Reading Crime, Writing Gender: The Representation of Criminal Women in Ottoman and Early Republican Literature (1870–1926)

Gizem Sivri (Stanford University) will give a talk titled Reading Crime, Writing Gender: The Representation of Criminal Women in Ottoman and Early Republican Literature (1870–1926).

This article examines the literary representations of female criminality in Ottoman literature by analyzing selected works published between 1870 and 1926. It first establishes a framework for understanding public and intellectual perceptions of women offenders in Ottoman society and their reflection in fictional narratives. Through a close reading of İntibah (1874) by Namık Kemal, Esrar-ı Cinayat (1884) by Ahmet Mithat, Milli Cinayet Koleksiyonu (1914) by Süleyman Su’di and Vassaf Kadri, and Tilki Leman (1926) and Çekirge Zehra (1928) by Peyami Safa (as Server Bedi), the article traces how narrative structure, characterization, and linguistic choices shaped the portrayal of female perpetrators. It highlights the recurring patterns that diminish or distort women’s criminal agency, revealing a broader societal reluctance to recognize women as active agents in crime. By integrating feminist criminological theory and drawing on archival evidence, the study demonstrates how Ottoman literary discourse both reflected and reinforced gendered anxieties around crime, agency, and social deviance and how the dime novel culture helped to reveal the agency of criminal women in fictitious narratives.