etkinlikler

Where to hide your lover? Use of Private Space in Early Modern Ottoman Prose Fiction / Dr. İpek Hüner Cora

Orient-Institut Istanbul

Tarih : 23-01-2019 19:00

Where to hide your lover? Use of Private Space in Early Modern Ottoman Prose Fiction

Using Early Modern Ottoman fictional prose stories, this talk centers on stories set in the home and proposes to rethink home as a gendered space by looking at women’s (and men’s) performances there. The question of “Where to hide one’s lover?” introduces women’s strategies to claim home as their own space —mainly by its regulation and organization— and men’s “out-of-place”-ness in the domestic setting, especially during the daytime. The stories give us clues about the conceptions of home and its uses, about its boundaries and how these boundaries are negotiated and challenged by different actors. They also show us the anxieties born out of negotiations and transgressions of the locked doors by others, including lovers.

İpek Hüner Cora completed her Ph.D. at the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in Fall 2018 and she is currently teaching at Boğaziçi University’s Department of Turkish Language and Literature. Her research focuses on the history of Ottoman literature, gender, and sexuality. Her work questions primarily how men and women, as well as their social and spatial relations, were narrated and perceived in Ottoman literary fiction. By doing so, it proposes to add to our knowledge of gender and literature in the Ottoman Empire, and, more specifically, to provide insights into Early Modern Ottoman minds and mentalities.