Şule Yüksel Şenler: An Early Style Icon of Urban Islamic Fashion in Turkey

Altınay, Rüstem Ertuğ

doi:10.2752/9781474235303/tarlo0009

Cited by 8 publications

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“…This trend gained support from religious groups as it could encourage other women to aspire to perform piety and modernity. Over time, the headscarf in tesettür, which later evolved into a "türban" [hijab] that covers all hair, shoulders, and bosom with opaque fabric in muted colors, has gained a symbolic character as a representation of the politics of Islam (Altinay, 2013). Due to the government's regulation of dress in public after the military coup in 1980, women wearing hijabs were not allowed to attend university and faced barriers entering into public institutions.…”

Section: The Sociopolitics Of Piety and Modesty In Turkeymentioning

confidence: 99%

Hands-On(ly) Vlogging: How Turkish Muslim Women Perform “Modesty” and “Piety” in Self-Branding on Their YouTube Cooking Channels

Bagdogan

2023

Social Media + Society

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Studies examining the self-branding efforts of women producers of online content have proliferated in recent years. Typically focused on the production of content by young, white, and highly educated middle-class women in the West, such scholarship has predominantly conceptualized women’s online self-branding as a function of neo-liberal and postfeminist values centered around notions of “commodified femininity” and “mediated intimacy” along with consumerism and individualism. In contrast, this article examines the sociocultural values underlying the self-branding practices of Turkish Muslim “housewives” from relatively underprivileged backgrounds who have recorded, performed, and monetized their cooking skills and arguably their values on YouTube. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 12 leading Turkish women vloggers, combined with digital ethnographic research into their online profiles and content, my analysis reveals the importance for these vloggers of ensuring their online performances and personae comply with and embody the Islamic values of feminine piety and modesty. By highlighting the importance of social positionality in research on gendered self-branding, my findings problematize dominant conceptualizations of women’s online self-branding as a postfeminist undertaking. In reality, Islamic values are active online, embodied by Turkish Muslim women cooking on YouTube in a way that is empowering for them but also under negotiation through the participatory culture of the Internet.

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Section: The Sociopolitics Of Piety and Modesty In Turkeymentioning

confidence: 99%

Hands-On(ly) Vlogging: How Turkish Muslim Women Perform “Modesty” and “Piety” in Self-Branding on Their YouTube Cooking Channels

Bagdogan

2023

Social Media + Society

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“…More interestingly, she introduced this style using photographs of models from Western fashion magazines. By painting her designs on the models, she published them with their detailed patterns and promoted this style through a series of conferences commencing in 1967 (Altinay 2013;Beşinci 2017: 95-96). As it will be delineated later as a critical milestone in Republican history, this utilisation of the popular and hegemonic determined the course of Islamism and the hijab issue as a major fault line in Türkiye.…”

Section: Weapons Of the Enemymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Likewise, the Ankara University Conference was just one of the speeches by Şenler that caused widespread outrage in the national media (Tezcan 2019: 124-129). Şenler embarked on her famous series of conferences in Samsun in 1967 (Altinay 2013). The conference, titled "The Place and Duties of Woman in Islam", was upon the invitation because Şenler was already a very influential and "scandalous" columnist.…”

Section: Muslim Fashion: Stylish Elegant Modernmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A more "ironic" instance of the vernacular in Şenler's hijab case, reminding Ali's appropriation of hegemonic racist expressions, occurs in the invention of the Şulebaş style. As mentioned, in designing this style, Şenler took inspiration from the style of Audrey Hepburn in Roman Holiday and introduced it as "stylish, elegant, modern" (sık, zarif, modern) (Altinay 2013;Tezcan 2019: 72). Her leaning toward hegemony -"modern" and "Western" -as a reactive irony first appears in her early struggles when and after deciding to wear hijab.…”

Section: Muslim Fashion: Stylish Elegant Modernmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, she remembers when her grandmother İkbal Hanım mocked her by claiming that people would have called her a Kurdish woman due to her hijab, she countered by saying Kurds were human just like us (Tezcan 2019: 49). When portraying Şenler as the first style icon of "urban Islamic fashion" in Türkiye, Altinay (2013) interprets these struggles by referring to "the Others of modernity". Considering the racist modern-nation-building process of Kemalism, Kurds were "the ultimate Others of modernity who need to be modernized by Turks".…”

Section: Muslim Fashion: Stylish Elegant Modernmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Şule Yüksel Şenler: An Islamist Vernacular Intellectual

Sakarya

2023

ReO

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This article is not a contemplation on women and politics. Neither is it a discussion on Muslim women, the hijab, and Islamism. Instead, this is a testimony to and a remark on Şule Yüksel Şenler, an Islamist vernacular intellectual who blazed a trail in the Islamist politics of Türkiye commencing in the 1960s but existed in the Islamism literature rather through her absence. Şenler vernacularised Islamism by mobilising the hijab, public talks, cinema, literature, journalism, and womanhood, amongst other things such as charities, organisations and politics. As a testimony, I begin with a depiction of the context by providing a chronicle of Turkish politics focusing on the 1960s with a biographical note on Şenler. Next, as a remark, I attempt to work her out as a vernacular intellectual who fashioned the context that concurrently moulded her. To this end, I present Grant Farred’s concept of vernacular intellectual. Farred coins the term to account for the particular intellectual figures who emerged from the anti/postcolonial struggles. Then, I narrate the story of Şenler by expanding the vernacular intellectual and vernacular beyond the conventional postcolonial setting.

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Moral ambivalence and veiling amongst British Pakistani women in Sheffield

Clarke

2018

Contemporary Levant

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Şule Yüksel Şenler: An Early Style Icon of Urban Islamic Fashion in Turkey

Cited by 8 publications

References 0 publications

Hands-On(ly) Vlogging: How Turkish Muslim Women Perform “Modesty” and “Piety” in Self-Branding on Their YouTube Cooking Channels

Hands-On(ly) Vlogging: How Turkish Muslim Women Perform “Modesty” and “Piety” in Self-Branding on Their YouTube Cooking Channels

Şule Yüksel Şenler: An Islamist Vernacular Intellectual

Moral ambivalence and veiling amongst British Pakistani women in Sheffield

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