Opening up a space for women: matinees in Izmir Culture Park

Abstract

This article explores how women’s practices transformed abstract space into lived space in the context of women’s matinees in the entertainment venues of Izmir Culture Park, a historical marker of Turkish modernity. Drawing on collective memory, Lefebvrian spatial theories, and gender studies, the article sets out an analytical framework through which to explore women’s spatial preferences and performances. Engaging with oral histories and archival material, the study reads women’s agency in 1970s matinees, arguing that these events opened up an alternative public space for women to liberate themselves by applying their own rituals and tactics in this space. They thus added new layers of meaning about women’s spatiality to the historicity of the park.

Keywords:

• Izmir Culture Park
• matinee
• memory
• modernity
• social space
• women’s agency

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank this study’s participants who generously shared their memories with us. We also thank Dr. Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Meltem Eranıl Demirli received her PhD degree from Bilkent University in Ankara. She is giving lectures as an assistant professor at Yasar University in Izmir. She attained a patent with her graduation project, a portable post-disaster shelter unit, from the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) in 2013.

Meltem Ö. Gürel is a professor at Yasar University. She previously taught and served as the founding Chair of the Department of Architecture at Bilkent University. Gürel received her PhD in Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Her research interests include architectural theory and criticism, cross-cultural histories of architectural modernism with an emphasis on society, gender, and culture (especially in mid-twentieth-century Turkey), culture-space relationship, and design education. Dr. Gürel has published numerous articles in leading journals, including Journal of Architecture; Journal of Architectural Education; Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; Journal of Design History; Journal of Architectural and Planning Research: and Gender, Place and Culture. Her work has also been published in many collections. She is the editor of Mid-Century Modernism in Turkey: Architecture across Cultures in the 1950s and 1960s (Routledge, 2016).