Looking At Tarkan Through Feminist Lenses
Tarkan’s name has often been referred to in various articles published in academic journals and books over the years. TarkanPLUS International would like to start a new series of articles to familiarize its readers with some of these academic sources.
In the first part of this series, we would like to examine Yeşim Arata’s article “Rethinking the Political: A Feminist Journal In Turkey, Pazartesi”, printed in Women’s Studies International Forum (Volume 27, Issue 3, August-September 2004, Pages 281-292).
In her work, Arata mainly focuses on the analysis of the Turkish feminist journal, Pazartesi, to discuss how “feminists expand the confines of the political, rethink political values in the Turkish context and contribute to the democratization of the polity”.
In the article, Arata explains how popular culture can be viewed/re-viewed from a feminist perspective and she demonstrates this through a close analysis of an essay penned by Ayşe Düzkan “I admit, I like Tarkan” as printed in the feminist Turkish journal “Pazartesi” in 1995.
Before looking at Düzkan’s essay and Arata’s interpretation, it would be a good idea to first familiarize ourselves with Laura Mulvey’s canonical work “Visual Pleasure and Narrrative Cinema” (1975) .
According to Mulvey, the mainstream cinema has a patriarchal point of view through which woman in film is reduced to an erotic object. Her appearance is carefully coded for strong visual and erotic impact because she is expected to connote to-be-looked-at-ness. Since this is the case, regardless of whether the viewer is male or female, the woman on the screen is viewed from the male perspective. In other words, the classic cinema promotes the male gaze and turns women into prey.
When we read Düzkan’s essay, we can understand how patriarchal hierarchy and traditional, stereotypical gender roles pointed out in Mulvey’s work are challenged: [Below is an excerpt of Arata’s translation of Düzkan’s essay]
“Tarkan does not carry out the job with a God-given attractiveness, he struggles to make himself attractive, handsome and sexy and does not hide this endeavor!.. I like Tarkan because he allows me to feel an emotion I am not accustomed to; to look at a man with a ‘customer’s eye’ and say ‘what a handsome man…”
The quotation above clearly indicates that Düzkan likes Tarkan because Tarkan, in Arata’s words, “is sexy in a way that men in Turkey are not or are not allowed to be”. In other words, Tarkan “possesses a sexiness that people in Turkey are not used to associating with men, because his sexiness seduces the onlookers and being seductive is associated with being female”.
Yeşim Arata’s analysis of “I admit I like Tarkan” clearly indicates that Tarkan challenges gender roles and “offers an opportunity for women to experience a feeling of sexual liberation [and] a code of sexual conduct where men as well as women can choose to seduce and be seduced.”
