A Feminist Reading of Limon and Zeytin: Motherhood and Gender Roles

Abstract

The analysis of motherhood and gender roles has been one of the most crucial concerns for feminist theory. Throughout history, the conventional understanding of gender roles has resulted in the oppressed women in society. There are also the repercussions in parents’ roles in marriages mostly resulting in inequality in the division of labour due to the internalized roles that see men superior to women. This belief has affected and directed numerous marriages as a false model where the woman is loaded with all the domestic work as a housewife and man is the sole breadwinner who is exempted from domestic work and has loose connections also with childcare, which is also included in domestic affairs. As the wife and thus mother becomes the projected figure, it becomes quite hard to mention the possibility of the division of labour in marriages because conventional marriages favour the established understanding that only or predominantly mothers are responsible for childcare and housework and that fathers should be distanced from this process. Turkish cartoonist Salih Memecan’s comic books Annem, İşte Benim Annem and Sihirli Annem are among the comics portraying examples of the problems about the division of domestic work in marriages. Drawing an example of a rather long-established perception of gender roles within a family sphere, the author comes up with a marriage where the name and place of the wife figure, Çıtçıt (May) is quite diminished. Taking its departure from the ideas of the second-wave feminism, the purpose of this paper is to study Salih Memecan’s comic books Annem, İşte Benim Annem and Sihirli Annem in the light of feminist theory. Çıtçıt (May) and Babişko (Bubs) will be analyzed shedding light on their duties as parents and as a couple with regards to gender roles.