The Department of Gender Studies
Gender and Women’s History Section of Hungarian Historical Society
cordially invites you to
Who is a survivor in a genocide?
The Gendered Silencing of Islamized Armenian Survivors in Turkey
A public lecture in the framework of CEU-Sabanci Joint Academic Initiative
by
Ayşe Gül Altınay
Asssistant Professor
Sabanci University, Istanbul
An unknown number of young Armenians survived the massacres of 1915 as adopted daughters and sons of Muslim families. Fewer others became wives and, in exceptional cases, husbands. While some of these survivors (particularly young men) re-united with their families or relatives in later years, or were taken into orphanages by missionaries and relief workers, many others lived the rest of their lives as “Muslims,” taking on Turkish, Kurdish, or Arabic names. Until recently, the stories of these survivors have been silenced, either in the form of total erasure or of serious trivialization by all historiographies. The presentation discusses the implications of both this long silence and the recent forms of unsilencing for contemporary academic and political debates and asks questions about the category of “the survivor” in genocide scholarship.
February 23, 2012, 5.30 pm, 201 Room, Monument Building 2nd Floor, Nador utca 9.
Ayşe Gül Altınay received her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University. Her research and writing have focused on militarism, nationalism, violence, gender, and sexuality. She is the author of The Myth of the Military-Nation: Militarism, Gender and Education (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); co-author of Violence Against Women in Turkey: A Nationwide Survey (with Yeşim Arat, Punto, 2009, www.kadinayoneliksiddet.org/English.html), and Torunlar (based on Muslim grandchildren’s narratives of their converted Armenian grandparents, with Fethiye Çetin, Metis, 2009, second edition 2010; French translation Les Petits-enfants, trans. Célin Vuraler, Arles: Actes Sud, 2011; Armenian translation: Torner, trans. Lilit Gasparyan and Tigran Mets Hratarakchatun, Yerevan: Targqnutyun, 2011); Her co-authored book with Yeşim Arat, Türkiye’de Kadına Yönelik Şiddet (Violence Against Women in Turkey) was awarded the 2008 PEN Duygu Asena Award.