-A report by Sergen Avci
Dr. Didem Havlioğlu, a literary historian and Associate Professor at Duke University who works on women and gender in the Islamicate world, gave a fascinating talk titled “Performance, Subversion, and Gender-Bending in Ottoman Poetry” on April 18th, 2024. With this talk, Dr. Havlioğlu contributed to the Walter G. Andrews Memorial Lecture Series hosted by the Turkish and Ottoman Studies Program in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures. Her lecture delved into the intricate field of early modern Ottoman poetry, exploring concepts of gender, performativity, and marginality, with a particular focus on the woman poet Mihrî Hatun (c. 1515). Dr. Havlioğlu successfully illuminated the experience of being a woman poet in early modern Ottoman court culture, scrutinizing Mihrî Hatun’s poetry alongside narratives produced by male authors about her.
Dr. Havlioğlu started her lecture by recounting her academic journey, which began with her encounter with the late Walter Andrews while she was a student at Bilkent University. Following this influential meeting, she decided to specialize in Ottoman poetry, questioning the role of woman poets within Ottoman literature. Through her research with Walter Andrews at the University of Washington to trace female poets, Dr. Havlioğlu wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on Mihrî Hatun, which she later developed into an academically stimulating book titled Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History (2017). Despite the scarcity of written documents about woman poets prior to the 19th century, Dr. Havlioğlu thoroughly presented Mihrî Hatun's life as a woman poet as well as her strategies of subversion and integration within the courtly literary tradition.
Regarding gender as inherently performative, Dr. Havlioğlu discussed the pre-modern expectations of manhood and womanhood in the male-dominated realm of Ottoman poetry. In this literary tradition, male poets commonly embody the roles of lover and beloved, thereby underscoring the androgynous characteristics of the ideal beloved and homosocial nature of Ottoman poetry. Dr. Havlioğlu persuasively argued that to navigate herself within these male homosocial literary networks, Mihrî Hatun also claims masculinity and deconstructs the traditional social construction of gender created by and for male poets. In doing so, Mihrî Hatun incorporates a heterosexual desire into her poetry, for instance, by associating herself with Zuleyha, a celebrated female lover. While this assertion challenges the male homosocial settings inherent, especially, in Ottoman literary gatherings (majlis), this intervention also enables Mihrî Hatun as a marginalized subject to be accepted within the male-dominated literary tradition, asserting her legitimacy and acknowledging her status among the male poets of her time.