Tryiiiing to undress..first attempt.
A too narrow provisional proposal for a possible phd:

“Almanci” youth amazingly enough know their Yesilcam cinema by heart in contrast to Turkish born youth living in Turkey. why is this?

Being a young immigrant girl watching the Yesilcam melodrama “Alyazmalim” one is involuntarily/unintentionally introduced to the heavy burdens of gender roles in Turkey. In the film actress Turkan Soray playing the young girl Asya is forced to make herself look uglier by letting her mother colour her face with charcoal before getting permission to go out.

This strange act put in place by Asya’s protective mother is indeed made to protect Asya from the overall Turkish male gaze that Asya as a very beautiful young woman is indetermindedly prone to in Turkish society.

Therefore Asya involuntarily agrees to this agreement in order to be able to leave the house.

The way Asya’s mother aggressively paints Asya’s face with the blackening charcoal we also get an insight to how women from a very young age are being scolded and shamed for being pretty. To the extend that the female’s outer looks is her family’s responsibility (read honour, and thus socialized with ayip-shame) as it is the woman’s own responsibility to prevent herself from male sexualizing gaze.

 

From this not so unique Yesilcam scene, although a very obvious and clear example of its kind, migrant women including myself is invisibly secondary socialized into the most prevalent identity for Turkish women.

This filmic experience of Turkish audience, the almanci girls in particular, as well as similar or close personal experiences in regards to such a socially imposed uglifying processes is an issue that I would like to scrutinize in details.

And its exposition in Turkish women and especially on almanci women via primary socialization and Yesilcam.

The primary and secondary socialization is similar but the almancis secondary socialization processes has a frightening Europeannes that is further used on top of everything and thus oppresses women further now also in the common space of European culture.

These socialization processes all have different outcomes.

 

I would describe this defiminizing process as an outcome of female sexual shame/ayip-shame and due to the strict gender roles in Turkey (the troubled modernization process proceeding from late Ottoman era plays a big role in feminizing/defeminizing the female subject in Turkey and its diaspora).

In order to desexualize herself to be able to even share the streets with men/or to even leave the home the woman has to defiminize herself. I.e. Clotheswise , putting angry/indifferent facial expressions to avoid improper remarks by men/contact or even rape or insult of one’s family’s honour.

 

My research aims mainly to look at Turkish women’s facial expressions via a documentary film and photos.

How can a whole set of facial expressions be formed via male gaze?

And are prettier girls in smaller Turkish towns who are more prone to male gaze becoming uglier in an early stage/early age compared to less prettier girls?

(Here we should remember that the idealized blonder girl with blue/green eyes are standing higher in the aesthetic hierarchy of modern Turks.)

And are uglier girls not prone to the same sexualizing mechanisms of society?

As in my experience the girls who used to be beautiful end up becoming ugly and get a greyish kind of shadow on their face and some facial lines that for me always indicate that they are Turkish girls from a smaller place in Turkey. The ones that look pretty as grown-ups are in contrast the ones that were often not so pretty as children.

Can we indeed scientifically see a difference between Turkish girls i.e. growing up in Denmark/ England/Germany/ big Turkish cities .

 

And is this female uglification as a shield of protection also taking place in other countries in Europe/Middle East?

And isn’t so that we as women no matter which cultural background always protect ourselves from male gaze in different social settings?

 

These are the areas/layers within Turkish gender roles that I like to look into via fieldwork research and documentary filmmaking. Using Yesilcam as a platform in which this uglification phenomenon is literally taking place.

 

Of course the filmic audience/viewer experience is also to be considered and illuminated.

 

Hulya Ucar

January 1, 2013