Paper long abstract:

In the concept of gender, power produces the types of women's body which patriarchal society requires through power's principle mechanisms, "surveillance" and "gaze." The acquisitions of this mechanism are the following: Women's body is habituated the external regulation, it optimizes its capabilities, it extorts its forces, it increases its usefulness and docility, and it integrates it into the system. As a result, a disindividualized woman's body is created. However, as Foucault suggests, power does not only operate through domination or oppression as the common knowledge, it also operates through the experience of resistance. In other words, "it creates new possibilities, produces new things, ideas, and relations; this is akin to what feminists call 'empowerment'". In this paper, I will focus on the body and show the relationship of power with the body and the reflection of this in the literary texts written by Turkish women writers. In doing so, I will try to find answers to the questions: How does power disindividualize a woman's body? In other words, what kind of disciplinary mechanisms does power produce to disindividualize women's bodies? How do women resist this in literature? Are they able to construct a free/empowered woman's body? If so, what narrative strategies do they use?

Paper long abstract:

The Story of the Speaking Skull - who commonly goes by the name of Jumjuma Sultan - is found throughout the Islamic world, among the Arabs, Kurds, Persians, Pashtuns, Balochi, and Indonesians alike. As the Turkic Islamic world is no exception to this, here too, the skull speaks in many tongues. Indeed, its story has been written down in Khwarezm-Turkic, Ottoman, and Chagatai, and has been sung by the Azeri ʿāşıḳ, the Kazakh öleñşi, and the Uyghur baḫşı.

Rethinking each available text as an instantiation of this widely shared story, this paper starts from the observation that these instantiations hover between a (narrow) translation and a (broad) adaptation. In order to demonstrate this, two unpublished 19th-century manuscripts, one Chagatai-Kazakh and one Chagatai-Uyghur, are juxtaposed and explored in terms of the strategies of transposition applied therein. What translational and adaptational strategies did their respective performers apply while tailoring the story to the needs of their target audience? Building on these data, the paper argues that these transpositional strategies are correlated to a number of variables, such as the socio-linguistic axis of orality-textuality and the socio-religious axis of local/lived-normative/textual Islam.

As such, this paper makes the skull tell not only its own colourful story, but also a vivid story of 19th-century Turkic literature as it moved between oral and written, and of 19th-century Turkic Islam as it moved between yurt and madrasa; in short, a story of the vitality and flexibility of language and religion in a world on the eve of a new era, when boundaries were to be reset radically.

Paper long abstract:

In the Kazakh folk-narrative "Ush kelinshek syr aitysqany" (How three wives shared their secrets), a young woman recounts how, when her fiancée publicly abandoned her, she disguised herself as a batyr and set out resolved to similarly humiliate him—the tale ends with the fiancée crouched naked at her feet, begging for mercy from the fearsome and mysterious batyr. The motif of disguising oneself as a member of the opposite gender is a plot device common to folk tale traditions from around the word; the tale traditions of India, the Middle East, and Europe can all furnish multiple comparative examples. In Kazakh folk tales specifically, this ruse may appear as part of a quest to rescue a lost family member, or it may serve as a strategy intended to trick an adversary either out of gold or into a marriage alliance; the protagonist may be a woman who guises herself as a male warrior or a man who dresses as a beautiful young woman; the tone of the text can ranges from tragic to ribald joking. This paper asks what conceptions of gender emerge from these performances of disguise, and to what extent can these performances be read as subversive of the sex-gender order? In answering these questions, the paper draws on a series of 19th century and Soviet-era collections of Kazakh folk tales to trace both the varying forms the motif takes and the ways in which it is embedded in plot morphology.