Year: 2022
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: When youth means menThe student leader and guerrilla fighter Deniz Gezmiş, who was put to death by the Turkish state in 1972, became the symbol of Turkish youth activism of the 1960s-70s (Erbil, this volume).In a widely circulated photograph, Gezmiş stands in the courtroom during the first trial of the People's Liberation Army of Turkey (THKO), the far-left armed group, which he co-founded.Gezmiş has his finger pointed towards the invisible addressee while making what looks like a fervent speech.The image appeared on the cover of a 1974 book about the THKO trial, a unique collection of legal documents published by Gezmiş' lawyer Halit Çelenk (Figure 1, left hand side).However, the photograph was cropped to exclude a woman in light-coloured dress seated to Gezmiş' left.In most of the reproductions of the image, Sevim Onursal, the only female defendant in the 1.THKO trial, is either missing from the picture (as in Çelenk's book) or her presence is blatantly ignored, as exemplified by the description in Bedri Baykam's book (Figure 1, right hand side), which reads: "Gezmiş pronounces his defence during the THKO trial in 1971; immediately next to him is Yusuf Aslan" (Baykam 1998, 598)".Baykam notes a well-known activist to Gezmiş' right, but Sevim Onursal on the left goes unmentioned.Historical and cultural attention tends to be concentrated on Gezmiş and his male comrades.Such male-dominated representation is particularly pronounced when it comes to Turkish youth's involvement in political struggles.Demet Lüküslü (2009), Berna Pekesen (2020), and, in this very volume, Duygu Erbil have shown that in Turkey, "youth" refers principally to young men.The martyred Deniz Gezmiş is central to and emblematic of these masculinist representations of political youth.In turn, it was mostly menespecially those men who wrote memoirswho created and limited the image of womanhood in Turkish activism of the 1960s and 70s.Academics such as Pekesen have noted the absence of female voices from this period.Commenting on female memory of 1968, for example, Pekesen laments that "the vast majority of these women have not yet given voice to their memories, which explains why their experiences still have not found their rightful place in the social memory" (2020, 237).Male activists of the 1968 generation have also commented on the issue.Journalist Tuğrul Eryılmaz, for
Source: De Gruyter eBooks
Author: Lucie G. Drechselová
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4293061637