From l’Écriture Féminine to Queer Subjectivities: Sevgi Soysal, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Perihan Mağden

This essay examines three works by women writers, Sevgi Soysal, Emine Sevgi Özdamar, and Perihan Mağden, who experiment with feminine writing (l’écriture féminine) in Turkish literature and explore the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality, and the possibilities of narrating queer sexualities. A brief biography of the individual writer is followed by a discussion of the works in question, that is, Tante Rosa (Aunt Rosa, 1968), Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei: hat zwei Türen, aus einer kam ich rein, aus der anderen ging ich raus (Life Is a Caravansary: Has Two Doors, I Went in One, I Came Out the Other, 1992), and Ali ile Ramazan (Ali and Ramazan, 2010). This essay is not a road map to the last five decades of countless works produced by women writers in Turkey, but it highlights pivotal turning points in the way the particular novels narrate gender and sexuality.

Soysal (1936–76) was a journalist, writer, actor, and activist. Tante Rosa was her first novel, followed by Yürümek (Walking, 1970), Yenişehirʾde Bir Öğle Vakti (Midday in Yenişehir, 1973), and Şafak (Dawn, 1975). She received the Orhan Kemal Award in 1974 for Yenişehirʾ de Bir Öğle Vakti. During the military coup of March 12, 1971, Soysal was imprisoned as a member of a left-wing organization, and in 1976 she published her prison memoir, Yıldırım Bölge Kadınlar Koğuşu (Yıldırım Women’s Ward). She also published a collection of short stories, Barış Adlı Çocuk (A Child Named Peace, 1976), and left an unfinished novel, Hoşgeldin Ölüm (Welcome, Death). In her work Soysal explores the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, militarism, and nationalism.

Considered a “foreign” character in literary circles in the late 1960s, the character of Tante Rosa is endemic both to Germany and to Turkey. Tante Rosa, the feminist manifesto of the everyday, of one woman’s sexual experiences and awakening, is in fact quite a milestone in Turkish literature. After decades of grand narratives of national literature depicting Turkey’s independence struggle (1919–22) or the establishment of the Turkish republic, of social realism, or of “village literature,” Tante Rosa highlights and celebrates the ironies, inconsistencies, and trivialities of the everyday. Unlike the characters in previous works of Turkish fiction, Tante Rosa is not an allegorical character in a national allegory. She is not a heroine. She neither sets standards nor acts as a model. She is not emblematic of “womanhood,” either. She constantly experiments, learns much through experience, and never misses the occasion to laugh at life, even if the joke is on her. Her frankness about her own sexual awakening leads to her excommunication from church, town, family, and society. Tante Rosa bravely confronts poverty, social isolation, and the risk of unemployment during wartime, preferring these to the comforts and luxuries of a tedious marriage. Leaving her three children behind, she unsettles the myth of the sacred mother to illustrate that the children are part and parcel of the “monotonous family,” that is, the regular church visits and the routine Sunday dinners.

Tante Rosa’s quest for new discoveries about herself cannot be reconciled with motherhood. With each new relationship, her life starts anew; she is often economically devastated, in search of employment, and looking for a new domicile to house her thirst for self-realization. Her joy, however, is in her sexual discoveries, and her satisfaction is in close heterosexual intimacies. Tante Rosa’s non serviam is directed to church, family, society, nation, and all metanarratives, including feminist master narratives. Her death is as mundane as her life. With no proper gravestone, her ashes scattered and urinated on (by house cats), she leaves us not sanctifying or mythologizing her dead body but letting it naturally mix yet deeper into the trivialities of the everyday.

Özdamar (1946–) is a writer, actor, and theater director. She received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize (1992) and the Walter Hasenclever Prize (1992) for her novel Das Leben ist eine Karawanserei in...