“Changing Feminist Paradigms and Cultural Encounters: Women’s Experiences in Ottoman and Post-Ottoman History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”

This issue is devoted to publishing a collection of articles drawn from an international conference held in Istanbul, Turkey, in June 2013, jointly sponsored by the editors of this journal and an interdisciplinary cohort of colleagues at two prominent Turkish universities. The articles reflect the challenges of historicizing the multiethnic and diverse Ottoman society with reference to women’s work, activism, and understandings of feminisms throughout the region. They also capture the continuous but problematic encounters between Ottoman and subsequent Turkish women’s movements and the Western-based women’s internationals—notably, the International Council of Women and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance. But encounter has another dimension as well: the productive but at times strained interaction among the participants, who came from Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Bulgaria, Holland, Israel, and the United States. As presenters and audience members, we engaged and debated our scholarly practices and the operative conceptual tools shaped by different geographical and regional perspectives. We also set aside time to discuss differences in feminist publishing in Turkey and the United States. All of this interaction took place against the backdrop of serious political unrest and state repression of social protest over the fate of a public park in Istanbul, which the government wanted to turn into a commercial venture. By the time we had arrived in Turkey, protests like those in Istanbul’s Gezi Park had broken out throughout the country. During the conference, we had a heady sense of déjà vu—remembering many historical moments when women and men had come together to raise their voices against war, state patterns of violence, and other injustices as part of their activism in the public sphere.

When we proposed to bring the Journal of Women’s History (JWH) to Binghamton University, we had to formulate our editorial vision. The heart of this vision is the consistent commitment to internationalize the field of inquiry, which we took over from our predecessors—drawing on more authors from outside North America and Europe and filling in the gaps in our international reach. After all, we welcome submissions from all regions of the globe and time periods. But with this conference, we had another more carefully targeted conception of internationalizing scholarship, which this special issue also reflects. As editors based in the United States, we did not want to predetermine the outcome or set the agenda for the scholarly inquiry. We wanted the themes, concepts, questions, sources of theoretical inspiration, and research to come from scholars within the region—what in our title for this note we call Ottoman and post-Ottoman history but, geographically, is also referred to as eastern Mediterranean history. In this collection of articles, we bring to our readers innovative scholarship about—and much of it from—this region.

If you look at the article titles, many themes seem familiar to those of us working in the wider field of women’s and gender history and the history of sexuality. Authors recognize women’s multiple identities and subject positions, feminism is pluralized, and agency plays a key role in the interpretative framework, set against the backdrop of gender analysis and discourses. Yet what do these terms and concepts mean in their historical, societal, and regional specificity? How do they translate in cultural encounters? This special issue raises many questions: for example, are there specific regional scholars and theorists whose work has shaped analyses in eastern Mediterranean history of which we in the U.S. academy are unaware? What are the big historiographical debates in the field and how and why do so many of these articles challenge nationalist historiographies? Should we as scholars incorporate not only the insights and findings of research framed elsewhere but their distinct historiographies as well? As you will see, we have included a separate introduction to this special issue written by a young scholar in the field of Ottoman women’s history to raise many comparative questions for you to consider as you take in and enjoy these articles.

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