Inscribing Bodily Narratives

Abstract

There is no question that the COVID-19 pandemic has turned our very conceptions of privacy and publicity upside down. Not surprisingly, this inversion is most crystallized in spaces of leisure that are domesticized more and more as our only available access points to city life in pandemic times. Authors discuss how public parks have always been domestic spaces by focusing on the Feast of Spring and Flowers that took place at Gülhane Park, Istanbul between 1950-60. Accordingly, the Feast exemplifies how forms of mass entertainment can turn into means of biopower that requires and legitimizes the detailed narrativization, governance and supervision of daily life and therefore becomes a public stage, disseminating behavioral norms and bodily dispositions as idealized by the state. In light of articles, news items, and visuals collected from period newspapers and periodical archives, the four-fold biopolitical structure that operated through the Feast is revealed by means of four distinct scenes: 1) image of accessibility, taste, health, and pleasure constructed in public imagination and inscribed into the collective memory of the park; 2) unspoken scenarios of everyday life around how the park should be appropriated; 3) idealization of bodily repertories that centralized bodily health and proper identification with specific gender performances; and 4) construction of idealized forms of agency for women, children, and families. In addition to these regulatory practices dominating over the collective body of the public, authors also account for some instantaneous acts of defiance performed by various members of the populace, which highlight the possibility of subverting the general functioning of the Feast, at the same time articulating the possibility of an inquiry into ‘the right to the city’.