Reorienting the nation

Spatio-corporeal imaginaries and Turkey’s father of modern obstetrics, Dr Besim Ömer

Datos Bibliográficos

ID12292021
AutoresDavid Lee Baylis (Delta State University, autor de correspondencia)
Año2017
Volumen24
Número12
Páginas1749-1767
Fecha de publicación2017-11-13
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaGender Place & Culture (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0966-369X • E-ISSN: 1360-0524
EditorialTaylor & Francis (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/0966369x.2017.1398136
OpenAlexW2768462305
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas1
Referencias citadas63

In this study, I use a queer theoretical framework to critically assess narratives of reproductive reorientation in the early Turkish republic. I focus on the writings of one of the central medical professionals associated with the Kemalist regime, Dr Besim Ömer. Inspired by Sara Ahmed’s approach to orientation, I undertake a queer reading of Dr Besim Ömer’s writings on reproductive bodies and the spaces that they inhabit. Spatial dimensions of reproductive misalignment and reorientation are especially evident in Dr Besim Ömer’s work between 1923 and 1938. Rural and urban women are written as out-of-line with respect to the presumed national family line of Turkishness, one that extended Turkish bodies from the heroically fertile past and into a successfully (re)productive future. This assessment is predicated upon a spatio-corporeal imaginary: the naturally fecund Turkish woman, a body whose otherwise reproductively inclined tendencies had become misaligned in both the stagnating rural and industrializing urban spaces of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish republic. I draw upon Ahmed in order to highlight the slantwise character of desires for properly oriented reproductive bodies and spaces that were in-line with the nationalistic family line of Turkishness; desires that were predicated upon a placeless idealization and an embodied utopia. Spatio-corporeal imaginaries such as these have limited the scope and dimension of what constitutes, as Ahmed describes, ‘a life worth living.’

Aesthetics · Art · Embodied cognition · Psychoanalysis · Queer · Sociology · The Imaginary · Turkish · Gender Politics and Representation · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Turkey's Politics and Society

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