(In)visible beauty queens: literary modernism and the politics of women’s Visibility in Nezihe Muhiddin’s Güzellik Kraliçesi

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the ways in which, via the beauty queen trope, Turkish women’s visible beauty became conflated with larger questions of Turkey’s visibility and legibility to the Western gaze and how the beauty pageant worked as an instrument of modernity to instruct Turkish citizens in what ways and in which spaces women should be seen as beautiful. Examining Nezihe Muhiddin’s 1935 novel, Güzellik Kraliçesi [The Beauty Queen], alongside published debates on the Beauty Queen by Turkish intellectuals, I propose that the cultural anxiety which pervaded socio-political narratives of the Turkish beauty queen offers a unique case study for expanded understanding of literary modernism’s relation to visual culture. The representation of the beauty queen in Muhiddin’s fiction departs from realist aesthetics which dominated the Turkish literary landscape in the early Kemalist era, and instead turns to experimental techniques in order to represent the ways in which these narratives worked on Turkish women’s consciousness through destabilizing the relationship between sight and self-knowledge.

KEYWORDS:

• Beauty pageant
• Nezihe Muhiddin
• Turkish modernism
• visual culture
• global modernism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kaitlin Staudt is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative Modernisms in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at the Education University of Hong Kong. Her articles on modernist Turkish literature have also appeared in Middle Eastern Literatures, and she is the Turkish Section Editor of the forthcoming Global Modernists on Modernism: An Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2019).

ORCID

Kaitlin Staudt http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4039-6092

Notes

1. For an introduction to the global history of beauty contests see Beauty Queens on the Global Stage: Gender, Contests, and Power, edited by Colleen Ballerino Cohen, Richard Wilk, and Beverly Stoeltje; Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.

2. For accounts of how these representative figures are associated with modernity see Felski, The Gender of Modernity; Connor, The Spectacular Modern Woman.

3. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Turkish are my own.

4. The centrality of visual culture to modernism has been established by a number of scholars including Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind; Crary, Techniques of the Observer; Danius, The Senses of Modernism; Kern, The Culture of Time and Space; Jay, Downcast Eyes; Trotter, Cinema and Modernism; McCabe, Cinematic Modernism.

5. See Pollock, Vision and Difference, Doane, “Film and the Masquerade”; Beckman, Vanishing Women; Beeston, In and Out of Sight.

6. Danius, The Senses of Modernism, 18.

7. For more on the hegemony of realism in the early Turkish Republic see Seyhan, Tales of Crossed Destinies.

8. A brief list of this scholarship includes Abadan-Unat, “Social Change and Turkish Women,” 5–31; Arat “Cumhuriyet’in 75,” 21–34; For a more recent example, see Doğramacı, Women in Turkey and the New Millennium.

9. See Kandiyoti, “End of Empire,” 22–47; Tekeli, Women in Modern Turkish Society.

10. Ergin, “Ottoman Royal Women’s Spaces”; Yıldız, “Rethinking the Political”; Brummett, “Dogs, Women, Cholera, and Other Menaces in the Streets”.

11. Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkılap; and Çakır, Osmanlı Kadın Hareketi.

12. For comparative discussions of the New Woman and visual culture beyond Turkey see Mesropova and Weber-Fave, Being and Becoming Visible; Weinbaum, ed, The Modern Girl Around the World.

13. Bilgiç, Turkey, Power and the West, 120.

14. Translation quoted in Atabaki and Zürcher, Men of Order, 214.

15. Ibid., 228.

16. Bilgiç, Turkey, Power and the West, 119.

17. Translation quoted in Shissler, “Beauty Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of,” 109. Original Turkish: “Aynı şeyi biz niçin yapmıyalım?” Cumhuriyet (4 February 1929), 1.

18. “Türkiye güzelinin beynelmilel müsabakaya iştirakini temine Cumhuriyet önayak olacak,” Cumhuriyet (5 February 1929), 1.

19. Schissler, “Beauty Is Nothing to Be Ashamed Of,” 107.

20. Banet-Weiser, The Most Beautiful Girl in the World, 186.

21. Connor, The Spectacular Modern Woman, 171.

22. British Pathé, “Do You Agree”.

23. Translation quoted in Bilgiç, Turkey, Power and the West, 120.

24. Peyami Safa (1899–1961) was a prominent author, newspaper columnist, and public intellectual. Mehmet Zekeriya Sertel (1890–1980) was a journalist and publisher who published Resimli Ay along with his wife, Sabiha Sertel.

25. Safa and Zekeriya, “Kraliçe Türk Güzelliğini Temsil Eder mi?.” 3.

26. Ibid., 2–29.

27. Cheng, “Shine.” 1023.

28. Zihnioğlu, Kadınsız İnkilap, 150–51.

29. Muhiddin, Güzellik Kraliçesi, 129.

30. “Russian beauty” here likely refers to the physical attributes of White Russian tsarist supporters who fled from Russia to Turkey after the overthrow of the Tsar in 1917. These refugees, who were predominately former aristocrats, settled in Istanbul, particularly in the neighborhood of Beyoğlu, and were thus some of the most visible examples of European physical attributes. It is likely that Belkıs uses this to reference Zühal Ferda, whose name is Turkish, to emphasize her foreign, non-Turkish appearance.

31. Ibid., 134–5. Tuluat is a form of Turkish folk theater.

32. Jacobs, The Eye’s Mind, 27.

33. Parla, “Car Narratives”, and Mardin, Super Westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire in the Last Quarter of the Nineteenth Century.

34. Muhiddin, Güzellik Kraliçesi, 137.

35. Ibid., 126.

36. Ibid., 138.

37. Yıldız, Popüler Türk Romanları, 230.

38. Ibid., 232.

39. Muhiddin, “Balolarda Kadın Kıyafeti,” 272.

40. Ibid.

41. Muhiddin, Güzellik Kraliçesi, 202.

42. Ibid., 203.