Conclusion

Abstract

In the early 2000s I presented work examining Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s various engagements with German literary tradition in her own literary texts, at several academic conferences. Inevitably, the conversation during the question-and-answer periods turned to the headscarf debates, despite the fact that this had nothing to do with the work at hand. As the decade continued, whenever presenting or teaching Turkish German literary texts, the “irrelevant” questions evolved, from “But what about the headscarf?” to “But what about forced marriage?,” “But what about honor killings?,” “But what about the future of feminism and gender equity?,” and “But what about promoting human rights?” I saw these questions as inappropriate to the reality of Turkish-German writers and artists and their artistic production. Yet it became clear that trying to divert attention from the “irrelevant questions” was an inadequate strategy. In fact, incessant attention to violence against women was very much a part of the context in which these people produce art. In other words, insisting on thinking about Turkish-German artistic production as artistic production was inadequate without a deeper analysis of the context in which it was produced—a part of what Lawrence Grossberg has called “radical contextuality” (Grossberg 20).