Fashioning the Turkish Body Politic

Abstract

While fashion permeates almost all forms of social life, including such seemingly rationally inclined and instrumentally governed fields as science and engineering (Blumer, 1968, pp. 341–5), it has attained its comprehensive, institutionalised manifestation in dress, and above all in the dress of women (Davis, 1989, pp. 337–8). In this paper, I shall concentrate on Republican Turkish attempts to ‘fashion the body politic’ and my focus will be on male rather than female bodies. Bodies are important because the life of the nation is played out through the technical arrangements of clothes, adornment and gesture, as nationalism transforms the body into an imprint and embodiment of the aspired national qualities and practices and into a surface of inscription through which political struggles are expressed. In a nutshell bodies are the essence of the nation. Although the literature on nationalism and gender suggests that men and women are involved differentially in nationalist projects, and that the symbolic representation of the nation usually takes a female form, I argue that not only women but also men are seen as the symbolic bearers of the nation’s identity. In the Turkish case men were not only associated with ‘masculine’ themes like patriotism, bravery, sacrifice and heroism, but also with so-called feminine issues such as the politics of dress and demeanour. Like female bodies, male bodies were simultaneously material and metaphor. Male bodies were discursively produced, becoming surfaces for the inscription of society’s ideals, morals and laws. Masculinity, as Kandiyoti notes, is the ‘missing dimension in the study of Turkish modernity’ (Kandiyoti, 1997). I see a man in the crowd in front of me; he has a fez on his head, a green turban on the fez, a smock on his back, and on top of that a jacket like the one I am wearing. ... Now what kind of outfit is that? Would a civilised man put on this preposterous garb and go out to hold himself up for universal ridicule?