CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Sekerci, Erdogan |
|---|---|
| Title | Girls in the nation: gendered childhood and liminality in three kurdish films |
| Summary | This thesis dwells on the gendered imaginings, positions and the roles assigned to children in the narratives of nations. As argued by feminist critiques of nationalism, children are not always mere victims or the ones in need of protection; they are represented in the category of children and adults-to-be, which render them a significant object of inquiry in the studies of nationalism. More specifically, this thesis reads the category of children through the lenses of gender by emphasizing the different imaginings, positions, roles assigned to the boys and girls. The concept of liminality elucidates their childhood and adulthood positions and shows the ways in which their in-between positions are represented in narratives on Kurdish nation through the analyses of three Kurdish films, Time for Drunken Horses (Ghobadi, 2000), Turtles Can Fly (Ghobadi, 2004) and Min Dit: Children of Diyarbakir (Bezar, 2009). Even if liminal states of children are depicted in these films at the level of cinematic representation, the chosen films give us a window through which the representations of Kurdish children as a collective experience of Kurdish population who live social and political conflicts as secondary citizens and experience suffering, death and violence under the rule of Iranian, Iraqi and Turkish nation-states. Three female characters, Agrin, Rojine and Gulistan, are analyzed in the film narratives to show the ways in which their parentlessness and statelessness drive them into the state of liminality. This study aims to contribute the feminist critiques of nationalism by positing a state of liminality in narratives on nation, and reads the narratives of gender through the lenses of liminality. In so doing, this study deploys the concept of liminality to the analysis of gender and nation. |
| Supervisor | Helms, Elissa |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/sekerci_erdogan.pdf |
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