Dancing Modernity: Gender, Sexuality and the State in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic

Abstract

Early Ottoman dance practices that took place in gender segregated spaces andallowed for a certain degree of sexual explicitness and expressions of homoerotic desirewere disavowed among Turkish elites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "Bellydance" became associated with non-Turkish performers, while the Tanzimat and YoungTurk state employed the theater to perform emerging ideas about 'Turkishness' and the'New Woman.' In the early Turkish Republic, the new cadre of Kemalist militaryofficers and bureaucrats altogether rejected its Ottoman heritage and danced the waltz ina close embrace to the music of Western orchestras.This thesis charts significant changes in dance practices between the late OttomanEmpire and early Turkish Republic in order to examine the articulation of modern viewsof gender and sexuality. Dance played a formative role in shaping Turkish modernityand framed moral issues about gender, sexuality, and public space, reflecting andreshaping social life at the same time.