This is the second international symposium of NFG 024 (Junior Research Group "Discourses of Justification in Turkey's Recent and Contemporary History on the Participation of Women in Armed Struggle"). 

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The event will focus on the representation and reception of female soldiers and fighters in various (mass) media, but also on the "pre- and re-mediatization" (Astrid Erll) and fictionalization of the topic in narrative literature or film.
In the mass media, there are always "waves of attention" in which, for example, images of Kurdish or Ukrainian female soldiers suddenly dominate war coverage. But while men and their manhood are presented as the unquestioned soldierly norm, female soldiers are questioned and shown in terms of their emotions and morals, their physical appearance and sexuality, their womanhood. (An approach to the everyday (war) reality of soldiers, regardless of gender, rarely succeeds anyway.)
Movies and series have long since discovered the female soldier and armed fighter, but here, too, the focus seems to be on heroization and mythologization. The heroines have outstanding mental abilities and manage to look attractive even in combat.
The symposium combines empirical studies with a clear focus on Turkey with comparative cases from other geographical areas and theoretical approaches. Presentations based on extensive field research on the political, legal and biographical situation of female armed fighters and veterans will enable a comparison between the perspectives of field research on the one hand and reception or fictionalization research on the other, and raise the question of the reciprocal relationship between reality and re/mediatization.

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Program

February 10, 2025

11:00 Opening and Introduction

11:15-12:45
Panel 1 – Women and war - Laying the foundations – chair: Zeynep Tüfekçioğlu
Karolin Tuncel “Feminism and the UN Women, Peace and Security Agenda: How we argue for women’s representation matters”
Isabel Käser “Beyond the battlefield: Kurdish women rebels in and after armed conflict”

Lunch Break

13:30-15:30, hybrid
Panel 2 - Moving pictures – chair: Meltem Dramalı
Yvonne Tasker “Military women in cinema: an historical overview”
Aslı Kotaman “Beyond the sword: Women’s strength and power in digital platforms, TV series, and films”
Zeynep Tüfekçioğlu “TV shows, Ottoman women and their power plays (tentative)”

Coffee Break

15:45-17:45, hybrid
Panel 3 - Women Heroes and Villains in Turkey – chair: Aslı Kotaman
Zeynep Kutluata “Women as bandits, warriors and national icons during the Late Ottoman and Early Republican Era”
Kumru Berfin Emre “Searching for the hegemonic discourses on Kurdish Alevi women in Koçgiri (1921) and Dersim (1937-1938)”
Gözde Emen-Gökatalay “A hero with many faces: Nene Hatun’s shifting images in modern Turkey”
Dinner with participants and friends

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11. February 2025

9:15-11:15
Panel 4 - Mass Media Affairs – chair: Karolin Tuncel
Umut Döner “The Journal Havacılık ve Spor (Aviation and Sports) and the militarization of women in the Early Republican Period”
Eva Fuhrmann “Images of women at war in Vietnam”
Elif Şentürk “Women as symbolic figures of the Turkish Armed Forces: Media representation, perception, and real experiences”
Meltem Dramalı “Construction and deconstruction of a national heroine – the case of Şerife Boz”

Coffee Break

11:30-13:30
Panel 5 - Literary Sources- chair: Elif Şentürk
Weiping Huang “Mulan, a figure of a female fighter in the traditional Chinese literature"
Béatrice Hendrich “Fighting, marrying, betraying: Women’s weapons in war tales of the Early Turkish Republic”
Nadav Solomonovich “Turkish women and the Korean War: from volunteering to protest”

Lunch Break

14:15-15:30
Panel 6 - (Fictional) Ego-Sources – chair: Umut Döner
Anna Rajkowska “Women's self-narrating in Dar al-Harb: Contemporary Jihadi literature in Turkey”
Elke Shoghig Hartmann “Female fighters in Roupen Der Minasian’s memoirs”

16:30 Farewell