Room for a newlywed woman - Making sense of gender in the architectural discourse of early Republican Turkey

Abstract

Issues concerning sexuality and gender are rarely addressed in the discourse of modern Turkish architecture. Given the gendered associations of domesticity, the architecture of the house provides the most obvious context to explore these issues. In the early years of the Turkish Republic, images of the modern house and modern, secular women were actively promoted by the architects and intellectuals of the new nation-state. Representations of women, which abound in popular journals but end up dispersed between the lines in contemporaneous architectural texts, often escape critical scrutiny. In general, only the imaginary figure of an asexual ideal Turkish woman is allowed to have legitimate entry to the discourse on modern Turkish culture. Here, I focus on the figuration of woman in architectural discourse with particular emphasis on a domestic reference in a book by Ismail Hakki Baltacioglu, a leading intellectual of the period. I argue that by containing an inadvertent reference to the figure of woman, Baltacioglu's text both introduces sexuality and exposes the lack of the feminine element in architectural discourse.