Male construction in the context of gender in Barış Bıçakçı's novels

This study, aiming at approaching masculinity issues in the novels of Barış Bıçakçı who is one of the important writers in Modern Turkish Literature ,has discussed traditional masculinity roles and men deviating from these roles. This thesis study centering gender, social gender, patriarchy, masculinity and hegemonic masculinity, has dealt with masculinity issues one by one in each novel. Masculinity practices which are in conflict with both inner worlds and social lives of men characters, necessitates building a new masculinity construction about men. According to traditional masculinity construction in Turkey, it is seen that men carry out masculinity roles as the society demands. The men characters in this study, while they are out of social gender norms in general, each of them has tried to fulfill their own masculinity construction away from these norms. Referring the title of the thesis as construction of masculinity is directly related with emphasizing that men who are out of the masculine social gender norms also live and have their own masculinity construction. The men characters' taking on the roles except the assigned ones has indicated that they have troubled and fragile masculine identity. Masculinity notion which constitutes a social form is always in conflict with novel characters. Men who feel emotionally restless, obsessive, dependent, anxious, diffident and weak are also quite passive and weak physically. It is seen that handling these aspects of men characters is assurance of the distance to masculine norm towards an introverted life. Society produces many masculinity models according to the needs and excludes the men who are contrary to these models as men can not become socialized. In this study, which is based on how novel characters of Barıs Bıçakçı exhibit "masculine identitiy" at home, outside and in all public areas, whether men in novels behave according to the masculinity practices or not will be handled and investigated.