[ecrea] New Book: Female Silences, Turkey's Crises: Gender, Nation and Past in the New Cinema of Turkey

FEMALE SILENCES, TURKEY'S CRISES: GENDER, NATION AND PAST IN THE NEW 
CINEMA OF TURKEY
by Ozlem Guclu

In the mid-1990s Turkish cinema experienced a remarkable revival. 
However, what is particularly unusual about this revival is the 
emergence of a new representational form: silent, inaudible characters. 
Equally unusual is the fact that this new on-screen silence had a 
gender(ed/ing) aspect, since, for the most part, the mute(d) characters 
were female. This book focuses on these newly emergent silent female 
characters in the new cinema of Turkey, and explores the relationship 
between the ‘new’ female representational form, the ‘new’ cinema of 
Turkey, and the ‘new’ socio-political climate in Turkey after the 
September 12, 1980 military coup. It investigates two central questions: 
what are the functions, formations and operations of these silent female 
characters, and why did this female representational form emerge 
specifically in this timeframe? Bearing a cinematic function of 
instrumentality and exposing, one way or another, a close association 
between point of view and discursive authority in the films studied, the 
silent female representational form in the new cinema of Turkey is a 
cinematic symptom of the on-going struggle over the disrupted orders of 
gender, nation and national memory due to an increase in thus-far 
silenced or marginalized voices in Turkey. The silent form not only 
functions as a cinematic instrument to reveal crises in hegemonic power 
positions, but also becomes a battleground within a struggle for 
(re)obtaining a position of discursive authority in the realms of 
gender, nation and past. The silent form in itself becomes an instrument 
on the discursive level, which enables a response to Turkey’s crises in 
these three interconnected realms in the post-1980s.

*Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016, 220p, 978-1-4438-9436-4
http://www.cambridgescholars.com/female-silences-turkeys-crises

*Özlem Güçlü is an Assistant Professor at the Sociology Department of 
Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey, where she teaches on film and 
media. She is also a Research Associate in the Centre for Film Studies 
at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Her 
current research focuses on contemporary cinema of Turkey, 
representations of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, national identity and 
memory in the cinema of Turkey, and the social and political history of 
Turkey. She is the editor of the special issue Yatay Direniş: Gezi 
Deneyimi [Horizontal Resistance: Experience of Gezi Park] of Teorik 
Bakış (2013) and co-editor of Queer Tahayyül [Queer Imagination] (2013). 
Her recent publications include “Oooh! Belinda” and ‘Waiting for the 
Clouds” in Directory of World Cinema: Turkey (2013); “Gender, Family and 
Home(land) in Contemporary Turkish Cinema” in Contemporary Cultures of 
Resistance in the Middle East: Literature, Cinema and Music (2013); and 
“My Only Sunshine” and “A Run for Money” in World Film Locations: 
Istanbul (2012), among others.




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