1090705

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JES0010.1177/00472441221090705Journal of European StudiesMaksudyan and Alkan

Journal of European Studies

Embracing embodiedness, 2022, Vol. 52(2) 111­–128

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in Sevgi Soysal’s oeuvre journals.sagepub.com/home/jes

from the 1960s

Nazan Maksudyan
Centre Marc Bloch, Germany

Burcu Alkan
University of Manchester, UK

Abstract
The ‘women’s liberation’ of the global 1960s did not entail a full range of women’s rights, feminist
politics and sexual freedoms in Turkey. On the contrary, the Turkish 1960s were characterised
by a patriarchal heteronormative order that imprisoned women in a passive and essentially
asexual identity and denied them control over their bodies. In Turkey, women’s emancipation
was postponed. At the same time, the 1960s offered a juncture of literary renewal in women’s
writing and representation, embracing the dictum ‘the personal is political’. This article focuses on
three works by Sevgi Soysal (1936–1976), a key name of this period whose writing is concerned
with the problematisation of what Judith Butler calls ‘the compulsory order of sex/gender/desire’.
Relying on queer theory, we examine how Soysal’s Tutkulu Perçem (The Passionate Forelock,
1962), Tante Rosa (Aunt Rosa, 1968) and Yürümek (Walking, 1970) represent female characters’
growing awareness of their rich spectrum of gender performances, as they embrace their desires,
transformations and confusions. In this way, Soysal’s works not only take the female body ‘out of
the closet’ but also explore its multitude of desires and fluid possibilities.

Keywords
embodiedness, female sexuality, gender performances, global 1960s, queer theory, Turkish
literature

The Turkish-German author Sevgi Soysal (1936–1976), whose prolific writing career
was cut short by an untimely death, was an insightful critic of militarism, gender inequal-
ity and social injustices in modern Turkey. Her writing first began to appear in literary

Corresponding author:
Burcu Alkan, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
Email: [email protected]
112 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

journals in her mid-20s and she published widely through the 1960s and 1970s.1 Her first
collection of short stories Tutkulu Perçem (The Passionate Forelock) was published in
1962. Her first novel, Tante Rosa (Aunt Rosa), came out in 1968. These works were fol-
lowed by Yürümek (1970, Walking), Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti (1973, Noontime in
Yenişehir, 2016) and Şafak (1975, Dawn). Yürümek received the TRT Novel Achievement
Award but it was also banned for obscenity. Soysal won the prestigious Orhan Kemal
Novel Award in 1974 for Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti. In the aftermath of the military
intervention on 12 March 1971, she was imprisoned for 8 months on political grounds
and later exiled. Her novel Şafak criticises the military intervention from the perspective
of an exiled woman. In 1976, she published her prison memoir, Yıldırım Bölge Kadınlar
Koğuşu (Yıldırım Region Women’s Ward).2
While feminist sensibilities were introduced into Turkish literature by a number of
women writers in the 1960s, Soysal’s female characters in particular manifest novel
forms of performing their womanhood. Her ironic, at times sarcastic writing style and
highly self-aware female characters established her as a unique voice in modern Turkish
writing. Her characters resist giving in to hopelessness or despair; instead, they reflect on
their conflicts and desires. As they contemplate their lives past, present, and future, her
women seek to become active agents of their own fates against all odds. Their perception
of and engagement with their embodied realities, that is, their recognition of the material-
ity, transformation and performativity of their bodies, render them strong and resilient.
This article focuses mainly on three of Soysal’s works from the 1960s, Tutkulu
Perçem, a collection of highly opaque short texts, Tante Rosa, a sequence of short stories
set in Germany among German characters that approximate to a novel, and Yürümek, a
short novel with a male and a female protagonist who do not come into contact with each
other until the last section of the book. We also touch upon some parts of Yenişehir’de
Bir Öğle Vakti in order better to situate Soysal’s take on women’s performative embod-
iedness. Being products of an era of global feminist politics and a new understanding of
the female body, these three works stand out through their liberating representation of
women’s experiences. In their choices, failures, struggles, and new beginnings, there is
an undeniable agency.3 Soysal’s works offer a nuanced recognition of the concurrent
existence of patriarchal repression and women’s endurance and resistance, along similar
lines to postcolonial feminism.4 Especially the protagonists of Tante Rosa and Yürümek,
Rosa and Ela, respectively, embrace ‘their fall’ (and failures) and insist on life. They
‘fall’ many times, but they stand up again and start anew.5 Resilience defines their ‘wom-
anly unknowings’, regardless of conventional expectations of ‘success’. Judith (Jack)
Halberstam argues in The Queer Art of Failure (2011: 87–9 & 123–29) that we need to
free our minds from ‘rational choice’ models and the obsession with success. An alterna-
tive feminist project might embrace failure, together with a less ‘rational’ and more
‘complicated’ existence; offer spaces and modes of unknowing, failing and forgetting;
and open up new routes outside the mainstream. Failure, in this context, is unruly and
dissident, and even queer.6 Soysal’s protagonists also defy the narrative expectations of
their milieu and their failures calculatedly defy heteronormative and patriarchal norms,
reject ‘white Western feminist’ formulations of emancipation and approach left-wing
intellectual ‘heroism’ with irony.
The ‘women’s liberation’ or ‘sexual liberation’ of the global 1960s did not quite trans-
late into the same kind of sexual freedoms in Turkey, for either women or men. However,
Maksudyan and Alkan 113

what the 1960s made possible was the performance of a spectrum of diverse femininities
along the lines of ‘the performance of gender and sexuality’ argued by Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick (1990) and Judith Butler (1999). Soysal shows that diverse performances of
gender became a part of women’s repertoire in the 1960s. These included: the rejection
of the domestic ideal (in the forms of not getting married, cheating on the husband, get-
ting a divorce, rejecting child-care); resistance to the asexual image of the ideal woman
of the Republic (‘modern-but-modest’); ‘coming-out’ as sexual bodies in terms of dress,
dating men and making out; and embracing less feminine gender performances (with
short hair, trousers, and t-shirts, especially among those who were politically active). In
fact, the idea of ‘coming-out of the closet’ used by and for queer communities in the
1960s is highly pertinent to discussions of Turkish women’s growing awareness of their
embodiedness. As Sedgwick maintains, being ‘closeted’ meant more than hiding away
one’s sexuality as it referred to a subtle literary style (1990: 3). By treating women’s
ever-transforming bodies and sexuality ‘as the locus of selfhood’ (Erol, 1995: 187–202),
Soysal asserts their embodiedness as a decisive factor in her characters’ lives. In her writ-
ings, the female body appears in its multitude of dimensions. It menstruates, masturbates
and has sex. It is sexually assaulted and raped. It gets pregnant, has abortions, gives birth
and breastfeeds. It also resigns from motherhood the better to accommodate its desires,
loses its sex drive and grows old and undesirable. In that sense, Soysal’s writings bring
the sexuality and innate and constant transformations of the body to light in a queer way
not too far removed from the ‘coming-out’ analogy.
Soysal’s fictions undeniably have feminist undertones. As early as 1971, Vedat Günyol
(1977: 155–62) noted that Tutkulu Perçem, Tante Rosa and Yürümek first and foremost
criticised patriarchal values and defied a worldview based on male domination. Çimen
Günay-Erkol (2001: 14–7; 2016) and Ayşe Gül Altınay (2011: 23–47) were among the
first to engage with Soysal’s works from a cultural studies perspective, focusing mainly
on militarism and feminism.7 However, in Soysal’s work, the analysis of gender is not
limited to a given female identity and the pursuit of freedom and equality is not imagined
solely for women. As Pelin Başçı (2015: 247–64) notes, a fundamental issue in Soysal’s
literary world is the formation and transformation of identities. Furthermore, gender iden-
tity is conceived from an intersectional perspective, where there is a multi-layered explo-
ration of class, politics, sexuality, ethnicity, and age (Adak, 2016: 107–111). We therefore
venture beyond the tradition of looking at Soysal’s writings as being mainly ‘about
women’ or ‘on feminism’ and stress the necessity of a queer theoretical perspective – as
Başçı (2015), Hülya Adak (2016) and İpek Şahinler (2019) have also pursued recently.
In the light of queer theory, gender identity is now defined as a field of performative
actions. Femininity(ies) and masculinity(ies) are determined by trying out, experiment-
ing with, performing and playing certain roles. Most importantly, none of these catego-
ries are absolute, stable or immutable. Yürümek provides a brilliant analysis of these
multiple interpretations of gender performativities through different life episodes of two
characters, in which the title of the novel, ‘walking’, encapsulates a dynamic existence.
In ‘The Passionate Forelock’ and Tante Rosa, Soysal shows the extraordinary possibili-
ties that lie ahead of her characters in terms of defining their selves. She captures diverse
gender performances from a non-binary perspective, underlining the centrality of sexual-
ity and an ever-transforming body to the (trans)formation of the self.
114 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

Exposing heteronormativity
While there was already a considerable level of women’s rights activity in the late
Ottoman era (Çakır, 2007: 61–83; Ekmekçioğlu and Bilal, 2006), the post-1918
Republican regime certainly improved the constitutional rights of women and promoted
girls’ rights to education. In fact, creating the educated modern woman as an ideal citizen
was a key part of the Republican modernisation project. Yet, while ‘traditional woman-
hood’ was scrutinised, Kemalist discourse still defined the ‘new women’ in Turkey as
‘modern but virtuous’ and set limits to the degree they could be modern (Berktay, 1998:
1–12; Durakbaşa and İlyasoglu, 2001: 195–203). As such, the identity of the educated
Republican woman encompassed contradictory attributes. Women were expected to be
‘the exemplary daughters of the new republic’ and achieve modernity and professional
status equal to men. However, they were also supposed to present a particular public
comportment characterised by modesty in behaviour and dress while showing complete
respect and obedience to the authority of men, that is, their fathers, husbands and, rather
symbolically, the founding father of the nation, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (Durakbaşa,
1998a, 1998b). Moreover, traditional values such as virginity before marriage, marital
fidelity on the part of the wife, ‘male honour’ (namus) and ‘family reputation’ (şeref) also
hindered the true emancipation of women (Paker, 1991).
Soysal exposed and challenged this sexually inhibited if not desexualised image of
the ideal woman as mother, wife and caregiver; the strict conception of sexuality as
conjugal, monogamous and reproductive; and the prescribed definitions of femininity
which stressed domesticity, chastity, modesty and virtuousness.8 In her works, there
are multiple ways in which women bend heteronormative conventions and explore the
rich possibilities of their bodies. For instance, in Tante Rosa, the protagonist’s unique
bodily performances range from spectacular horse acrobatics to filling the hole in a
broken window with her breast immediately after breastfeeding her child. In Yürümek,
Şenel explores her sexuality by setting up scenes of intimacy with her friend Ela, dur-
ing which the two girls mimic sexual foreplay. The female protagonist in ‘The
Passionate Forelock’ (the eponymous short story of Tutkulu Perçem) hangs ‘her desires
on her forelock’ [‘tutkularım perçemlerimde’] (Soysal, 2016a: 16)9 and daringly walks
back and forth in the city, flaunting her very presence and forcing people to see and
acknowledge her desiring body.10
The preoccupation with selfhood, focusing principally on urban female identity, was
prevalent in women’s fiction of the 1960s and 1970s. The increasing gender awareness
of the 1960s had presented novel viewpoints to question what it is to be a woman in
contemporary society. Soysal’s works were central in this juncture of literary renewal in
women’s writing and representation, as she embraced the dictum ‘the personal is politi-
cal’ and highlighted fluid performances of gender and sexuality with a close-up on the
female body. By delineating the heteronormative gender regime, she also provided an
insight into the mechanisms of control over the female body and the boundaries erected
around women’s exploration of their selfhood. From the perspective of the political cli-
mate of the 1960s and 1970s, her works embodied the feminist critique of the male-
dominated political culture and activism of the period which neglected a gendered
analysis of power and oppression.
Maksudyan and Alkan 115

In fact, even among the young participants of the student movement of the 1960s,
gender equality was not a priority despite the fact that female students were taking an
active part in occupations and protests. These female students rarely had a say in decision
making and almost never assumed leadership roles in student organisations (Badur,
2019: 429–45). Beyond the campus and especially within stricter political organisations
of the left, women were pushed to the periphery, if not made invisible. By the same
token, women’s emancipation was suppressed, euphemistically postponed until the com-
ing of the socialist revolution. In that respect, the feminist wave of the 1960s was not
embraced by either the official socialist party of the time (Türkiye İşçi Partisi [TİP]) or
the radical leftist factions, which were predominantly patriarchal and militaristic anyway
(Zihnioğlu, 2007: 1108–45). It is no surprise then that feminist discussions remained
limited to the literary realm and were far from the mainstream.

Adolescence and becoming embodied

In several examples of women’s writing from the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. Adalet
Ağaoğlu, Sevim Burak, Füruzan, Pınar Kür, Leyla Erbil),11 the exploration of sexual-
ity is linked to an awareness of political identity (Paker, 1991: 288). Engaging in left-
wing politics becomes an opportunity for female characters to break away from
domesticity and serves as a means to explore sexuality and/or to question the institu-
tions of family and marriage in newly formed extramarital relationships. Neither
Tante Rosa nor Yürümek, however, is set against that politicised background. Soysal
herself was, without a doubt, a part of the left-wing milieu. Yet, she does not situate
the awareness of the sexual body within any form of political engagement as she dates
it to an earlier period in life: adolescence, the ‘no-man’s land’ between childhood and
adulthood that translates into a serious transformation of the body. Both Tante Rosa
and Yürümek begin when Rosa and Ela find themselves entering that new phase in
their lives and continue on to their adulthood, and in the case of Rosa, old age.
Following the characters within a life-cycle, Soysal explores the innate queerness in
the constant (trans)formation of the body, an idea that is theorised by scholars of
queer studies some decades later.12 She also stresses the importance of age and youth
from an intersectional perspective in the construction not only of selves and person-
alities but also the gender regime in societies.
For instance, during their coming-of-age, both Rosa and Ela are taught to be
ashamed of their bodies. The novelist presents this feeling of shame and the damage
it causes in the characters’ sense of self to build more affirmative representations that
re-integrate their bodily existence into their self-understanding. Tante Rosa starts
with Rosa’s life in a convent school in Germany run by nuns, preaching asceticism,
self-discipline and abstinence. The girls are instructed that ‘the body is a bad thing’
(Soysal, 2008: 24), especially the naked body. They are not even allowed to bathe
naked; they have to do it in their shirts. One day Rosa falls and hurts her leg and
needs medical attention. Yet, she is still not allowed to take off her tights and her
wound gets infected. The outcome of their mishandling of her injury merely gives
the nuns another opportunity to promote their oppressive discourses regarding how
female bodies are impure, filthy and sinful and how they need to be tamed, never left
116 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

alone, never let free. By shunning and antagonising the female body as a locus of
shame and encouraging its concealment even before it is sexualised, any possibility
of sensual exploration is cut in the bud.
Similarly, Yürümek begins when most of the characters are experiencing the discon-
certing transformations of puberty, a period in which ‘children’ realise their embodied-
ness for the first time as they change physically and become unfamiliar to themselves as
they are pushed towards a new phase in their lives. There is an intellectual, emotional and
physical awareness conveyed through the senses in a heightened fashion. Moreover, oth-
ers notice this massive change as well, triggering in the adolescents an acute sense of
self-consciousness. In Yürümek, Soysal depicts this period as an experience of discover-
ing new horizons, along with coming against new boundaries. She stresses the ways in
which other people’s perspectives on these young characters and their treatment of them
change during adolescence as new rules and regulations are introduced into their lives.
She particularly points out how girls learn how to be ashamed of their body (modesty) by
being instructed to sit properly, making sure their legs are tightly closed. They also lose
many of their freedoms in dress, play and other activities and they are expected to prac-
tise reserve and restraint constantly.
Ela is no longer allowed to play ‘doctor and patient’ or to look at her naked self in the
mirror. On the contrary, she is expected to be disengaged from her body. Yet, she is curi-
ous about, and to some extent, envious of her friends’ sexually awakened bodies. For
instance, Ela in Yürümek is aware that her friend Şükran has physically transformed and
changed her manners at the same time. She is now the centre of attention in all the games.
Boys in particular are uninterested in games unless she plays as well and when she does
play, they only want to play with her. Ela notices that many girls and boys around her are
discovering their bodies and experiencing new forms of fun (Soysal, 2009: 29–31).
Through the establishment of these new social dynamics, Soysal masterfully portrays the
awareness of embodiedness and what it entails for young people.
A scene with Şenel, another ‘sprouted’ (‘serpilmiş’) friend of Ela, shows how the
dynamics of discovery and establishment of selfhood are central to the embodied expe-
rience of adolescence. The daughter of a working single mom, Şenel often invites Ela
to their basement apartment. One day she makes Ela pose like a Hollywood star,
exactly as she would appear on the cover of a magazine. Then, she instructs her to
touch her (Şenel’s) breasts: ‘Look how big they are now’ (Soysal, 2009: 37). When Ela
touches them, she feels a bit embarrassed but still enjoys it. Şenel, however, feels satis-
fied with Ela’s jealousy and enjoyment, as she puts oranges on Ela’s flat chest. The
adolescent transformation of the body with the enlargement of breasts marks the sexu-
alisation of embodiedness, while its manifestation in the relationship of the two girls
delineates a divergence between the self and the other that defines the shame that such
embodiedness entails. In another scene that involves an act of kissing (‘I will kiss you
and then you will lean towards the back and lift one foot up’) (Soysal, 2009: 37), Şenel
moves on to foreplay, rubbing herself against Ela. While Şenel gets aroused, Ela can-
not truly make sense of what is happening to her. Inhibited by her mother’s moralism
ringing in her head and struggling against it (Soysal, 2009: 39),13 she realises that
‘whatever is happening to Şenel is exactly what was not happening to Ela’ [‘İşte ne
olmuyorsa Ela’ya, Şenel’e o oluyor’] (Soysal, 2009: 39).
Maksudyan and Alkan 117

After this encounter, Ela becomes aware of another imminent major transformation.
Her inability to appreciate sexuality properly, she realises, is caused by the limits of her
not-menstruating body (Soysal, 2009: 41).14 Eventually, when her ‘reproductive woman-
hood’ is confirmed by menstruation, she will indeed experience and learn about desire at
the expense of more freedoms. Her new reproductive functions assert themselves with
scary capabilities. When she dates Aleko during a summer on Prinkipo Island (Büyükada),
her feeling of bodily shame will be further complicated by the fear of pregnancy. The
transforming adolescent body and the accompanying feelings of desire, shame and fear
thus underlie the construction of her selfhood and define the parameters of her experi-
ences. She understands that her body is a key yet fluid determinant of her existence.

Bodies and desires that matter15

With the global omnipresence of miniskirts, mini shorts, bikinis, stretch tops, and blouses
with low necklines, women’s ‘coming-out’ in the 1960s was their assertion of being
sexual bodies, and seeing and showing themselves as such. The women of the Turkish
1960s also followed this global ‘mini’ fashion. However, patriarchal interventions into
the realm of women’s clothes were also prevalent during this period. Women were often
criticised by the men in their social groups about the colour or the length of their skirts,
and eventually, these fashionable clothes were either sent to the back of their closets or
tailored into more modest styles (Badur, 2019: 441).
As noted earlier, the Republican hegemonic gender regime prescribed the conditions
of women’s presence in public spaces to be kept within the limits of asexuality (Kandiyoti,
1987: 324–34). Similarly, the limitations to the dress code of women who were active in
the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s in Turkey translated into the choice of
midi skirts just on their knees and short-sleeved shirts that did not reveal much beyond
forearms. They would also refrain from wearing make-up so as not to attract too much
attention to themselves, that is, to their feminine bodily presence (Beşpınar, 2019: 467).
Many female student activists of the 1960s also recount that they preferred to wear trou-
sers when they visited factories and low-income neighbourhoods. As the student move-
ment evolved towards a more radical and violent political struggle, women in these
groups quickly abandoned the feminine looks of the ‘mini’ fashion and (re-)assumed the
asexual looks of the Republican ideal (Badur, 2019: 441). While wearing miniskirts or
‘bra burning’ transformed into serious forms of political activism all over the world,
from the United States to Mali, from Yugoslavia to Brazil, women in Turkey were timid
and not prepared to embrace their embodied existence as a political issue in such an out-
wardly performative fashion due to the Republican morality that underlies Turkish
modernity (Jian et al., 2018: 131, 138–45, 147, 193).
Soysal seeks to counter the ways in which the majority of Turkish women are alien-
ated from their bodies as a result of such arrested development and the systematic denials
of bodily needs, sexual and other. For instance, at the convent school young Rosa is often
punished for tending to the needs of her body, such as thirst and hunger, and for not being
able to suppress her desires as required by the asceticism of convent life. She is a ‘sinner’
who is unable to kill her ‘inside’ that is, the self that makes her who she is, body and soul:
‘You are a sinful girl who doesn’t know how to reign in her desires, you don’t know how
118 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

to kill your inside!’ [sen arzularına gem vuramayan günahkar bir kızsın, içini öldürmeyi
bilmiyorsun] (Soysal, 2008: 24). The denial of bodily needs and desires is the foundation
of the negation of the self that maintains the nuns’ religious path as it is depicted.
However, Soysal was well aware that this disregard for the needs of the body was not
peculiar to Germany or to the Catholic nuns. As Karin Karakaşlı (2010), Ahıska (2015),
Adak (2016), and Şahinler (2019) have already noted, while Tante Rosa’s setting might
not be Republican Turkey, the ways in which the novelist engages with issues regarding
womanhood establish transcultural links, highlighting the shared patterns in the repres-
sion of women’s embodied experiences. Being born of the same moralism that underlies
many belief systems, heterosexual intimacy in any patriarchal society requires the denial
of female pleasure.
Soysal writes against this denial and asceticism. For instance, the desire for affection,
attention, and physical intimacy is central to her short story ‘The Passionate Forelock’,
as the narrator walks around the city with her feelings hanging on her forelock and com-
plains about not being seen (Öztürk, 2015). She passes ‘the two-lane boulevards, shop
windows, construction sites, and political party headquarters’. She thinks that people
would see her if she were ‘a trolleybus pole or a road machine’ (Soysal, 2016a: 16). Her
reference to the mundane details of daily life having more presence than her before the
eyes of the people maintains how woman as a desiring subject is ignored, and thus her
agency devalued in society. Moreover, when she forces herself upon people, pushing
them to see her as she wants, the men in particular divert their gaze or they walk away.
Their reaction symbolises the broader blindness to and refusal of the reality of women’s
bodily existence and desires. In the end, the narrator, unable to carry on with such neglect,
‘throws her passions in the sewage’ (Soysal, 2016a: 16) in a double symbolism. Her
desires are both being wasted and becoming waste. Moreover, her projection of her fore-
lock as the bearer of her passions and hence to blame for their flaunting is both a defence
mechanism and another symbolic form of denial. The synecdoche built on the rather
feminine piece of hair represents the whole of the narrator as a woman and through her
any woman in the general population, while the discarding of the passions hung on it
represents the loss of a substantial part of the self in having to give up desire.
Rosa, however, has different opportunities for sexual encounters as she actively
responds to her being denied pleasure and chooses to seek fulfilment. For example, with
her third husband, after his unwelcome return from the war, she feigns desire and satis-
faction but eventually concludes that it is better to move forward to new ‘foolish begin-
nings’ [‘enayi başlangıçlara’] than to repeat the ‘ugliness’ of the fake moans (Soysal,
2008: 46). Embracing her real desires and choosing not to fake them, she embarks upon
different sorts of adventures. In an earlier marriage, she did not hesitate to leave her hus-
band and children behind and was excommunicated by the church. She becomes a news-
paper vendor, works as a cashier at a brothel, and crosses the English Channel to marry
a man after seeing a classified ad in a newspaper.
Even though her great expectations often end in disillusionment, Rosa’s story is an
extraordinary saga of fearless beginnings. Her daring failures and renunciations are
expressions of her passion for freedom and her resilient hope to live a free life. Starting
with a chapter on horse acrobatics, which immediately sets the tone as her first ‘failure’
with its title ‘Tante Rosa could not become a horse acrobat’ [‘Tante Rosa at cambazı
Maksudyan and Alkan 119

olamadı’] (Soysal, 2008: 16), Rosa’s entire life is a testimony against patriarchal and
heteronormative restrictions. Already in the first episode, she faces her father’s rejection,
the circus manager’s complicity with the father (by giving her the worst horse), and the
pain of falling off the horse. Yet, she still perseveres. The novel stresses the character’s
resilience regardless of conventional expectations of ‘success’. At a socio-historical
moment when leadership, victories and heroism were particularly in fashion and the
perceived sparks of ‘revolution’ created several absolute heroes, as an anti-hero(ine)
(İdil, 1990: 82) Soysal’s protagonist underlines the ironies, inconsistencies and triviali-
ties in a woman’s life.
Rosa never misses an opportunity to show her ‘rebellious joy’ [‘isyankar neşe’]
(Türker, 2010) and physicality and sexuality are natural to her off-the-beaten-track jour-
ney. In a rare instance, where the narrator distances herself from Rosa, she notes that
‘Rosa may have been secretly thinking’ that anything can be envied and anything can be
desired. Anything can be equally noble or equally base. One can desire to be ‘the most
sparklingly clean family woman’ [‘en temiz pak aile kadını’] within the context of a
house visit, and in a brothel, one can desire to be ‘the greatest whore among the whores’
[‘orospuların yanında en orospu’] (Soysal, 2008: 69). What is important is the desire and
no one desire is nobler than any other. Soysal’s emphasis on the idea of desire, which is
also at the centre of queer theory, problematises the essentialism of a single and true self.
Instead, she underlines the variability and non-linear structure of the concepts of self and
desire in their relation to one another (Şahinler, 2019: 105).

Heteronormative sexuality
In her article on the formation of Republican male and female identities, Ayşe Durakbaşa
(1998b: 47) notes that in the 1960s young single women were supported by their fathers
to receive a good education and find a good job. However, these women had to be very
careful in their personal relationships and suppress their sexuality until marriage. Oral
testimony of 1960s Turkish youth also stresses the burden bestowed on the young women
by their families, particularly in regard to their virginity, when they were sent off to the
universities in the big cities (Beşpınar, 2019: 453). Furthermore, once again, even among
the radical revolutionaries, flirting was shunned and love was deemed a bourgeois inven-
tion. Many couples were pushed to pursue what were then called ‘revolution marriages’
[‘devrim evlilikleri’] (Baydar and Ulagay, 2011: 137). Such attitudes loaded marriages
with a sense of duty that ignored the very private nature of embodiedness, that is, inti-
macy and sexuality, especially in the experiences of women.
Soysal was preoccupied with this often unacknowledged prevalence of women’s
unsatisfied desires and the difficulty, even impossibility of satisfying them under a patri-
archal and heteronormative gender regime. In her analysis of women’s position in soci-
ety, Soysal diagnoses that patriarchal heteronormativity is a deeply established structure,
which is not simply produced by a domineering father or a husband, but also exercised
by women depending on their intersectional positioning. Long before Kandiyoti’s
‘Bargaining with Patriarchy’ (1988: 274–90), Soysal problematises the ideal of sister-
hood or female solidarity and demonstrates how women – mothers, mothers-in-law,
aunts, friends – contribute to women’s domination and marginalisation in society. In this
120 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

sense, Soysal goes beyond the feminist critique of ‘women’s rights’ and embraces a
queer critique of the heteronormative regime.
Many women characters in Soysal’s works are aware of the prohibitive control over
their bodies and they dare to criticise and challenge the patriarchal honour codes that
maintain it. For instance, in Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti, Şükran, a bold, young woman
from a low-class background, wears miniskirts and blouses with low necklines, dances
with her boyfriend and even makes out with him in the basement of a department store
(Soysal, 1996: 26–8). Tante Rosa’s Rosa and Yürümek’s Ela revolt against their fathers
or husbands early in their lives. At a young age, Rosa defies the sacred value of virginity
by making love with her boyfriend. She is later depicted reclaiming control over her own
body by locking her husband out of the bedroom. She also cheats on her different hus-
bands and leaves them without much care. Likewise, Ela, despite her father’s prohibi-
tions, follows her boyfriend to the desolate corners of the island so that they can kiss
freely. Later in life, she cheats on her husband and at another point she lives with a man
out of wedlock as a divorced woman.
These are very bold moves on the part of the female characters, for both young maid-
ens and divorced women share similar types and levels of social surveillance and criti-
cism. These pressures are rooted in the patriarchal morality that becomes manifest
through the collective control over the feminine body. While the youthful body is pro-
tected from sexuality until it can experience sex in a culturally sanctioned framework,
broader social morality is defended against potential contamination by the now uninhib-
ited female subject. Essentially, the protection and restriction of the female body is car-
ried out for the good of the general morality of the society.
Despite being brave enough to experiment and take responsibility for her own fail-
ures, the adult Ela experiences the same dissatisfaction in her sexual encounters as both
the nameless woman of ‘The Passionate Forelock’ and Rosa. Her desires are suppressed,
silenced, and unfulfilled until she is married. Even after her marriage, she is not satisfied
nor are her desires acknowledged. Beginning with their honeymoon, the sexual life of
Ela and Hakkı is described mostly with reference to its non-consensual nature. The short
section on their marriage is compressed into the wife’s ‘obligation’ to have sex with the
husband (Soysal, 2009: 83) and several instances of involuntary sexual acts, suggestive
of rape within marriage (Soysal, 2009: 104).16 Furthermore, the novel stresses that the
heteronormative sexuality regime renders Ela a commodity to be used and abused as her
husband pleases.17 Already during their honeymoon in the newly-opened, luxurious
Hilton Hotel in Istanbul, the so-called ‘best place for newlyweds’, she feels like a brand
new toy for her husband, who claps his hands happily when they enter their hotel room.
They have uninterrupted sex for a week,18 but Ela does not enjoy it. Still, she feels
obliged, thinking that if you get married and if your husband books the Hilton for a week
of honeymoon, it means that you are ‘supposed to’ have sex there for a week, ‘just like
those who think they should swim all the time because they paid all that money to be at
the seaside’ (Soysal, 2009: 84). Ela questions her obligation to have sex with her husband
for a week due to general expectations, while her likening her honeymoon to paid vaca-
tions by the seaside highlights the commodification of the female body in marriage.
Yet, Ela also recognises later that marriage becomes her sexual liberation. Without the
inhibitions of virginity, she is free to explore her sexuality as she wants and with whom
Maksudyan and Alkan 121

she wants. So, she cheats on her husband with her ex-boyfriend from her university
years, Bülent, whom she had rejected at the time because she was a virgin. One evening
they reunite at a social gathering with other couples. At some point, Ela leaves briefly
with Bülent to pick up some music from her place and they have sex. The presence of
flirtation among the two is suggestive of potential challenges to the conventions of
monogamy, in other words that she will have an affair with Bülent, while remaining with
her husband. However, the incident with Bülent leads to Ela’s divorce from Hakkı.
Moreover, the anticipation that Ela’s sexual liberation might lead to her reclaiming and
enjoying her bodily desires is not fulfilled. On the contrary, Ela’s response to the experi-
ence is rather anticlimactic in its matter-of-fact tone. She does not interpret her agree-
ment to have sex with Bülent as a revolt against her marriage, but as a natural extension
of it in order not to ‘randomly break the chain of meaningless sex’ [‘Daha önceki anlamsız
yatmalar zincirini rastgele koparmak’] (Soysal, 2009: 104). After all, since she did not
say no to her husband on many nights even though she did not desire him, refusing
Bülent would be absurd. Sexuality becoming devoid of meaning for Ela liberates her
counterintuitively from the moral impositions on her embodiedness in the paradoxical
transcendence of indifference.
Through her awareness of the heteronormative order, Ela acknowledges that her
desires are deemed irrelevant in her relationships with men. Even though her affair with
Memet starts promisingly, as the novel’s two protagonists are finally united, Ela realises
soon enough that Memet is not so different from Hakkı and Bülent in seeing sex as the
only proof of his manhood and masculinity. The novel familiarises the reader with his
‘rites of passage’ (in the neighbourhood, in the boarding school, in a brothel, etc.) which
are associated with a toxic masculinity. After having sex with an older woman in their
apartment building, Memet comes home happily, declaring to his mom that he has ‘taken
back his gun from Nuri’ (Soysal, 2009: 82). Recovering from all his humiliations, he
finally assumes his ‘rightful’ place within the heteronormative order and ‘becomes a
man’ through the workings of his penis. This ‘masculine happiness’ of repeatedly prov-
ing and re-proving manhood disturbs Ela deeply, as Memet always wants to have sex,
like a ‘professional Romeo’ (Soysal, 2009: 123). Especially during their days in Cyprus,
he appears to Ela as someone who thinks about nothing but sex. He is indifferent not only
to the ordeal of the people of the island, especially the Greeks, but also to the feelings and
(non)desires of Ela.

Reproduction, contraception, motherhood

As a part of the pro-natalist politics of the early twentieth century, the 1930 Public Hygiene
Law (Umumi Hıfzıssıhha Kanunu) made abortion illegal in Turkey and contraceptives
were prohibited. Throughout the early 1960s, however, the country’s population policy
was re-evaluated and changed. In 1962, the Turkish national assembly officially adopted
a more anti-natalist position. In 1965, the Population Planning Act was passed and the
same year abortion was partially decriminalised. It should, however, be noted that even
prior to decriminalisation, abortion was widely available in Turkey. Over one-third of the
women in the country are estimated to have terminated their pregnancies in the 1960s
(Miller, 2007: 60). In the meantime, the first combined oral contraceptive was marketed
122 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

in the United States in 1960 and in the United Kingdom the following year. In Turkey, the
Five-Year Development Programme published in July 1962 recommended the provision
of contraceptive pills at low prices or free of charge (Benezra, 2014: 41–56). Globally
many women embraced the pill enthusiastically in the first half of the 1960s, as it made
an enormous difference in women’s lives by giving them control over their body in regard
to sexuality. It meant the separation of reproductivity from sexuality, as well as liberation
from moral stigma, forced marriages, and the invasiveness of abortion.
Similar to her portrayal of menstruation as a key aspect of female embodiedness in the
adolescent years of a young girl, Soysal emphasises pregnancy, contraception, abortion
and giving birth as being central to a woman’s experiences in her adult years. For
instance, at the beginning of Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti there is a dialogue on contracep-
tives, namely, ‘the anti-baby pill’, between two women talking about weight gain that is
caused by it (Soysal, 1996: 10). The conversation refers to the late 1960s discussion on
the pill’s adverse effects on women’s bodies, clashing with the pill’s initial popularity.
Soysal might have also been aware of the feminist critique of the pill as an instrument of
ongoing male domination of sexuality (Silies, 2015).
The risk of pregnancy and the stigma that comes with it usually prevented single
women from having sex and married ones from having affairs. Soysal portrays the con-
sequences of such risks in her depiction of Rosa whose early first marriage is forced.
Rosa gets pregnant after her very first intercourse with Hans in the woods: ‘like the way
it is in all those lame romance novels, she got pregnant as soon as she slept with him’ [‘o
bayağı aşk romanlarının hepsinde olduğu gibi yatar yatmaz hamile kaldı’] (Soysal, 2008:
30). To avoid being a ‘dishonoured’ [‘namusu kirlenmiş’] girl and giving birth to a ‘bas-
tard child’ [‘piç kurusu’], she marries Hans and thus fast-forwards from youth to adult-
hood through motherhood, simply because her body is capable of it.
For many married women, however, unwanted pregnancy quickly translated into
abortion. In Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti, Gülsen has three children and fifteen abortions.
Soysal writes it as plain as that: ‘fifteen abortions’ (Soysal, 1996: 80). As a result of the
deprivation and fatigue caused by the reproductive pressure and the invasive operations
on her body, she looks much older than she actually is. Her husband does not take respon-
sibility for what she has to go through each time and even complains constantly of her
exhausted and worn-out state. In the end, he divorces her to marry a younger woman. Her
husband’s not taking responsibility and eventually pursuing a younger woman is also a
natural outcome of the commodification of the female body and its ‘legitimate’ abuse
and exploitation within the heteronormative gender regime. Through her focus on ‘male-
friendly’ contraceptive methods, in the form of either pills or abortion, Soysal also
stresses the heteronormative double standard of the society with regard to the ‘sanctity of
motherhood’.
The assumed link between womanhood and motherhood is further challenged in the
birth scene in Yürümek. In contrast to physicality of giving birth, with detailed descrip-
tions of Ela’s labour and medicalisation of her body, there is a certain sense of shock that
she feels about the transformations of her body and ‘becoming a mother’. Her alienated
positionality demystifies the supposed ‘sacred bond’ which comes from giving birth. The
novel also desanctifies motherhood by referring to the ordinariness of a birth as observed
by the medical personnel. While Ela suffers silently, two nurses talk about a new
Maksudyan and Alkan 123

melodrama in the cinemas. Then, one of them interrupts the conversation, points at Ela,
and asks, ‘girl, does she have a urinary catheter already?’ [‘sondası yapıldı mı kız?’]
(Soysal, 2009: 91). They go on to discuss the lachrymose details of the film, then the
nurse asks again, ‘has this one been shaved, yet?’ [‘traşı yapıldı mı bunun?’] (Soysal,
2009: 92). At first the nurses’ manners might appear insensitive or lacking empathy.
However, this is their ordinary approach to a patient: it is yet another woman giving birth
and they simply follow a procedure with the shaving and the catheter. In fact, such a
scene emphasises the biological embodiedness of motherhood while at the same time
exposing the uncanny capability of maintaining two bodies at once: as her bladder will
be emptied artificially, a baby will come out of Ela’s perineum.
Soysal also focuses on breastfeeding in a way that underlines and challenges the func-
tions of the female body and what it represents in motherhood. For instance, in one scene
Rosa is nursing her third child on a snowy Sunday and watching the crowd return from
the church. A child throws a snowball and breaks her window causing the cold air to
enter the room. Since her baby has had enough milk and is asleep, ‘ Rosa fills the hole on
the windowpane with her breast’ [‘Rosa memesiyle camdaki deliği doldurdu’] (Soysal,
2008: 34). Paralleling the biological function of the breasts in motherhood with another
but rather absurd function highlights how a woman’s body becomes a tool beyond the
self that it maintains. A similar effect is created in Yürümek, in which Ela wakes up to her
new-born’s cry and puts her to her breast for feeding: ‘The child was sucking on her flesh
unconsciously, regardless of where’ [‘Çocuk bilinçsizce emiyordu etini, neresi olursa
olsun’] (Soysal, 2009: 94). This vivid depiction of the female ‘flesh’ serving the greedy
needs of another being highlights the embodiedness of motherhood in a way that also
exposes the continuous transformation of the body and the self.
Motherhood is often considered an even more effective way of restricting women’s
lives and what they can do with them than marriage itself. Yet, Soysal’s Ela and Rosa are
not to be deterred by its implications. Rosa’s quest for new discoveries about herself cannot
be reconciled with her motherhood. So, she leaves her three children behind and moves on
with her life. Her children reappear in the narrative, but Rosa is depicted primarily as a
woman and not necessarily as a mother. Similarly, Ela does not hesitate to break the ‘sacred
bond’ of her marriage either, despite the unending advice that ‘a woman with a child must
be more careful’ and that ‘a child should be raised by a mother and a father together’
(Soysal, 2009: 95 and 125). After she falls in love with Memet and they begin living
together, she feels the burden of not being able to share the responsibility of motherhood
with her lover. The child, she realises, is hers alone and not a ‘burden’ that she can share. It
is remarkable how little information is given about the child. We know neither its name nor
its gender, and it hardly figures at all in the narrative. Ela is an exceptional female figure in
that she calls her child a burden, defying both the expected sublimation of motherhood and
the primary definition of her womanhood through such sublimation.

Conclusion
As an old woman, Rosa dreams of an impassable forest, where she comes across a mole
hole: ‘Rosa glided through the hole in the youth of a forest nymph’ [‘Delikten bir orman
perisi gençliğinde süzüldü Rosa’] (Soysal, 2008: 87). She sees her body young and feels
124 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

as if after endless ‘crawlings’ [‘sürünmeler’], she has found in this hole the satisfaction
she has always been looking for. All of a sudden, a naked man appears behind her. His
introduction into the dream is a mistake according to the narrator, because Rosa did not
choose to keep any of the men in her life. Her nakedness with men was only to forget and
to escape. So, the narrator intervenes:

Oysa hatırlamak için soyunulur, hatırlamak için, yüzyıllardan beri unutulanları hatırlamak için.
Neyin olmadığını, neyin olamayacağını hatırlamak için, yeniden başlamaya gücü olmak için,
seçim yapmak için, seçim yapabilecek açıklığa kavuşabilmek için. Hayır demek için, evet
demek için, başkaldırmak için, yakıp yıkmak için, barış için soyunulur, soyunulur.

[one gets undressed to remember, to remember those that have been forgotten for centuries.
One gets undressed to remember what is not, what cannot be; to find the strength to start over;
to make a choice, to have the clarity to make a choice. One gets undressed to say no, to say yes;
to revolt, to destroy; one gets undressed for peace, one gets undressed.] (Soysal, 2008: 88)

Rosa finally understands the meaning of her ‘falls and failures’ and comes to terms with
them. The references to remembering, starting over, and making a choice highlight her
resistance and resilience against passivity and victimhood. The revolt, the destruction
and the peace can be considered as instances of her active agency in repeatedly decon-
structing herself and all ‘conventional wisdom’. Most importantly, her existence is a
refusal to be categorised and to be designated from within a stereotypical perception.
Rosa resists to be fixed in an absolute and stable self.
The ‘women’s liberation’ of the global 1960s did not necessarily mean a full range of
women’s rights, feminist politics, and sexual freedoms in Turkey. On the contrary, the
Turkish 1960s were characterised by patriarchal relations and the postponement of wom-
en’s emancipation. The ‘coming-out’ of women in Soysal’s oeuvre from the 1960s was a
calculated challenge to the patriarchal heteronormative order, which imprisoned them in
a sexually inhibited self geared towards reproduction and nurturing. Soysal’s characters
were undeniably oppressed, but also resistant and resilient, exercising agency as they
embrace their embodiedness, become aware of gendered realities of lived experience and
try out fluid gender performativities. Rosa, Ela and the nameless protagonist of ‘The
Passionate Forelock’ embrace their bodies and desires, challenge the ‘purity’ of virginity,
leave the protective cloak of matrimony, defy the ideal of a monogamous marriage and
do not take their ‘sacred duty of motherhood’ as a given. The female body, which is cen-
tral to Soysal’s writings, appears in constant transformation through and within life, in its
multitude of functions and dimensions, with its queer passions and desires, and mutable
gender performances. In her work, the body is finally ‘out of the closet’ and the self is
dynamic, ever-transforming, ever-trying, ever-failing, failing better.

Notes
1. For a detailed English biography of Sevgi Soysal, see Egem Atik (2017). There are also
Turkish (Doğan, 2003) and German biographies (Furrer, 1992) about the author.
2. Apart from Tante Rosa and Yenişehir’de Bir Öğle Vakti, which were translated into European
languages in 2016 and 2017 (see References section), her works are only available in Turkish.
The translations of the quotations in the text are our own.
Maksudyan and Alkan 125

3. Judith Butler (1997) calls this the paradox of subjectivation, arguing that the processes and
conditions that secure a subject’s subordination are also the means by which she becomes a
self-conscious identity and agent.
4. As Saba Mahmood (2001) notes, agency is not only the capacity for progressive change but
also the capacity to endure and suffer.
5. With regard to ‘success’ or fulfilment, we agree with Meltem Ahıska’s (2015) interpretation
of Tante Rosa. As she stresses, Rosa’s life cannot be read as a failure. On the contrary, it is
the story of always starting a new life. It is resilience in life. İpek Şahinler’s (2019) recent
analysis of Tante Rosa is also along the lines of falling, failure and the queer.
6. Silas Morgan (2015) Symposium Introduction: The Queer Art of Failure.
7. Altınay (2013: 123–33) defines Yıldırım Bölge Kadınlar Koğuşu ‘an antimilitarist feminist
manifesto’.
8. Essentially in the 1980s, a new wave of feminist criticism that developed alongside the wom-
en’s movement problematised this understanding of a Republican ‘state feminism’ (Tekeli,
1988: 307–34). It challenged the Republican reforms that hindered women’s true liberation
by burdening them with larger than life expectations and limiting them to be the breeders,
caretakers and educators of the new generations, that is, ‘the enlightened mothers of the
nation’, Tekeli (1988) and Kandiyoti (1987: 317–39).
9. All translations from Turkish to English are done by the authors.
10. Despite, and probably because of, their bold presentations of sexualised female bodies,
Soysal’s works were only embraced and praised decades after their publication. Her liberated
portrayal of women’s bodily experiences challenged mainstream literary expectations. One of
the important critics of the time, Atilla Özkırımlı argued that Tutkulu Perçem was not a ‘prom-
ising beginning’ as a first book (Özkırımlı, 1977: 7–15). Tante Rosa was criticised in Turkey
for reading too ‘foreign’, ‘as if translated’ and just generally ‘bizarre’ (Ahıska, 2015: 65–80).
Yürümek was censured and banned on the grounds of ‘violating public morality’ (müstehcen
neşriyat) after its publication in 1970, Soysal (2009: 17–20). The edict was reversed in 1974.
11. Some examples of such noteworthy works are Leyla Erbil’s Hallaç (The Wool-Carder, 1961),
Sevim Burak’s Yanık Saraylar (Burnt Palaces, 1965) and Adalet Ağaoğlu’s Ölmeye Yatmak
(Lying down to Die, 1973).
12. Butler (1999: 140) stresses that identity categories, as well as bodies, are not fixed, that they
are always in the process of (trans)formation, meaning that they can be refused, resisted and
subverted.
13. ‘Memelerim annem kızar diye mi büyümüyor acaba: “sana göğüslerini büyütme demedim
mi?” diyebilir anası’ [I wonder if my tits are not growing bigger because my mother would
get angry: her mom could say ‘haven’t I told you not to grow your breasts any bigger’]
14. ‘Ne aybaşısı?’ [‘what mensturation?’]
15. The title is inspired from Judith Butler’s Bodies That Matter (Butler, 1993).
16. ‘İstemediği bunca gece “hayır” dedi mi Hakkı’ya. ‘Hayır’ın ‘evet’in önemini çoktan
unutturmuş kendisine’ [‘Has she said “no” to Hakkı all those nights that she didn’t want it.
She has long forgotten the importance of “no”, “yes”’.]
17. As Foucault noted, more than 10 years after Sevgi Soysal, according to the general sexual
mores of bourgeois society, ‘normative sexuality’ corresponds to married heterosexual sex,
wherein normative gender roles translate into masculine dominance and female commodifi-
cation (1985: 215–20).
18. ‘Bir haftadır, aralıksız’ [‘continuously, for a week’] (Soysal, 2009: 84).

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Author biographies
Nazan Maksudyan is senior researcher in the ERC-funded research project, “Ottoman Auralities
and the Eastern Mediterranean: Sound, Media and Power, 1789-1914” at the Centre Marc Bloch.
128 Journal of European Studies 52(2)

Among her publications are Ottoman Children & Youth During World War I (2019), Orphans and
Destitute Children in the Late Ottoman Empire (2014), Women and the City, Women in the City
(ed., 2014).
Burcu Alkan, honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, is the author of Promethean
Encounters: Representation of the Intellectual in the Modern Turkish Novel of the 1970s (2018).
From 2017 to 2020, she was senior research fellow at Justus Liebig University Giessen. She is the
co-editor of Turkish Literature as World Literature (2021), published by Bloomsbury.