Women and Turkish Cinema: gender politics, cultural identity and representation

Abstract

There has been a significant recent increase in the number of English-language monographs on Turkish cinema. Savas Arslan’s Cinema in Turkey (2010), Asuman Suner’s New Turkish Cinema (2010) and Gonul Donmez-Colin’s specialized volumes (The Routledge Dictionary of Turkish Cinema, 2013; Turkish Cinema: identity, distance andbelonging; 2013) attest to this new proliferation. Eylem Atakav’s book focuses on women and Turkish cinema in the context of politics, cultural identity and representation. The book’s central claim is that enforced depoliticization introduced after the coup of 1980 is responsible for uniting feminism and film in Turkey. Atakav claims that the feminist movement was not perceived as politically significant during that decade, thus it was allowed to flourish. These films focused on individuals, on women’s issues and lives, while trying to avoid being perceived as overtly political.