FALL 2023, Thursdays, 3:00-6:00PM; Meets at harvard

This course focuses on the margins of dominant gender and sexuality regimes in the modern Middle East through the lenses of women’s fiction in Turkey, Egypt, and Iran. Throughout the semester we will examine the workings and the violent underpinnings of modern gender and sexual norms by centering on women’s stories in three areas: non-conjugality, sex work, and imprisonment. We will contemplate and compare the subjectivities produced by modern Turkish, Iranian, and Egyptian literature by focusing on works that subvert the criteria for national canon formations. These three nation-states went through rapid modernization processes during the 19th and 20th centuries and give us a ground for comparison. Reflecting this focus, the course materials include literary works on the modern experience that tell the stories of subjects who defy patriarchy, do not conform to normative sexual orientations, or live outside the conjugal order. Works of art describing life at the margins of society, such as in sex work and prisons, are integral to the course. Students will closely engage with these literary works of Middle Eastern modernisms while reading critical and empirical studies of gender and sexuality from different disciplines in social sciences and humanities.

With these critical questions in mind, we will read texts that depict dissonant sexualities and ask what we can learn about feminist theory and subjectivity from the historically situated context of the Middle East. The course is comparative and interdisciplinary, as students will think of Middle Eastern cultural archives in dialogue with seminal critical works on Western modernity. The course attempts to rethink modernism and its gendered underside, through narratives about modern Istanbul, Cairo, or Tehran to scrutinize the capitalist reification and fragmentation of gender and sexuality in these rapidly growing cities of Middle Eastern modernity. We will discover the moments when those narratives move beyond the male gaze and beyond moral warnings about the catastrophes that await unmarried women in big cities.

Faculty

Selen Erdoğan received her BA in political science from Boğaziçi University and her MA in cultural studies from Sabancı University with a thesis focusing on the relationship between irony and women writers’ political subjectivity. She completed her PhD in Turkish language and literature at Boğaziçi University in 2021 with a dissertation titled "Writing from the Closet: Bilge Karasu’s Queer Modernism." Her work examines how Bilge Karasu’s fiction contributes to queer theory by transgressing the heterosexual matrix and Karasu’s dialogue with significant works of modernism. She spent the 2018-19 academic year in the United States as a Fulbright Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Department. Since 2015 she has taught Turkish modernism and queer literature courses at Boğaziçi, Sabancı, and Kadir Has Universities. She published articles, book chapters, essays, and reviews in journals, including New Perspectives on Turkey, Journal of Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, Bir+Bir, and Notos. She is interested in comparative modernisms, Turkish modernism, gender and sexuality, queer theory, and life narratives.