We are excited to announce our first guest lecture of the 2018-19 academic year will be given by Dr Şima İmşir (Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, İstanbul Şehir University).

The details are below:

“A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes”: Biological Debt, Illness and the Limits of Nation State in Women’s Writing in Turkish

Science, technology and medicine functioned in the Ottoman Empire of the nineteenth century and onwards as focal concerns in regulating populations as sources of economic growth and military power. Such concerns led to positivism, determinism and social Darwinism functioning as methods of understanding, measuring and controlling populations. These debates remained intact after the foundation of the Turkish republic, defining members of the nation as healthy and fit, and by doing so gave them a “biological debt” with remarks such as “A person proves that he is a good citizen by protecting his life.”In other words, the “ideal” citizen was ideologically defined as healthy, sturdy and reproductive, and health became a prerequisite for what constituted a nation. Gender, especially, occupied a central role in the heteronormative definitions of what an ideal citizen’s body should look like and what was expected of it.

Functioning as a vanguard element in such discourse, works of literature instrumentalized metaphors of illness: healthiness and unhealthiness became useful and subtle themes for discussing broader subjects such as nation-making, race, modernization and citizenship. Taking its cue from Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of bare life and state of exception, this talk will discuss publications by medical authorities, members of parliament as well as pieces of fiction of the twentieth century, more specifically Kerime Nadir’s Hıçkırık and Halide Edib’s Mev’ut Hüküm, in relation to the nation-building project, and argue that illness as an object of focus presents the potential to reveal what is left outside the imaginary borders of nation.

About Asst. Prof. Şima İmşir

Şima İmşir is an assistant professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Istanbul Şehir University. She received her BA degree from the Department of Comparative Literature at Istanbul Bilgi University and her MA degree from the Department of Women Studies at Istanbul University. Having received School of Arts, Languages and Cultures fund from the University of Manchester, she completed her PhD at the University of Manchester and taught as a teaching assistant between 2013-2018. Her PhD research examined ideological and discursive constructions of diseases in women writers’ fiction in Turkish in the twentieth century by looking at a variety of genres from melodramas to modernist fiction. Her research interests include biopolitics, medical humanities, disability studies, gender, history of social Darwinism, 19th and 20th century British literature, 20th century Turkish literature and postcolonial theory.