Translating Girlhood in Mustang (2015): Locations of Style, Political Context and Audience Reception

As part of the conference "Female Agency and Subjectivity in Film and Television", which took place at Istanbul Bilgi University (April 11-13, 2018),  Cüneyt Çakırlar presented his paper in the panel "Translating Girlhood in Mustang (2015)" with Özlem Güçlü (MMGSU) and Elif Akçalı (Kadir Has University). 

Focusing on the Turkey-born French director Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang (2015), the panel explored diverse modes of critical analysis to locate the film’s national and transnational framings of gender politics. Mustang tells the story of five orphaned sisters living with their grandmother and uncle in a remote Turkish village. Focusing on these five characters’ rapport with the conservative and segregated gender order in which these girls are “trained for” and forced into arranged marriages, this unconventional coming-of-age story capitalises upon solidarity, agency and resistance rather than a defeatist drama of spectacular victimhood. However, the film has received differing reviews: while the international reviews were celebrating it as a feminist text of rebellion and female empowerment, the local (i.e. Turkey-based) reviews were more sceptical of the film’s engagement with the national political context. The panel questioned the functions of film style, the political context of cinema, and audience reception in locating Mustang’s ideological operations in terms of national politics, (trans)national feminism, and the theoretical frameworks of national/transnational cinemas. Özlem Güçlü argued that Mustang’s formulation of female agency and subjectivity can be considered as exemplary of new female narratives in the contemporary cinema of Turkey. Cüneyt Çakırlar focused on the film’s formal/stylistic choices and the extent to which these choices reify a transnational feminist accent while undermining the local intricacies of gender politics. Finally, Elif Akçalı discussed the differences in the film’s reception by critically exploring local and international reviews of the film.        

Soufiane Ababri's solo show at The PILL, Istanbul

Following his solo show, Here is a Strange and Bitter Crop, which was on display at the Space in London last year, the French-Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri has recently launched an exhibition of his recent work at the gallery The PILL (Istanbul & Paris) titled Memories of a Solitary Cruise (10 January - 23 February 2019). Through his use of the spectacular scene of traditional Turkish wrestling, Ababri's project intervenes into the racialised and sexualised modes of Orientalism. Exploring male friendship and homoeroticism in Arab and Middle Eastern cultures through the intersections of race, gender and sexuality, Ababri's art of appropriation creates a productive friction by depicting Arab or "Oriental" with the aesthetic tools of Western canons/masters of homoerotic arts.

The gallery commissioned Cüneyt Çakırlar to author a piece that introduces Ababri's art practice to the Istanbul audience. The English version of Çakırlar's piece can be accessed from this link. The Turkish translation has recently been published in Manifold.

Innocent until proven filthy: new lad masculinity in women's magazines

The Inequality, Culture and Difference research seminar series presents:

“Costumes and fashion in Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale”

Dr. Karen A. Ritzenhoff, Department of Communication and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies (WGSS), Central Connecticut State University

Wednesday 24^thOctober, 12-1pm in MAE 206

Gender politics and access or lack of power are core themes in the The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopic novel about a sexually corrupt society where Puritan ideals have led to the enslavement of young women in the country of “Gilead”, located in the borders of the United States. The Handmaid’s Tale provides ample narrative materials and a particularly prescient basis to discuss many pressing contemporary social issues in different academic contexts. The war front in The Handmaid’s Tale has been relocated in the domestic sphere of the American white, upper middle-class home where women’s actual bodies are the battleground. 

One of the ways to force the handmaids into submission is by robing them into red cloaks that are standard costumes.

The School of Arts and Humanities

Modern Languages and the Centre for Inequality, Culture and Difference

Present 

a seminar with

Dr Jim Wolfreys, from Kings College, London

Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France

Islamophobia in France is on the rise, with Muslims subjected to unprecedented scrutiny of what they wear, eat and say. This book examines the role played by France’s ‘new secularism’ in giving racism a respectable veneer and assesses the impact of the political mainstream’s adoption of an authoritarian neoliberal outlook on France's Muslim population. This officially sanctioned Islamophobia risks going unchallenged. It has divided the anti-racist movement and undermined the left’s opposition to bigotry. Drawing on interviews with anti-racist activists, Republic of Islamophobia situates these developments within a wider historical and international context.