City, space and gender in Sevgi Soysal's novels

Sevgi Soysal was an authentic writer who structured the feminist literary canon through her work in modern Turkish history of literature. When Sevgi Soysal's novels are approached in terms of gender, city, and space, one can notice that her novels are fictionalized around particular themes. Tante Rosa (1968) suggests reflecting on the concept of popular feminism through a tabloid magazine that has gained a seat in the daily lives of urban women. Yürümek (1970) is a unique bildungsroman that questions how gender identities, which are constantly kept in check by the society, become vulnerable. Yenişehir'de Bir Öğle Vakti (1973) confronts its readers with an unheeded reality like incest. Şafak (1975), on the other hand, is one of the best novels written on the psychology of exile and captivity with autobiographical elements in the Turkish literary canon. Without ignoring the intertextual relations in Sevgi Soysal's selected novels, which are Tante Rosa (1968), Yürümek (1970), Yenişehir'de Bir Öğle Vakti (1973), and Şafak (1975), there is a need to do a new reading to decipher the power relationships that gender ideology establishes in the context of symbolic order and urban-space. Another aim of this current and critical reading is to bring Sevgi Soysal closer to the semantic world of Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva, who were exiled both from their birthplaces and from their mother tongues and who are trying to liberate the symbolic order from the hegemony of patriarchal values.