Zeynep Y. Gökce

Revisiting the Ottoman Households: The Maids and Mistresses

My project is an inquiry of presenting the intersectional relations of household labor of women in 18th and 19th Ottoman Empire, through the perspective of Western travelers. My research project seeks to answer the following questions:
(1) How are unpaid women labor/household slavery and the identities of those women in Ottoman households represented by Western writers throughout the 18th and 19th century?
(2) How are the different ethnic identities and religions of enslaved women represented by the Western writers?

For this project, I will take intersectionality as a framework which has been very useful recently for understanding oppression and the "subaltern" groups since it brings the discussion to the level of common systems of oppression justified by those identities, rather than the level of common identities and the theories and methodologies of intersectionality that are missing in Ottoman historiography. Through analyzing the Western travelogues (mainly British, North-American and Italian writers) I will aim at investigating the gendered representations of the slave/unpaid women with relation to their ethnic backgrounds. This project aims at contributing to the literature of gender and slavery studies as well as oriental studies.

since 2019               
Ph.D. in Oriental Studies, University of Bonn, Germany

2014–2018               
M.A. in History, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey

2009–2010               
Study Abroad, Communication Sciences, Verona Universtiy, Italy

2008–2011               
M.A. in Communication Sciences, Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey

2003–2007               
B.A. History, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey

since 2019           
Research Associate in Research Area E Gender (and Intersectionality), University of Bonn, Germany

2013–2019                 
Research and Teaching Assistant, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey

Member of the Cultures of Turkey Research Group, Istanbul Bilgi University, Turkey

since 2017       
Assistant Project Coordinator of the Cultural Plurality in Turkey Project