Wartime Bodies: Politics of Sexuality and War Orphans in the Late Ottoman Empire (1913-1923)
Creators: name: Kayaal, Tugce
Publisher: name: My University
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Childhood and Youth Sexuality
subject: History of Sexuality
subject: Ottoman Empire
subject: Middle East
subject: Homoeroticism
subject: Orphans
subject: Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender Studies
subject: History (General)
subject: Humanities (General)
subject: Middle Eastern, Near Eastern and North African Studies
subject: Women's and Gender Studies
subject: Social Sciences (General)
subject: Humanities
subject: FOS: Humanities
subject: Social Sciences

description: Wartime Bodies: Politics of Sexuality and War Orphans in the Late Ottoman Empire (1913-1923) explores the efforts the Ottoman Empire took to regulate sexual behaviors of war orphans, the targets of local and national moral panics, to bring them in line with the state’s nation- and citizen-making politics. These politics relied on Turkish nationalism and the construction of an Ottoman heteropatriarchal regime during the Balkan Wars (1912-13) and World War I (1914-18). Situated at the intersection of history, queer studies, feminist studies, and childhood studies, this dissertation makes two main arguments. First, two total war experiences contributed to the Ottoman Empire’s transformation from a multi-ethnic empire to a homogenous Turkish-Muslim state shaped by the loss of its Christian-populated territories in the Balkans and its genocidal targeting of its Christian-Armenian citizens in 1915. Wartime losses made it even more urgent for Ottoman state officials and ideologues to (re)articulate the Ottoman nation as Turkish-Muslim and the ideal Ottoman citizen as a Turkish, Muslim, heterosexual man. To forge this three-fold identity, I argue, the wartime government mobilized the politics of sexuality to construct a heteropatriarchal regime that focused on children and youth. For non-Muslim children, especially the survivors of the 1915 Armenian Genocide, state regulation of their sexual orientation, conduct, and gender roles was intertwined with converting them to Islam and inculcating a Turkish identity. Second, I maintain that Ottoman state officials and ideologues saw war orphans, who by definition lacked access to proper parental supervision and disciplining, as subjects and triggers of deviant sexual behaviors, meaning any form of sexual conduct and intimate relationship that defied the established norms of heterosexual sex, and thus as a threat to the heteropatriarchal order the state aimed to establish. Using primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Western Armenian, English, and French, the dissertation in the broadest terms investigates how the Ottoman wartime government (re)constructed the gender, sexual, ethnic, and religious categories that had constituted the Ottoman nation. Wartime Bodies furthers our understanding of how age-, sex-, ethnicity-, and religion-based categories intertwine with and mutually inform each other in cultivating wartime colonial subjects. Analyzing war orphans as a complex social and sexualized category through the lens of feminist and queer methodologies, this dissertation presents a multilayered representation of childhood and youth sexuality in a non-Western locality.