Problematizing translated popular texts on women's sexuality: a new perspective on the modernization project in Turkey from 1931 to 1959

Abstract

In this doctoral research, a database, the first of its kind in Turkey, is established for non-literary translated and indigenous texts for/on women published between 1828 and 1990. Since the critical analysis of the database reveals sexuality to have been the subject most translated and written about, ten texts on women’s sexuality published between 1931 and 1959 are selected for analysis in three case studies. In order to contextualize this corpus, a literature survey is presented of works on the history of Turkish women’s movements and the republican modernization project, along with a critical overview of non-literary articles (translated and otherwise) in women’s magazines. Firstly this thesis aims to analyze the complexities underlying translations, which bear significant consequences for the study of republican translation history: translations were altered in such ways that they became different from their source texts in terms of fullness; several assumed translations were in fact pseudotranslations, with no corresponding source texts, while some assumed indigenous texts were, in fact, concealed translations. Secondly, as an interdisciplinary study, the thesis aims to show that the discursive interventions of the translators foregrounded the issue of sexuality while aiming at informing female readers on the subject. When the full range of translations (those lacking in fullness, pseudotranslations, compilative and concealed translations) are compared with indigenous texts, it becomes clear that translators were less constrained than indigenous writers in expressing themselves and created a freer discourse of their own in the early republican period. Thus, this thesis also throws a fresh perspective on the republican modernization project by positing new findings to question arguments in Turkish women’s studies that women’s sexuality was suppressed in the nation-building process.