Patriarchal Codes Research Articles

Mizgin Müjde Arslan and women’s autobiographical filmmaking

ABSTRACT Mizgin Müjde Arslan is a mid-career Kurdish filmmaker from Turkey. This interview focuses on her documentaries which are self-reflexive and auto-ethnographic. Focusing on personal stories including herself, Arslan wields a double critique of masculinist and colonialist codes of the state as well as the feudal and patriarchal codes of her community, while the complex female characters of these narratives deconstruct the common fantasy imposed by white/Western feminist discourses. During the interview, I asked questions to explore what inspired her to turn the camera to herself and her community and break the silence: I didn't like the story my grandmother and aunts had written for me. I didn't want to be a woman like that. I was able to stay sane for only one reason . The reason was I could write, dream, aim for something, and have the desire to tell. When I was young, I was certain that I would survive. I would survive and tell my story. I would tell my story to the world. Arslan continues to tell her story to the world. With the hope to contribute to her journey, I invite the reader to this interview in which we can witness the stories of the films and the filmmaker.

Beauty: Liberation and/or Confinement in The Life and Loves of a She Devil by Fay Weldon

This essay critically examines the transformation of the protagonist, Ruth Patchett, in Fay Weldon’s novel The Life and Loves of a She Devil (1983). The transformation that Ruth undergoes can be viewed in two ways: both in terms of her role in society and her physical appearance. Initially a submissive housewife, Ruth evolves into an independent businesswoman who undergoes extensive cosmetic procedures to conform to prevailing beauty standards. This article reveals, through an analysis of Ruth’s liberation from traditional domestic obligations and her response to societal constructs of beauty, the marginalization she experiences as a result of her deviation from societal norms. Ruth’s rebellion against the idealized attributes of a housewife reflects her pursuit of qualities associated with appealing femininity. Hence, this article highlights how Ruth transforms herself into a seductive object of the male gaze to remake herself into a powerful subject. Through this transformative journey, the article elucidates the interplay between societal ideals of beauty, female liberation, and implications on personal fulfilment. Although Ruth’s transformation into the ‘ideal’ woman endorses the patriarchal codes of ideal and standardised beauty, this essay argues that the same transformation reverses the process to reveal how female empowerment can be achieved through the manipulation of standards.

Miracle Meal Ragi: Perspectives On Ragi Ragini: Chronicles From Aji's Kitchen From Alimentary Domain

Ragi Ragini: Chronicles from Aji's Kitchen, Anjali Purohit's debut work, is an intriguing mash-up of recipe writing, pictographic visualizations, and narrative writing. It presents a sensitive story about the miracle meal ragi, which is intertwined with the protagonist Ragini's life in various ways. What unfolds is a one-of-a-kind story about women and food traditions encouraging each other through a mutually supportive relationship. The study explores the diverse responses to food narratives, with female characters often conforming to patriarchal codes while resisting them. Authors like Anjali Purohit challenge patriarchal ideologies by incorporating kitchen locations as women's spaces for knowledge creation, sharing, and caring. Purohit's narrative aligns with the contingencies of Third World women, who lead lives in deeply patriarchal locations. By writing narratives anchored on alimentary traditions, she offers a new prescription for women's enablement, offering a nuanced understanding of empowerment discourses.

Quest of Agency and Identity: A Feminist Reading of Kate Chopin’s “A Respectable Woman”

The present paper critically examines how Kate Chopin’s short story, “A Respectable Woman” encapsulates women’s aspiration for their unconditional agency, distinct personal identity, and the subsequent existential authenticity. It focuses the female protagonist Mrs. Baroda’s mental restrictions caused by social norms and her struggle to overcome them. By applying Simon de Beauvoir’s notions of transcendence and immanence, it analyses how Mrs. Baroda strives to affirm unconditional and unproblematic agency as an individual as a part of her attempts to negotiate her sexuality, freedom and identity. The paper posits that Chopin defies the contemporary patriarchal codes of the 19th century American society as she reveals women’s awareness of their precarious situation, desire for freedom and emancipation from societal constraints that seek to strip them of their independent agency and identity.

Anagronism of Topoi and Atopoi in the Works of Jasmina Musabegović

Few female authors have managed to bring about a gynocritical habitus of recognition like that of Jasmina Musabegović. A woman as a scholar, writer, and interpreter – both in the context of literary criticism and the literary text itself – would be just some of the key determinants of this author's creative biography. The experience of meticulous scholarly effort, poetic-essayistic feminine writing, the skill of deconstructing patriarchal codes, and the profiling and reconstruction of female narrative identities are preoccupations that lead Musabegović towards anachronisms. In her literary-critical work, essayistic oeuvre, in novels – from the first Snopis to Žene. Glasovi – identities, both authorial and protagonistic, inscribe themselves through certain topoi (typically female cognitive intimate spaces) and atopoi (dreams, the body's aporia, arts, phantasmagoria), reaching textual, and through it, an existential anachronism. Under the hypothesis that women's anachronisms occur precisely through and between topoi and atopoi, the work examines how they manifest and what they reflect. The research leads to the conclusion that the motifs of recognition range from sensual feminine to geographical and historical, woven into their associations subject to previous experiences.

Women’s bodies and lives as symbols of patriarchal codes: Honor killings

Violence(s) imposed on non-western women during aggressive ritualized occurrences and, in the hereafter, meta-analysis of pain inflicted upon women is discussed particularly in the domain of honor crimes. Representational languages framing trauma in global discourses of naming and human rights are scrutinized, asserting that women’s perspectives must be centric to the discussion. Orientalist frames and control over women as symbols of honor and patriarchal codes maintain tensions of dichotomies between modernity and tradition and cultural relativism. These are thus challenged by emphasizing women’s burdens – as situated individuals – of multi-layered struggles which unfold from purporting to depict women’s realities. The naturalization of women’s suffering is further amplified when constrained within a one-dimensional representation claimed by regional and global injustice. This article contributes to critical feminist interventions in spaces representing women’s realities in a process which deconstructs and diverts the post of modernity and colonialism toward equality and dialogue across socio-political racial and gendered markers.

Migration, patriarchy and ‘modern’ Islam: views from left behind wives in rural northern Bangladesh

ABSTRACT Male labour migration can both empower and disempower non-migrating, or left behind, wives – contingent on further distinctions of rural–urban, nuclear-extended households and of class, religion and educational background. Migration catalyses transformations in the gender and religious norms in rural northern Bangladesh. It entrenches patriarchal norms and helps to reinforce the practices of ‘modern’ Islam – by creating the identity of ‘respected’ housewife, a woman who stays home, takes care of her in-laws and wears the burqà – that works within the codes of enhanced classic patriarchy. These patriarchal norms and practices dampen women’s agency through patriarchal codes – constituted of the power relations between mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law, restrictions on the physical autonomy of women and women’s dependency on their male kin. In-laws, and the assistance of natal kin, curtail women’s decision-making power. This curtailment serves, ultimately, to sustain the power the in-laws and natal kin exercise over the women.

Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones

Neomedievalism, Popular Culture, and the Academy: From Tolkien to Game of Thrones

Pod maską wiktoriańskiej kobiecości. Kulturowe implikacje przedstawień Heleny Modrzejewskiej w prasie amerykańskiej (1877–1909)

Helena Modrzejewska, professionally known also as Modjeska, a renowned Polish-American theatre actress of the second part of the 19th century, lived and performed in the USA in the years 1876–1909. She became an object of interest to the American press soon after her debut in 1877 and stayed in the media spotlight till her death. The present study in cultural and women’s history examines Modjeska’s abundant newspaper reports, notices, stories and reviews in the context of emerging American feminism. Employing content and topical analysis of randomly-selected texts published about her at three different points of time, two parallel yet contradictory femininities have been identified as parts of her mediated identity: an embodied ideal of Victorian „true womanhood” and a genuine New Woman of the fin de siècle. Although Modjeska was keeping up the conventional facade of a perfect gentlewoman for the sake of publicity, her activities were nevertheless consistently subverting the patriarchal codes authorising it. Whether she intended it or not, her media presence moved her to the forefront of feminist ferment in America.

Rethinking privacy and publicity: Reading the spatial reflections of gender through Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway

This article deciphers socio-spatial characteristics of the London scene in the early twentieth century. Analyzing excerpts from Mrs. Dalloway (1925), a novel written by one of the prominent modernist and feminist writers, Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), the literary space analysis aims to ascertain how the narrative elucidates the relation between assigned gender roles and spatial practices of the protagonist Clarissa Dalloway. Revealing the abundance of socio-spatial information hidden in literary fiction, the three-partite spatial analysis that examines Mrs. Dalloway’s living environment within the contexts of private (domestic) space, public space, and ‘internal’ space highlights new layers of textual meaning. Thus, the study exposes the spatial hints of Woolf that guide readers to understand the confined social position of a high society lady. Touching upon controversial issues that nurtured the private-public dichotomy, the study broadens the discussion of gendered space, discussing Woolfian space as a challenge to patriarchal codes. Excerpts examined throughout the article reveal that the author's critique on unequal power relations between men and women reveals itself in spatial portrayals in the novel. Therefore, scrutinizing Mrs. Dalloway allows rediscovering, reinvestigating, and rethinking privacy and publicity in the early twentieth century through modern fiction.

From stay-at-home women to career-minded women: the Istanbul YWCA, 1919–1930

ABSTRACT Examining the labor policies of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) in Istanbul from 1919–1930, this article claims that the organization’s mainly American staff were critical of women who stayed at home because the idea of being ‘an individual’ for them meant working, or having a professional goal. They encouraged young women develop their individuality and self-expression as independent career-oriented women. By establishing an Employment Bureau, offering business training, presenting career-oriented role models and talks, YWCA staff encouraged young women to gain financial independence and pushed them towards making active decisions about their careers, detaching them from paternal and societal authority. Working for oneself and focusing on one’s own career became the key to taking control of one’s life and choices, pursuing personal happiness and potential, all of which was part of attaining a sense of individuality. Their prioritizing of having a career over marriage and motherhood contributed to feminist activism. This case-study argues that the YWCA’s mainly American staff at the Istanbul centers promoted the value of a professional identity for women beyond the bounds of nationalistic duty or motherhood, which contrasted with the late Ottoman state’s and Early Republican Turkey’s ideologies while simultaneously challenging gender roles and patriarchal codes.

Tarihsel Süreçte Kadının Aile İçindeki Konumunun Feminist Sosyal Hizmet Yaklaşımı Temelinde Değerlendirilmesi

Bu çalışmanın amacı, ataerkil kodların üreticisi ve uygulayıcısı olarak ailenin, feminizm ve feminist sosyal hizmet yaklaşımı açısından eleştirel gözle sorgulanmasıdır. Feminist sosyal hizmet yaklaşımına geçmeden önce feminizmin ortaya çıkmasına zemin hazırlayan tarihsel süreç ve kadın hareketinin kronolojik seyri açıklanarak feminizmin dün ve bugün ne olduğu sorusuna cevap aranmıştır. Ardından feminizmin etkisiyle şekillenen feminist sosyal hizmet uygulaması açıklanarak, bu bağlamda kadınlarla sosyal hizmet müdahalesinin nasıl yürütülebileceğinden bahsedilmiştir. Bu çalışma, mevcut literatürden, ikincil veriler kullanılarak derlenmiştir. Söz konusu veriler ışığında genel bir değerlendirme ve çözüm önerileri sunularak noktalanmıştır. Kadının aileden bağımsız düşünülmediği toplumlarda aile kurumunun kadının özgürleşmesine katkı sunması mümkünken, kadınların özgürleşmesi önünde önemli bir engel halini aldığı açıkça görülmektedir. Bu nedenle aileye ilişkin değerlere eleştirel bir bakışla yaklaşarak, kadınların özgürleşmelerine katkı sunacak feminist sosyal hizmet uygulamalarına ihtiyaç duyulmaktadır.

The Mountain Girl from La Vera

The Mountain Girl from La Vera

A "Moderately" Bengali Alice: Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati

A "Moderately" Bengali Alice:Tracing Moderate Nationalism in Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati Sreemoyee Dasgupta (bio) We have all heard the Kankabati tale as children. Kankabati's brother bought a mango. Keeping the fruit in the safety of his room, he warned one and all—"Let no one touch my mango. Remember, I will marry the one who consumes it." A mere child, Kankabati couldn't gauge the implications, and ended up eating that very fruit! So her brother declared: "I will marry Kankabati!" Parents and acquaintances went blue in the face trying to convince them that this was not the proper thing to do! … The brother, however, refused to pay heed. … Kankabati was abashed beyond measure! She made a boat and set herself afloat on a river, winding away just behind her house, left with no other recourse. She was out of her brother's reach, and beyond his determination to marry her. —Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay, Kankabati, translated by Nandini Bhattacharya This pracheen kawtha, or ancient tale, at the beginning of nineteenth-century Bengali writer Trailokyanath Mukhopadhyay's most well-known novel, Kankabati, foreshadows many of the concerns of female identity and agency that dog his eponymous heroine, while simultaneously establishing a difference between old folklore and contemporary colonial reality. He ends this little prologue with the words, "is it possible to believe such a tale? Is it probable that a brother would insist on marrying his sister for the sake of a mere fruit? This is patently impossible! I will narrate a tale that lies within the realm of probability" (Mukhopadhyay 3). While the story of Mukhopadhyay's Kankabati might not contain the incestuous and phallic overtones of [End Page 1] a brother and his mango, it does have similarly arbitrary and superstitious authority figures and speaks of a world where women continue to be oppressed by irrational patriarchal codes. Further, the tale he goes on to narrate is a fantastic one that recalls Lewis Carroll's Alice stories: a central female protagonist slips into a dreamscape where she encounters the strange and the wondrous; has adventures in unfamiliar and somewhat exotic settings; meets a variety of curious and fantastic anthropomorphic creatures and finally, returns to the realm of reality. If Mukhopadhyay seeks to highlight the contrast between the ancient tale and his own modern tale, why call our attention to similarities through his prologue? If he did want a probable tale (as opposed to the patently impossible ancient folktale that he recounts), why would he adapt Lewis Carroll's fantastic setting? By turning to the temporal and geographical intersection of the text's publication, i.e., late-nineteenth-century colonial Bengal, which was permeated by increasing literacy and the rise of early anticolonial political events, we can answer both questions. As a text of a very particular historical moment, Kankabati portrays the early stirrings of nationalism (also known as Moderate Nationalism) and a social discourse best represented by a fluid movement between the old and the new, reality and fantasy, between the possibilities and improbabilities of contemporary Bengali society. By framing his novel in the context of both an ancient Bengali fairy tale and Carroll's Alice stories, Mukhopadhyay calls attention to the changing political time and advocates for necessary domestic social reforms, while simultaneously voicing anticolonial sentiments. The world of textuality in nineteenth-century Bengal was chaotic and colorful. In the aftermath of the introduction of the colonial education system and the rise in literacy, education, and professional aspirations among the Indians, educators, both Indian and foreign, felt the increasing need for textual material more suited to the needs of the Indian population.1 The resulting rise in the import of European books took place simultaneously with the growth and formation of the domestic publishing industry. Although a variety of nonfiction materials were popular for the benefits of knowledge and social mobility they conferred upon their possessors, a large part of readerly attention was occupied by the delights of more imaginative forms of literature. This article explores the symbolic and functional advantages of imaginative fiction, especially the genre of children's fantasy, presented to authors in colonial Bengal. I argue that the ideological and formal conveniences offered by...

Being a Woman in the Turkish Criminal Justice System

In Turkey, discrimination against women has cultural, sociological, and legal causes. Education, health, employment, and social life carry traces of gender discrimination. Gender inequality also occurs in the legal field. Especially in the criminal justice system, women experience disadvantages compared to men. Despite the gender-neutral laws, discrimination is widespread and affects law enforcement, which is dominated by patriarchal social codes and prejudices. This study aims to focus on women as victims and offenders in the Turkish criminal justice system, with examples and assessments from investigation of the corrections system.

The advent of scientific housewifery in the Ottoman Empire

ABSTRACTThe late Ottoman education policy implemented curriculum reforms adding science courses reduced to school children level. The modern science was popularised by supplementing public education with the new courses. Textbooks with illustrations efficiently introduced children to European material improvements and icons of progress. Between the years 1898 and 1924, home economics textbooks for girls, with improved illustrations and updated content, taught traditional tasks within modern guidelines. They conveyed the values of European family consumerism, in which material discoveries of science were adapted to domestic grounds. This paper explores home economics textbooks in an attempt to define and characterise the concept of scientifically idealised womanhood. It contextualises “scientific housewifery” within the debate on degeneration and the women question. It seeks to discuss the reproduction of patriarchal codes in the polished disguise of rationality and modern science.

Türkiye’de ataerkillik, kapitalizm ve erkeklik ilişkilerinde biçimlenen babalık

This study discusses fatherhood in Turkey, in the light of the findings of Fatherhood in Turkey Research, comprised of a comprehensive quantitative and a qualitative research focusing on fathers who have children aged 0-10, conducted in 2016, which was conducted by Mother and Child Education Foundation. Here it is argued that fatherhood in Turkey is constructed under the relationships of patriarchy, capitalism and masculinity. Due to gender-based division of labor, the fathers spend most of their time working and outside their homes. This leads fathers to have limited relationships with their children. On the other hand, with the up-to-dating of patriarchal codes, the interest of fathers to their children has increased; but this interest has mostly been directed to the out- of-home area. Childrearing is still primarily considered as the mothers’ duty. The fathers, however, have greatly adopted the role of bringing bread to the home attributed to them

Conditions of Visibility: Trauma and Contemporary Israeli Women’s Cinema

The past decade has marked a renaissance of women’s cinema in Israel. A new generation of female filmmakers is seeking to redefine the conditions of women’s representability in Israeli society and cinema. In their films, they deal with current problems in the lives of women in Israel, or with issues that have been excluded from the public agenda. They identify and address actual female communities, foregrounding marginalized or emergent social groups within local feminism. They work with and against dominant forms of representation, shifting the traditional place of the gaze, blurring the boundaries between documentary and fiction, avant-garde and narrative, and directly addressing the film spectator as a woman. These issues—the structure of the look and the reorganization of vision—emerge especially in light of Israeli women’s cinema’s current preoccupation with female trauma, which in itself is embedded in matters of visibility. Focusing mainly on Michal Aviad’s 2011 film Invisible, I argue that contemporary Israeli women’s cinema invites us to question our viewing position of women’s traumas. The new women’s films do not attempt to depict female suffering realistically but rather to change the conditions of visibility of women’s injury. In so doing, they challenge accepted patriarchal codes of spectatorship with respect to the woman and at her trauma. By proposing new ways of representing female pain from a female perspective, they seek to reclaim the gaze, to look differently and with fresh eyes, as an act of survival, on women’s very existence in the shadow of ongoing trauma.

Filming the Queerness of Comfort Women: Byun Young-Joo's The Murmuring, 1995

This essay does not concern the history of comfort women per se; rather, it treats disruption and transgression in the discourse of comfort women, as filmmaker Byun Young-Joo sets in motion in The Murmuring (1995). This essay is particularly concerned with Byun's visual language in The Murmuring, which exceeds or is independent of the film's dialogue and narration, spoken to defy and subvert the tyranny of the social norms that regulate gender and sexuality. Although shot when the research on comfort women was inchoate, the critical power of The Murmuring is still unsurpassed because it confronts the difficult but fundamental issue concerning comfort women: the heteronormative desire that sanctioned the violence of wartime sexual slavery. The history of the comfort women has often been written as an indictment of Japan's military imperial ideology, with the goal of recuperating its victims into a semblance of normality, but such normality conforms precisely to the very patriarchal codes that naturalized the institutionalization of Japan's military rape in the first place. Byun's cinematography suggests a recuperation of comfort women, not in the interests of a normalized heterosexuality, but something that might be associated with the queer, a form of defiance aiming to “undo restrictively normative conceptions” of sexuality and gender. After considering Byun as an icon of transgressive gender and sexuality, this essay delves into her queer camera work and visual narrative structure in The Murmuring. Utilizing the rhetoric of coming out, Byun documents Kang Deok Kyeong's protest against social erasure in front of the Japanese embassy in Seoul. In a scene of domestic activities such as cooking, washing, and hairstyling, which are traditionally associated with femininity, Byun critiques the discourse of normalcy surrounding former comfort women who must endlessly negotiate with the social regulations of womanhood. Bodily desires are emphatically configured in Byun's film even in standard interview scenes, and the architectural setting of the former comfort women's residence (the House of Sharing) metaphorically mirrors the psychological state of its inhabitants. Physical interactions between the women of the House of Sharing are shown to challenge the regulations of gender and sexuality, and bodies that resist the silencing in the name of father are hauntingly featured. With an indepth examination of the final scene in which Hong Kang Rim stands naked before Byun's handheld camera, this essay explores the cinematography of the queer and the undoing of gender and sexuality.

Prayer, Discipline and Secrecy in Felicia Hemans's Late Poetry

This article analyses prayer as a technics of female identity in late Hemans. Differing prayers crystallize different kinds of self-definition. One important strand, foregrounded in Scenes and Hymns of Life (1834), sees the discipline of female affect and interiority translated into the roles and relations of domestic Christianity. Although working within such pre-inscribed patriarchal categories need not be read negatively, there is nevertheless a sense of wound or unexpressed remainder. A second strand of biblical lyrics appears to attend to this remainder in exploring female secret prayer and less structured affectivity. However, the voices of prayer here tend to dissolve, appearing on the edge of discourse. A dilemma emerges: schematically, identities within patriarchal codes are threateningly dispossessing, whilst identities outside them are threateningly mute. The article concludes by looking at deathbed prayers as one possible space in which deep female interiority and a culturally normative sense of self overlap in interesting ways.