Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History ed. by Didem Havlioğlu (review)

Focusing on the celebrated woman poet Mihrî Hatun (ca. 1460–1515), this book is a timely addition to early modern Ottoman literary history, which deploys gender as an analytic category. The introduction presents Mihrî Hatun and provides a literature review on Ottoman poetry and on studies of her, contextualized with examples from European and Islamicate literatures. It also introduces different concepts of gender analysis, such as marginality, performativity, and the subject position, using Mihrî Hatun as an example. The remainder of the book consists of six chapters divided into two thematic sections, followed by an epilogue and an appendix containing a selection of her poetry.

The first part is titled "Mihrî Hatun: The Making of a Woman Poet." Starting with paraphrases of her poetry, the first chapter introduces Mihrî Hatun the woman, anxious after a poetic exchange with a male poet. The chapter continues by examining entries about her in bibliographical dictionaries of poets to trace how male authors presented a woman poet's life, namely, by focusing on her morality, virginity, purity, and possible love affairs. Havlioglu discusses the inclusion and exclusion of information, the discursive power of these narratives, and the "erotically humorous" tone used by poets (39, 44). Her discussion also tackles the process of Ottomanization, or the development of an Ottoman canon through the recording of the Ottoman poets in bibliographical dictionaries, which contributed to "the production of the male poet and his lesser counterpart: the woman poet" (43).

The second chapter considers the meclis (literary gathering) as a site of artistic production with gendered and spatial boundaries. Havlioglu uses Mihrî Hatun's ghazels (lyric poems) to explicate the literary culture and problematizes the performative nature of poetry. Continuing with the spatial focus, the third chapter concentrates on the city of Amasya, the location of the princely court of Bayezid II and other crown princes, whose patronage facilitated the success of woman poets.

The second part, "Poetics of a Battlefield," traces Mihrî Hatun's own voice among the men of the battlefield (merd-i meydân) by tackling the traditional gendered characterizations of poets and poethood (110 and passim). The fourth chapter grapples with the dominant discourse of love in classical Ottoman poetry, dealing with such issues as the ambiguity of the beloved's gender, Islamicate aesthetics, and allusions and ambiguity caused by poetry's different layers of meaning. Through performativity and her marginal subject position, Mihrî Hatun challenged traditional gender constructions, consciously distinguishing between "male biology" and the "values of manliness," and laid claim to the latter—namely, courage and fearlessness—as a woman poet performing among men (111). Another intervention is her identification with the lover rather than with the beloved, which allowed her to carve out a unique place for herself while playing by the "legitimate" rules of classical poetry. In the following chapter Havlioğlu observes that "in her woman's voice, the battlefield of poetry and its vocabulary no longer have the same meaning but are reconstructed in a whole new way" (117).

The last two chapters, which are most interesting as an investigation of Mihrî Hatun poetic strategies, concentrate on two instances in which she engaged in dialogue with male poets. The fifth chapter discusses a parallel poem written in response to a poem by Necatî.Havlioğlu reads Mihrî Hatun's poem not only as a display of her poetic skill but as a response to Necatî's claims to manliness. She especially emphasizes Mihrî Hatun's identification of herself with Züleyhâ, the famous female protagonist of the story of Joseph/Yusuf, and argues that this choice underlines Mihrî Hatun's identity as a woman poet by linking her to a famous female figure who also transgressed gender and social boundaries to satisfy her desires and suffered to reach her beloved. The sixth chapter focuses on a dialogue before an audience with the male poet...