Framing Silence in Southeast Anatolia: Confined Spaces, Subdued Bodies of Women in Turkish Cinema

Abstract

This paper looks at the representation of women's silence as a deliberate survival strategy in Turkish cinema with a focus on a socio-politically scarred region of Southeast Anatolia in 1960-1990. Drawing from feminist scholarship, architectural theory and film studies, the research explores how cinema portrays silence as women's negotiation against patriarchal oppression. Situating women in this cinematic geography, the analysis is through two complementary views. One is the patriarchal perspective, where the camera frames spaces and bodies in ways which render women silent and immobile. From this perspective, silence may confirm male authority over space and body. However, in the second perspective, i.e. women's lived experience, the same silence is re-assessed as an active form of collective endurance and self-protection. By limited public visibility, gesture and speech, women create networks to secure themselves, evade harassment and share resources. These perspectives, analyzed with recurring cinematic motifs such as ceremonies, customs and traditions, and daily life practices, reveal how spatial and bodily silences become survival tactics against oppression and subjugation. Hence timely, this study centers silence as an agency that transforms confined spaces and subdued bodies into embodiments of survival.