Staging Queer Marxism in the Age of State Feminism: Gender, Sexuality, and the Nation in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar’s Kadin Erkekleşince (When Woman Becomes Masculine)

In this essay, I will study the complex politics of Kadın Erkekleşince and the play's significance for the queer Turkish dramatic canon as well as for the histories of queer negativity, radical feminism, and queer Marxism. I use the term "queer Turkish dramatic canon" to refer to plays in Turkish that explore queer sexualities and identifications. Other early examples of such works include texts by Şahabeddin Süleyman and İbnürrefik Ahmet Nuri Sekizinci. In the scholarship on Turkish theatre, late Ottoman and early Republican queer plays have either received very limited scholarly interest or, as in the case of Kadın Erkekleşince, they have been studied without their explicitly queer elements being acknowledged. Gürpınar's play provides an important opportunity to explore this neglected body of work. The case of Kadın Erkekleşince also demonstrates how queer intellectuals, who experienced the transition from the Ottoman Empire to the Republic of Turkey, used theatre to challenge the hegemonic politics of gender and sexuality as well as the broader sociopolitical dynamics in the country. The play is important for the history of Turkish theatre not only because of its rare queer subject matter but also because of its production history. Censorship has almost always been a problem in Ottoman and Turkish theatre, and the single-party era (1923–1945) was a particularly difficult period.6 Nevertheless, Kadın Erkekleşince shows that the public theatre still produced works that were explicitly critical of the government and the socioeconomic atmosphere—which is in stark contrast with the current situation under the professedly democratic regime of Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party).7 The case of Kadın Erkekleşince thus demonstrates that in a context where theatre functioned as a venue for learning and experimenting with the norms of citizenship, the infrastructure provided by the state could also be used by dissident figures. These processes, however, depended on complex negotiations among playwrights, directors, and theatre administrators. In the case of Kadın Erkekleşince, a number of factors may have facilitated these negotiations, including not only Gürpınar's status as a canonical literary figure but also the play's ambivalent ending and complicated politics as well as the production's indirect promotion of state feminism by casting iconic figures associated with that political project.