2025 Theses Doctoral

Russia as Woman: The Afterlives of Émigré Female Bodies in Russo-Turkish Space, 1919-39

Sekeryan, Ararat

This dissertation examines the sexualized, racialized, and politicized portrayals of Russophone refugee women in late Ottoman and early Republican Turkish literature and visual culture. Focusing on the mass displacement of White Russian refugees to Istanbul following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, it explores how the presence of these women reshaped Turkish perceptions of gender, race, and national identity in a moment of profound political and cultural transition.

While the figure of the Slavic/Russian woman as an object of desire has held a prominent place in the Turkish imagination for over a century, scholarly engagement with these representations remains limited. Such work often reduces Turkish-Russian encounters to illicit sex work, overlooking the longer visual and literary genealogy through which these women became racialized symbols of threat, desire, and modernity. This dissertation challenges the existing scholarship, arguing that the roots of this racializing and sexualizing gaze lie in the period following the First World War and 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, when over two hundred thousand White Russians sought refuge in Istanbul. During the Allied Occupation (1918–23), Russophone refugee women—working as waitresses, dancers, nude models, and vendors—became highly visible participants in Istanbul’s public life. Marked by their Europeanized manners and racial whiteness, they emerged as striking figures in a still patriarchal and conservative society. Their presence unsettled dominant gender norms and triggered anxieties surrounding modernity, belonging, and national integrity.

Drawing on a wide range of sources—including archival materials, memoirs, satirical cartoons, short stories, and novels—this dissertation constructs a prehistory of the racializing and sexualizing gaze. It situates these representational practices within the intersecting upheavals of World War I, the Bolshevik Revolution, and the Kemalist nation-building project. One of the central arguments of this study is that the refugee influx catalyzed the formation of a new sensory and affective regime through which the Turkish male gaze came to relate to the Russian/Slavic female body. This gaze, saturated with desire and anxiety, was articulated through recurring literary and visual tropes that rendered these women simultaneously desirable and morally suspect.

Russia as Woman ultimately asks: How did the White Russian refugee women become a site of fantasy and fear in Turkish cultural production? How did forced migration, wartime displacement, and nationalist anxieties inscribe the Slavic female body with contradictory meanings—oscillating between erotic allure and moral panic? By tracing the emergence of a new representational language this dissertation offers a critical account of how gendered and racialized imperial legacies were negotiated, reconfigured, and aestheticized through the figure of the Russian refugee woman.