[Commlist] New Book: Mustang: Translating Willful Youth

/Mustang/: Translating Willful Youth*
*
*
*

This book provides a critically informed account of the Turkey-born 
France-based director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film /Mustang/ (2015), 
which tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their 
grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village.

The film’s familiar art-house style, and its universalising focus on 
female coming-of-age and feminist dissent, resulted in celebratory 
reviews from journalists and scholars of world cinema. Meanwhile, 
/Mustang/’s framing of youth in the Turkish national context, and its 
representation of gender, divided Turkish film critics and cultural 
theorists. These divisions led to a debate that questions the politics 
of transnational feminism by criticising the film’s failure to capture 
the local intricacies of the politics of gender and youth. While this 
book aims to locate /Mustang/ within the intersection of emerging female 
and youth narratives in the cinema of Turkey, it also provides a 
critical understanding of the differences in /Mustang/’s local and 
global reception. This focus on the geopolitics of representation 
informs the diverse criteria this study uses to evaluate Ergüven’s 
stylistic choices.

Engaging with both Anglophone and Turkish literature in youth cinema and 
gender studies, the book makes an original contribution to current 
debates on national/transnational cinemas and gender/youth studies and 
is an accessible reference for graduate and undergraduate study of 
contemporary film.

Authors: Elif Akçalı, Cüneyt Çakırlar, Özlem Güçlü

Elif Akçali is an Associate Professor in Film and TV Studies at Kadir 
Has University, Turkey. Her research focuses on film aesthetics, 
videographic criticism, non-fiction film, and gender/sexuality studies.

Cüneyt Çakirlar is Associate Professor in Film and Visual Culture at 
Nottingham Trent University, UK. His research focuses on issues of 
gender and sexuality in film and contemporary arts.

Özlem Güçlü is an Assistant Professor in Sociology at Mimar Sinan Fine 
Arts University, Turkey. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality in 
cinema, cinema in Turkey, and cinematic animals.

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Locating /Mustang/’s Willful Youth
1. Escaping ‘New Turkey’s ‘Wife Factory’: Towards a Contextualisation of 
the//Claim for Female Voice and Subjectivity
2. Framing the Willful Subject of Coming-of-Age: Cinematography and 
Stylistic Excess
3. Critical Reception: Paradoxes of National Belonging and Geopolitics 
of Film Criticisms
Conclusions

*
The book is published within Routledge's Cinema and Youth Cultures 
series, which engages with well-known youth films from American cinema 
as well as the cinemas of other countries. Using a variety of 
methodological and critical approaches the series volumes provide 
informed accounts of how young people have been represented in film, 
while also exploring the ways in which young people engage with films 
made for and about them. In doing this, the Cinema and Youth Cultures 
series contributes to important and long-standing debates about youth 
cultures, how these are mobilized and articulated in influential film 
texts and the impact that these texts have had on popular culture at large.

Series Editors: Siân Lincoln and Yannis Tzioumakis

*
For more information, please visit 
https://www.routledge.com/Mustang-Translating-Willful-Youth/Akcali-Cakirlar-Guclu/p/book/9780367543136 
<https://www.routledge.com/Mustang-Translating-Willful-Youth/Akcali-Cakirlar-Guclu/p/book/9780367543136>.

---------------
The COMMLIST
---------------
This mailing list is a free service offered by Nico Carpentier. Please use it responsibly and wisely.
--
To subscribe or unsubscribe, please visit http://commlist.org/
--
Before sending a posting request, please always read the guidelines at http://commlist.org/
--
To contact the mailing list manager:
Email: (nico.carpentier /at/ commlist.org)
URL: http://nicocarpentier.net
---------------