The Cultural Other in Film Narratives: Gendered Perspectives

Abstract

This chapter discusses the different ways in which the periphery is imagined by contemporary film narratives in Turkey based on an analysis of three films, Mustang (2015), Tereddüt (2016) and Yozgat Blues (2013). Mustang is the debut film of female filmmaker Deniz Gamze Ergüven, narrating the story of five sisters facing various kinds of oppression in a village located in Turkey’s Black Sea region in a conservative cultural setting. While Mustang undertakes a feminist critique of male-domination that subordinates the sisters, it does this by Orientalizing the peripheral other through the presence of a superior, enlightening gaze of the center. On the other hand, directed by acclaimed Turkish female film director Yeşim Ustaoğlu, Tereddüt highlights the mutualities between the experiences of women from different classes and cultures. Another narrative in the Black Sea region, the film tends to demystify the empowered self at the center and establishes grey zones between the center and the periphery by focusing on different women’s common struggle against male domination. Finally, this chapter discusses male film director Mahmut Fazıl Coşkun’s Yozgat Blues, to show the deconstruction of the center’s masculinist, unified, superior self, challenged by the multiplicity of identities and unexpectedness of experiences promised by the periphery.