Description
- Abstract:
- This dissertation investigates Turkish redefinitions of traditional gender norms through the re-contextualizations of transnational American culture in the period between 1988 and 2009. Through an interdisciplinary analysis of three mass cultural genres (originally imported and yet localized in their Turkish actualizations)--namely, American daytime television soap operas, the Turkish Cosmopolitan magazine, and Turkish rock music--as well as their producers and audiences, I illustrate culturally specific female agency as well as the processes and strategies of localization in the Turkish setting. Employing a methodology that combines audience and production ethnographies, textual and historical analyses as well as transnational feminist media theory, I argue that cultural producers' diverse appropriations of these media for their competing views of female empowerment; female audiences' varying uses and readings of these texts; and the actualization of a powerful female homosociality, furnish the structural conditions under which alternative forms of meaning can gain a public momentum and challenge traditional Turkish norms of gender and female sexuality. Turkish women's engagement with transnational American culture exhibits a transgressive potential, particularly in constructing and re-imagining counterpatriarchal knowledge as well as in challenging the official citizenship regime that attempts to control the female body. Turkish women's resistive pleasures from re-coding and decoding once-American genres reveal a multifaceted process, one that embodies the discursive struggle in contemporary Turkey between Westernization and tradition as well as that between globalization and local resistance. This study illuminates this complex relationship between different demographics of contemporary Turkish women and American cultural imports. It approaches localized American culture as a dynamic space where capitalist patriarchal hegemonies and various modes of female resistances can and, most of the time, do co-exist. Overall, this dissertation aims to deconstruct Turkish women's lived experiences of transnational media and local patriarchies by identifying the counterhegemonic qualities of women's pleasures that are informed by the multiple female voices, visions, re-articulations and decodings of womanhood and modernity that reside in those experiences, yet remain unexplored.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph.D. -- Brown University (2010)
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Citation
Onaran, Aslihan Tokgoz,
"Turkish Cosmo Girls, Soap Fans and Guitar Heroes: Resistive Pleasures of Turkish Women Consuming and Producing Transnational American Popular Culture"
(2010).
American Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z0K935SZ
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American Studies Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the American Studies department....