From a Daughter of the Republic to a Femme Fatale: The Life and Times of Turkey's First Professional Fashion Model, Lale Belkıs

On the other, they would be modern housewives adorned with the "scientific knowledge" (Navaro-Ya§in 2000) and the Western taste to fulfill their social and domestic duties properly, transform their families and thereby the society. Since they were believed to provide the education that would prepare the girls for their role as comrades of men in constructing a powerful modern nation-state, the institutes were preferred by the Muslim middle class, especially bureaucrats and soldiers, for their daughters. In that she was a failed modern woman, the subject positions she invested in now rendered obsolete if not treacherous, her life and work are characterized by a queer disorientation. [...]in what may be described as her queer art of failure (Halberstam 20 1 1 ), where the paintings feature painted and material traces of the artist, like a shadow or an earring, entangled with the two-dimensional bodies of her (anti)heroes, Bellas builds alliances through which she sustains a queer subjectivity.