that there were no importunate visitors from other quarters, that dealings among inhabitants were honest and fair, and that infractions of propriety did not go unpunished. They were mostly uneducated but could be artisans practicing their trade, and they were generally respectable members of the community. (Indeed, Ulunay suggests that they were most concerned about being mistaken for külhanbey, rakish scamps displaying irresponsible and lumpen styles of masculinity).

Both the patrician and the kabadayi, and the masculinities they implied, were the guarantors and protectors of a normative order that was at once stifling and reassuring, constraining yet deeply familiar. It is little wonder that expressions of rage and nostalgia mingled in equal measure in many literary productions of the time.

What, then, were the contours of the new patriarchy—that of the citizen and the modern husband-father—being shaped through the reforms culminating in the republican era? Although the effects of Kemalist reforms on women’s identities have received some attention, ₂₀ the masculine ideals of Turkish nationalism have remained somewhat more nebulous. The figure of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, however, portrayed alternately in military uniform and Western tuxedo, provides some clues to this question.

A fact about the republican dress code that is often overlooked is that Atatürk never actually outlawed the veil (unlike Reza Shah in Iran, who did) but was ruthless when it came to the sorts of headdresses men chose to wear. In the Ottoman empire, rank, origin, and ethnicity could be read clearly in the costumes and even the colors that subject populations were allowed to wear. Similarly, men of religion could be clearly distinguished by their turbans and garments. The Western hat and tie were not merely items of fashion but became the solvent and suppressor of these differences, a uniform of secularism that also signified loyalty to the state. The new cadres of the republic, civil servants and professionals, wore the insignia of their allegiance; conversely, insubordination could be indicated by misplaced facial hair or the wrong hat.

Moreover, this new uniformity among the elite exacerbated the visible differences between urbanites and peasants. While the modern man of the republic appeared at public functions with his bare-faced wife at his side, his rural brother was pictured, and frequently caricatured, in traditional garb with his veiled wife following forty paces behind him (preferably, he rode his donkey while she walked). The unreconstructed masculinity of tradition, the sharp age and gender hierarchies, and the oppression of women were now portrayed through rural mores and interpreted as a deficit in civilization. The civilizing mission of the village teacher and kaymakam, alluded to earlier, was portrayed as the struggle of science and enlightenment against ignorance and obscurantism. On the other hand, populist discourse idealized village life and the person of the Turkish peasant as the true repository of folk wisdom and indigenous values. This ambivalence lodged itself at the heart of discourses about modernity in Turkey, where the boundary between the modern and the alien remained alarmingly indistinct.

The paternal role was also redefined for modern men. The remote, authoritarian father figure began giving way to a new intimacy and paternal involvement. The modern father had a special link to his daughters, who were valued, educated, and nurtured—men gave social birth to the new woman of the republic. This new affective tone is captured well in the correspondence of Ziya Gökalp, a major architect of Turkish nationalism, with his daughters from his exile in Malta. Atatürk’s choice of daughters as his adopted children, in a society where male child preference was the uncontested norm, was also heavy with symbolic significance.

It should be clear from the foregoing that these new identities reproduced aspects of both gender and social class in a society with a small urban and literate population and a large rural hinterland with varying degrees of integration to national and international centers of trade and culture. Çaglar Keyder points out that the single-party regime (1923–45) was based on an alliance of urban and provincial elites and notables who were invested in state-led development policies and who, in the international climate created by the Great Depression of the 1930s, were able to opt for etatism and an inward-oriented path of industrialization. ₂₁ This populist elite, however, did not modernize the rural masses, despite some efforts at spreading schooling and health services and improving infrastructure. It was only after World War II and the transition to multiparty democracy that rural areas experienced major transformations, which have been extensively documented in the economic and sociological literature. Processes of rural-to-urban migration totally changed the urban landscape. New patterns of social mobility and elite recruitment created diversity and heterogeneity among a previously narrow and relatively homogenous state elite whose cultural hegemony was being challenged.

The contemporary context for social identity formation not only involves local particularities of status, region, and rural or urban extraction but also an increasingly complex network of influences resulting from the globalization of culture. ₂₂ Mass consumption and media images now have their own independent roles to play. To take but one example, some versions of masculinity enacted by youths of popular extraction owe much to kung-fu films and television heroes whose exploits can be emulated in local karate clubs (which have enjoyed a considerable vogue). When coupled with certain patterns of peer group activity and ideological sympathies, these styles can also come to signal particular subcultures on the political right or left.

The lack of detailed studies of emerging subcultures, however, makes it difficult to come to grips with the nature and scope of contemporary transformations. Few existing studies of popular culture, notably on arabesk as a style of popular music, give us valuable clues. ₂₃ It is worth noting that the most popular arabesk singers enact styles of masculinity that reinstate a modern version of the kabadayi in a changing urban landscape and exalt the virtues of loyalty, unselfishness, and moral rectitude, but with a bitter undertone of perpetual betrayal and disappointment.

The extreme diversity of the arenas in which contemporary masculinities may be enacted—from the football stadium to the mosque, from the coffeehouse to the disco, from the school to the street corner, from the sports club to the bazaar—mandates detailed ethnographies. Distinctions of class and taste are mediated through items of consumption and brand names, making it possible to differentiate the jeans of the lumpen youth (the zonta) from the expensive ones of his upper-class counterpart. Other badges of identity are also displayed on the body: this mustache indicates left-wing leanings; that beard bespeaks Islamist sympathies. (Significantly, after the coup of 1980, the military rulers ordered government employees, including university lecturers, to remove all facial hair). Even expressions of different sexualities have become more overt; the haunts of male transvestites and transsexuals and some of the locales where homosexuals congregate are more visible. ₂₄ Detailed studies of contemporary expressions of gender remain to be carried out. For the time being, suffice it to say that the male transvestite occupies the same modern space as his bearded brother who displays novel forms of Islamic militancy.

Daughters of the Republic

Compared with the relatively gradual changes in masculine identities, ideological interventions with respect to women in Turkey appear to have been both more abrupt and more hotly contested. Throughout the reform period, debates on women and the family became self-consciously integrated into different ideological recipes for salvaging the threatened empire. From Islamists who advocated a return to the unadulterated application of the Shari’a to Westernists who favored a radical break with Islam, all used the condition of women as an indicator of the moral health of society. Cultural nationalism created a new discursive space by appropriating women’s emancipation in the name of pre-Islamic Turkish egalitarianism and condemning certain aspects of Ottoman patriarchy (such as polygyny and the seclusion of women) as a corruption of original Turkish mores. The republic adopted this approach to women’s emancipation as an item of official state ideology. ₂₅

In the first decades of the republic, the modernity of the new state was most eloquently signaled through images of women that became central to the iconography of the regime—parading in shorts and bearing the flag, in school or military uniform, or in evening dress in ballroom dancing scenes. Sarah Graham-Brown remarks that visual images of the 1920s and 1930s exuded a sense of self-confidence which concealed the fact that republican reforms were a remote and unrealized ideal for the vast majority of rural women. ₂₆ Indeed, Yakin Ertürk argues that, paradoxically, rural women of eastern Anatolia may have been even further marginalized by the secular reforms because their access to institutions of the modern state was mediated through men, whose own access was in turn dependent upon the intercession of more powerful men such as tribal leaders, landlords, and leaders of religious sects. ₂₇ Thus, women’s encounters with modern or secular structures merely bound them even more tightly to local power holders rather than defining them as equal citizens of the state.

For the first generation of university-educated women, however, who went on to swell the ranks of republican cadres and professionals, there was an unmistakable sense of being in the vanguard. Ayse Öncü suggests that the entry of Turkish women into the professions was a function of the initial mode of recruitment of cadres under conditions of rapid expansion in the new republic. The growth of elite cadres with specialized and technical education may necessitate the recruitment of people from manual-labor or peasant origins if upper- and middle-class women do not begin to enter professional schools. The favorable climate of opinion about women’s education was instrumental in the recruitment of upper- and middle-class women into prestigious and well-remunerated occupations. ₂₈ Thus women’s education may initially have acted not so much as a means of mobility as of class consolidation, since recruiting women may have been less threatening than admitting upwardly mobile men from humbler origins.

However class-biased this initial mode of recruitment may have been, it did have long-term effects in establishing the legitimacy of a female presence in the public sphere. Yet, according to Sirin Tekeli, the primary roles of women continued to be defined in nationalist rhetoric as those of enlightened motherhood and child rearing, which provided the ultimate justification for a modern education. ₂₉ Tekeli argues that the “state feminism” which propelled women into the public world of work and put formal equality on the agenda was not matched by significant changes either in domestic divisions of labor or in sexual morality. This created a split between the public and the domestic personas of women professionals, a split that is currently being contested by contemporary Turkish feminists.

There were also serious problems of identity management in a culture where, by and large, women were still perceived as either under the tutelage of a man, and therefore protected and worthy of respect, or unprotected and therefore “loose.” It is important to remember that models for “respectable” independent womanhood (spinsterhood, “genteel” occupations, or even monastic orders) were entirely absent in the Ottoman-Turkish context, in which high nuptiality and easy remarriage of widows meant that women were almost always absorbed into a family. I have argued elsewhere that the very fact that women were no longer secluded or veiled might, paradoxically, have mandated new forms of puritanism that could be mobilized as symbolic shields in a society where femininity was incompatible with a public presence. ₃₀ The “modern” woman found herself in the unprecedented position of having to construct a new set of signals and codes that would enable her to function in the public realm without being importuned or molested. Unlike the veil, which, by concealing its wearer, confirms her unquestionable femaleness, the severe suit and bare face of the woman civil servant can emit powerful messages of sexual unavailability by deemphasizing femininity and projecting a “neuter” identity. ₃₁ Thus the management of femininity and sexual modesty became part and parcel of the symbolic armor of the “modern” woman.

The kinship idiom continued to provide an effective vehicle for easing social interaction and defusing tensions in cross-gender interactions among unrelated persons. ₃₂ The common use of terms of address such as agabey (older brother) and abla (older sister), or amca (uncle) and teyze (aunt), in everyday interactions implied respect owing to seniority, while terms such as oglum (son) and kizim (daughter) designated a younger person worthy of protection. There were, therefore, a variety of culturally sanctioned ways of signaling the sexually neutral character of interactions, ways that could be mobilized and put to use in novel settings.

In this connection, the theme of the sexually unavailable woman, neither a mother nor a sister but a symbolic sister, the baci, was quite strong in various forms of cultural and literary expression. To choose but one example, the central woman character in the film Söför Nebahat (Nebahat the Driver, a popular production of the 1950s) is portrayed in a highly unconventional role. She drives a cab, wears leather jackets and a cloth cap, and mingles with the boys. But she is pure as the driven snow, and none would dare show her disrespect without incurring the wrath of her cab-driving brothers.

This portrayal corresponds to that of the erkek kadin, the “manly” woman, who does not have to be “butch” or unfeminine but simply unremittingly chaste. That is, until she meets her true love, who transforms her into what she was always destined to be—a truly feminine woman, finally dominated by a male who can outman her. This, of course, removes her from her place as one of the boys and restores her to her proper station. I find this a telling parable of modern womanhood in Turkey because it unwittingly reveals the terms under which women may attain a measure of freedom and unconventionality in the social roles they enact. It is against this background that we must evaluate contemporary feminists’ attempts to assert themselves as both independent beings and sexual beings.

These tensions of identity management were experienced and responded to differently by women in different social locations. For women of the urban upper classes, habits of mixed-sex entertainment and sociality could easily be transposed to the classroom or the office, and a higher level of consumption, such as the ability to travel in private cars, sheltered them from direct exposure to those public spaces still inhabited mainly by men. Women from more modest and conservative backgrounds, who did not go out to work, were also sheltered from such pressures by continuing to lead home- and neighborhood-centered lives that minimized the need for new adaptations. The large group of women of rural and small-town extraction who became mobile through higher education and joined the ranks of office workers and city commuters faced quite a different predicament, as did women factory and service workers who needed to work for wages. Most found themselves thrust upon a world of men whose own backgrounds and habits of interaction did not prepare them to deal with women in anonymous settings such the classroom, the office, the street, or the bus. Ingenious ways had to be devised to deal with the ensuing confusion; these often involved implicit, hidden forms of segregation, such as male and female workers keeping different schedules for tea at the canteen.

The tensions involved are best exemplified by a recent debate over whether the municipality of Istanbul should run women-only buses. This demand, initiated by Islamist women in the name of appropriate Muslim etiquette, found favor among some secular feminists, thus creating a split with secularists who could not condone a return to the old days of segregated public transport. What is interesting to note here is the recognition of a common predicament by women whose lifestyles mandate exposure to public places and daily interaction with unrelated men.

Evaluated in this context, the decision to veil may indeed take on a variety of meanings. I agree with Leila Ahmed when she states that “Islamic dress can be seen as the uniform, not of reaction, but of transition” or as “the uniform of arrival, signalling entrance into, and determination to move forward in, modernity.” ₃₃ Yet it is not totally without reason that Islamic dress and deportment are labeled, by some, as traditional. This labeling partly belongs to the world of misapprehension I explored earlier when I referred to my own reaction to men picnicking in their pajamas. To the extent that veiling is not merely expressive of individual tastes, however, but may also signal the presence of an alternative hegemonic political project, it arouses intense anxiety among those secularists who fear that their life-world may be encroached upon and threatened. This anxiety inevitably leads to constructions of veiling as “tradition” in the sense of something that has to be overcome yet is still raising its ugly head. This “politicization” of identities is, arguably, one of the main factors that make subcultural expressions of taste and style in the Middle East distinct from those in the West, where they are easily absorbed into the mainstream and commodified.

In contemporary Turkey, expressions of femininity signaled by modes of dress, makeup, and body posture have become entangled in local idioms of social status and ideological predilection as well as in global media and advertisement images of modern womanhood. Like modern masculinities, feminine identities are subject to mediations through multiple codes articulated through fashion and modes of consumption. The trained eye, however, has little difficulty distinguishing the modestly dressed woman of recent rural origin from her committed Islamist sister, or telling the peroxide blonde from the shanty district from the fashionably underdressed university student. It would be a truism to say that these styles represent distinct modes of insertion into the modern, but the fact remains that attributions of “tradition” and “modernity” continue to be part of a political struggle over different visions of the “good society.”

Conclusion

Studies of modernization in Turkey have, by and large, suffered from a lack of critical perspectives on the “modern” as an analytic category and have not adequately or explicitly addressed the local specificities of modernity. Although in the introduction to this essay I attributed these lacunae primarily to the nature of local polemics, the roles of modernization theory and Marxism as leading paradigms during the formative years of Turkish social science must also be acknowledged. The assumed inexorable march of society from traditional, rural, and less developed to modern, urban, industrialized, and more developed, or, alternatively, from feudal to capitalist, meant that complexities on the ground could be dismissed as “transitional” forms. ₃₄

Studies of the family and gender relations could also mirror the templates of modernization theory by linking extendedness and gender hierarchy with tradition and nuclearity, and conjugality and egalitarianism with modernity. The question of gendered subjectivities and changing feminine and masculine identities did not even appear in treatments of social change, because questions of culture and identity could be accommodated neither in the Parsonian schematisms and aridities of modernization theory nor in the abstractions of Marx-inspired social theory. As a result, the possible links between expressions of gender and other markers of social status and difference, although utterly commonsensical, managed to escape any form of scrutiny. This, as I hope I have demonstrated, deprived us of an important point of entry for both a better understanding of the complexities of the “modern” in Turkish society and the development of a more self-reflexive social science. The analysis of gender by no means exhausts nor remedies these lacunae; it merely highlights the possibilities of a form of cultural analysis that should now find its way into a new agenda for social research.

Endnotes

*: A first version of this essay was presented at the Social Science Research Council conference on “Questions of Modernity,” held in Cairo, May 28–30, 1993. I am grateful to the other participants for their comments. I also wish to thank Lila Abu-Lughod, Nancy Lindisfarne, Michele Cohen, Ayse Öncü, Aynur Ilyasoglu, and Reem Saad for their helpful comments on the first draft of this essay. Back.

Note 1: Resat Ekrem Koçu, Türk Giyim Kusam ve Süslenme Sözlügü, Istanbul: Sümerbank Kültür Yayinlari, 1969. Back.

Note 2: Alan Duben and Cem Behar, Istanbul Households: Marriage, Family and Fertility, 1880–1940, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Back.

Note 3: Beth Baron, “The Making and Breaking of Marital Bonds in Modern Egypt,” in Nikki Keddie and Beth Baron, eds., Women in Middle Eastern History, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1991; Partha Chatterjee, “The Nationalist Resolution of the ‘Women’s Question,’” in K. Sangari and S. Vaid, eds., Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Back.

Note 4: Deniz Kandiyoti, ed., Women, Islam and the State, London: Macmillan, 1991. Back.

Note 5: For a good overview of the role of the women’s press between 1839 and 1908 in disseminating information on health, child care, and home economics, see Zehra Toksa, “Haremden Kadin Partisine Giden Yolda Kadin Dergileri, Gündemleri ve Öncü Kadinlar,” Defter, Spring 1994, 116–42. Back.

Note 6: Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 139–40. Back.

Note 7: These negative properties of modernity were frequently linked to the emancipation of women and the anxiety that women would opt out of their traditionally sanctioned roles as mothers and housekeepers. The Westernized (alafranka) woman was invariably depicted in literary texts as idle and corrupt. See my “Slave Girls, Temptresses and Comrades: Images of Women in the Turkish Novel,” Feminist Issues, vol. 8, no. 1, 1988, 35–50. Back.

Note 8: Nükhet Sirman, “Friend and Foe? Forging Alliances with Other Women in a Village of Western Turkey,” in Sirin Tekeli, ed., Women in Modern Turkish Society, London: Zed Books, 1995. Back.

Note 9: During a visit to the island in the summer of 1994, I noted some important changes. Day-trippers arrived by chartered motorboat in heterogenous age groups. The younger members, male and female, sported trainers, bermuda shorts, and T-shirts. Musical instruments were replaced by portable music sets of the “ghetto-blaster” variety. Older women wore head scarves and long-sleeved, flowered dresses, while men wore nondescript attire, mainly short-sleeved shirts and trousers. A younger woman in head scarf and flowing robe, although not encountered on this occasion, would denote something entirely different now from what it meant during my encounters as a child. Back.

Note 10: Duben and Behar, Istanbul Households, 202–14. Back.

Note 11: Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Back.

Note 12: Ekrem Isin, “19 yyda Modernlesme ve Gündelik Hayat,” Tanzimattan Cumhuriyete Türkiye Ansiklopedisi, Istanbul: Iletisim, 1985, 538–63. Back.

Note 13: Sencer Ayata, “Statü Yarismasi ve Salon Kullanimi,” Toplum ve Bilim, no. 42, 1988, 5–25. Back.

Note 14: Kandiyoti, “Slave Girls, Temptresses and Comrades.” Back.

Note 15: Deniz Kandiyoti, “The Paradoxes of Masculinity: Some Thoughts on Segregated Societies,” in Andrea Cornwall and Nancy Lindisfarne, eds., Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies, London: Routledge, 1994. Back.

Note 16: Jale Parla, Babalar ve Ogullar, Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1990. Back.

Note 17: Serif Mardin, “Super-Westernization in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century,” in Peter Benedict et al., eds., Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974. Back.

Note 18: Ref’i Cevat Ulunay, Sayili Firtinalar, Istanbul: Yeni Matbaa, 1955. Back.

Note 19: Ekrem Isin traces the dissolution of the mahalle structure to the social and demographic changes of the nineteenth century and maintains that it survived as a cohesive unit until then. See Ekrem Isin, “19 yyda Modernlesme,” 548. Back.

Note 20: Yesim Arat, Patriarchal Paradox: Women Politicians in Turkey, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1989; Ayse Durakbasa, “Cumhuriyet Döneminde Kemalist Kadin Kimliginin Olusumu,” Tarih ve Toplum, vol. 9, no. 51, 1988, 167–71; Sirin Tekeli, “The Meaning and Limits of Feminist Ideology in Turkey,” in Ferhunde Özbay, ed., Women, Family and Social Change in Turkey, Bangkok: UNESCO, 1990. Back.

Note 21: Çaglar Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, London: Verso, 1987. Back.

Note 22: Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture, vol. 2, no. 2, 1990, 1–24. Back.

Note 23: Martin Stokes, The Arabesk Debate: Music and Musicians in Modern Turkey, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990; Meral Özbek, Popüler Kültür ve Orhan Gencebay Arabeski, Istanbul: Iletisim Yayinlari, 1991. Back.

Note 24: Nurdan Gürbilek draws our attention to the fact that the 1980s constituted a watershed in terms of making the “private” something that could be articulated and exposed in public, especially through the media, fueling “private life” industries. For a full analysis of the implications of the valorization of the private, see Nurdan Gürbilek, Vitrinde Yasamak: 1980’lerin Kültürel Iklimi, Istanbul: Metis Yayinlari, 1992. Back.

Note 25: ee Afet Inan, The Emancipation of the Turkish Woman, Paris: UNESCO, 1962. Inan was the leading architect of this official version, noted for her contribution to the Turkish history thesis. Back.

Note 26: Sarah Graham-Brown, Images of Women, London: Quartet Books, 1988. Back.

Note 27: Yakin Ertürk, “Rural Women and Modernization in Southeastern Anatolia,” in Tekeli, Women in Modern Turkish Society, 141–52. Back.

Note 28: Ayse Öncü, “Turkish Women in the Professions: Why So Many?” in Nermin Abadan-Unat, ed., Women in Turkish Society, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981. Back.

Note 29: Sirin Tekeli, “The Meaning and Limits.” Back.

Note 30: Deniz Kandiyoti, “Patterns of Patriarchy: Notes for an Analysis of Male Dominance in Turkish Society,” in Tekeli, Women in Modern Turkish Society, 306–18. Back.

Note 31: For similar issues of identity management in the Iranian context, see the discussion of the concepts of ommol (too traditional) and jelf (too loose) by Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Hazards of Modernity and Morality: Women, State and Ideology in Contemporary Iran,” in Kandiyoti, Women, Islam and the State, 66. Back.

Note 32: For a more general analysis of the importance of the kinship idiom in the Turkish context, see Alan Duben, “The Significance of Family and Kinship in Urban Turkey,” in Çigdem Kagitçibasi, ed., Sex Roles, Family, and Community in Turkey, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982. Back.

Note 33: Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1992, 225 Back.

Note 34: I am indebted to Aynur Ilyasoglu for reminding me of the influence of the Marxist-inspired social-structural research of the 1940s in establishing base/superstructure models of social change. Back.