Fidan Cheikosman

Thesis title: Gendered Turkishness in Everyday Istanbul Through Elif Shafak’s and Orhan Pamuk’s Literature from an Aesthetic, Feminist, and Sociocultural Perspective

Biography

Background

Fidan is a fourth  year PhD candidate in Comparative Literature (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) at the University of Edinburgh. Her doctoral research is currently being supervised by Dr. Fabien Arribert-Narce and Dr.Ines Aščerić-Todd.

In Fidan's Comparative Literature dissertation, she assess the narration of Turkishness as a gendered conception of identity in Elif Shafak’s and Orhan Pamuk’s contemporary novels. Through three different avenues of theoretical study: aesthetic, feminist, and socio-cultural, she evaluates how Shafak and Pamuk assess identity in Turkey through intimate descriptions of everyday life and how these portraits reveal differences between the male and female experience in the city of Istanbul. The selected novels for this research in respective order include Istanbul: Memories and the City (Pamuk), The Bastard of Istanbul (Shafak), A Strangeness in My Mind (Pamuk), 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World (Shafak), The Black Book (Pamuk), The Museum of Innocence (Pamuk), The Flea Palace (Shafak), and Three Daughters of Eve (Shafak). In studying these texts, her dissertation is interested in identifying how Shafak and Pamuk create new ways of looking at the identity discourse, and how the subject of Turkishness is framed by a recontextualization of collected scenes from everyday life in Istanbul that are further distinguished based on the male/female experience that is introduced through certain processes of perception such as the gaze, fetishism, walking, and the woman as commodity.

Fidan demonstrates how the Turkish novel illustrates complex, and often contradictory vignettes of Turkish everyday life in the city of Istanbul to engage with the plurality of definitions that cause Turkishness to manifest itself as a human construct that is largely facilitated by gender. Throughout her PhD project,  Fidan explores Turkey’s historiographical narrative in relation to the Turkish novel. Her studies of the selected texts take the form of three angles: Istanbul as a metaphor city, the surrealist experiment, and the Museum of Turkishness, without forgoing the importance of gender to the concept of Turkish identity. Through these identified perspectives, Fidan interested in evaluating how women, as opposed to men, experience Istanbul through tasks such as spectatorship and walking, and how these actions speak to gender politics and influence identity. Throughout these chapters, Fidan navigate the male gaze and how women experience the city differently from men, therefore positioning herself from the lens of feminist theory. Fidan argues that Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk render Istanbul as a space of negotiating between the male/female experience in the city and enhance the importance of gender and sexuality that changes how men and women perceive the world around them. Shafak’s and Pamuk’s texts create a space within which to confront the hidden realities of Turkish everyday life that is often facilitated by fictional characters within Istanbul: cultural memory, violence against women, explicit gender boundaries, transnational relations, religious fundamentalism, and the importance of recurrent figures such as street vendors and sex workers to the illustration of the nation’s sociocultural dynamics. Such themes appear throughout the Turkish novel, which in effect transcends its definitive purpose as a space of leisurely reading, and instead grows to have profound and intimate effects on readers in their understanding of the perceptual world as they experience it around them.

Fidan's dissertation asks the following questions: How is Gendered Turkishness facilitated in the novels of Elif Shafak and Orhan Pamuk? How do the selected novels portray identity as a gendered phenomenon? And how does the everyday become a significant theme in the narrative structure in pursuit of new ways of understanding identity? How do the selected novels illustrate geography as a space within which to articulate character’s experience in urban space as one that is directed by gender? How does the truth of being a female in Istanbul affect how the city is lived, as opposed to how men live it? As her dissertation argues, insignificant details and descriptions of seemingly banal, habitual, forgettable everyday experiences are illuminated in the Turkish novel to draw create a profound awareness on the significance of the insignificance in the quest of defining the gender-defined boundaries of inhabitants’ perceptions of themselves and their sense of belonging.

Qualifications

January 2021 - Present - PhD., Comparative Literature (Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies), University of Edinburgh

September 2018 - May 2020 - M.S.c, Publishing: Print & Digital Media, New York University

September 2015 - May 2017 - BA, Magna Cum Laude, Departmental Honours, Comparative Literature, French Literature and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles 

Responsibilities & affiliations

May 2022 - Present - Member, Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association

February 2022 - Present - Member, Ottoman & Turkish Studies Association

February 2022 - Present - Member, Middle East Studies Association (MESA)

February 2022 - Present - Member, International Comparative Literature Association 

February 2022 - May 2022 - Independent Researcher, Department of Western Languages and Literatures, Boğaziçi University

Undergraduate teaching

2021 - French 1B Literature and Civilization 

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

No

Research summary

Fidan's research interests and specializations are concentrated within the theoretical and methodological frameworks within the Turkish and larger Middle Eastern and Islamic context. At the moment, she is largely focused on the gender-dichotomy as it exists within the Turkish novel.

 

  • Comparative Literature
  • World Literature (Turkish, Russian)
  • Gender Studies
  • Comparative Nationalism
  • Representations of Urban Space in Literature
  • Surrealist theory within everyday studies 
  • Museum and archive studies
  • East-West Literary Relations
  • Geo-Politics

Past project grants

March 2022 - May 2022 - Turing Scheme Grant

Conference details

"The Kemalist Illusion: A Comparative Tale of Nationalism Through Elif Shafak’s and Orhan Pamuk’s Non-Fiction." The Middle East in Myth and Reality. University of Iceland. Reykjavik, Iceland. 22-24 September 2022. 

“Literary Representations of Constantinople: Orhan Pamuk’s Ottoman Characters and their Western Travels.” Travelers in Ottoman Lands: The Balkans, Anatolia and Beyond. University of Sarajevo. Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina . 24-27 August, 2022.

"Istanbul, A Metaphor City: A Literary Illustration of Turkishness." International Conference on Thinking the City through Fragmentation and Reconfiguration: Aesthetic and Conceptual Challenges. Colégio Almada Negreiros. Lisbon, Portugal. 01-03 June, 2022. 

"The Dangers of the Syrian Woman from the Lens of Mainstream Turkish Media." International Conference on Xenophobia in the Media. Sakarya University. Sakarya, Turkey. 30-31 May 2022. 

"But Where Are You Really From?: An Ode to Children of the Diaspora." National Black History Month Conference. Scottish Graduate School of Social Science. October 2021.

"The Dangers of the Syrian Woman from the Lens of Mainstream Turkish Media Outlets," in Xenophobia in the Media: Critical Global Perspectives, eds. Senthan Selvarajah, Nesrin Kenar, Ibrahim Seaga Shaw, and Pradeep Dhakal (London: Routledge, 2024), https://www.routledge.com/Xenophobia-in-the-Media-Critical-Global-Perspectives/Selvarajah-Kenar-Shaw-Dhakal/p/book/9781032557038#. 

"The Possession-Possessor Dichotomy in the Turkish-Museum Novel," Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction (November 2023), https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2023.2279046

 

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