Abstract

Music has often had a political aspect but its power has increased since the formation of the modern state. In Turkey, music has been an instrument for the nation-building project but also a tool for members of the civil society. With the release of the ban that prohibited ethnic music in the public arena in 1990, women performers of this music genre have managed to carve out their niche on the public stage as well as to gain social respectability in the process. Drawing on a three-month fieldwork in Istanbul, this thesis seeks to present the strategies and obstacles women performers of ethnic music employ to break with the image of the ‘entertainer’, to advocate for the rights of the ethnic minorities, and to re-define inter-gender relationships. This thesis is an exercise in engagement with these questions: How do women use ethnic music in order to carve out their place in the public arena while gaining and maintaining social respectability? More particularly, how were they able to do it in the peculiar constantly evolving socio-political landscape of the Ottoman Empire first and then of the Turkish Republic? What were the obstacles they faced at various stages and what strategies they employed to challenge, circumvent, overcome, co-opt or neutralize these obstacles?