Women, Visibility, and Politics of Night from Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey
By Nurçin Ileri
A previous version of this essay was published as “City, Night, and Women” in Saha, no. 3 (April 2016): 57–62. The present version has been revised by the author.

When Kamelya Hanım was found dead in her home on Taksim Street in 1896, the news made headlines with sensational details in the newspapers of the time.[1] The brutal murder of the victim, along with her mother, her dog, and the household servant, was described in minute detail. One of the first pieces of information shared with readers was that Kamelya Hanım belonged to the “class of women of questionable morals.” In its coverage, Servet-i Fünun, one of the most prominent magazines of the period, noted that the victim had a habit of “riding alone in an open carriage through the promenades, trying to display herself,” implying that her behavior, deviating from traditional moral norms, might have had something to do with the murder.[2] After a lengthy investigation and police inquiry, the case was ultimately closed with the claim that it had been a crime of passion.[3]

More than a century has passed since then. In January 2016, 19-year-old E.F.B. was raped and robbed while returning home at night on Istanbul’s Bağdat Avenue, a neighborhood known for its wealth, vibrant commercial life, and general reputation for safety.[4] Those who followed the news found the incident “horrific” and criticized it, but they could not stop themselves from asking, “What was she doing on the street at that hour of the night?” A poll even circulated on social media, questioning what a young woman might be doing on Bağdat Avenue at 3 a.m.[5] The mere fact that a woman was “on the street at that hour of night” was seen as a “sufficient” reason for her to be subjected to a man’s sexual violence. This is just one example among the thousands of femicides and acts of sexual violence that have occurred in recent years.
So what was it that made the attitudes toward the victims in these two separate incidents, a murder and a rape that took place in vastly different historical periods and social contexts, so strikingly similar?
Gendered Cities, Contested Nights!
In the wake of the Industrial Revolution, sweeping socio-economic and cultural transformations reshaped the world’s major cities. Population growth and mobility, rural-to-urban migration, new employment opportunities driven by industrialization, and advancements in transportation, communication, and infrastructure technologies all contributed to a rapidly shifting perception of time and space. These changes profoundly influenced the mental and social landscapes of the nineteenth century. The emerging “modern” city became a site of both encounter and confrontation, bringing together people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and genders ‒ all increasingly demanding new rights and better living conditions. While the urban environment offered new spaces of freedom for many, it also entrenched systems of exclusion and heightened the visibility of social inequalities. Cities opened avenues for women’s self-representation and, in some cases, liberation, yet urban life remained deeply shaped by gendered power structures and the male gaze, ultimately curbing women’s mobility.[6]
Political scientist and feminist activist Fatmagül Berktay argues that cities are spaces of the public sphere, but that women have historically been excluded from this urban realm, and even when they are allowed into the public space, they are subject to certain limitations. Nevertheless, referencing Hannah Arendt, Berktay describes the public sphere as a space where people become mutually visible to one another; not based on a hierarchical relationship where one is the “subject” who looks and the other is the “object” being looked at.[7] In this sense, she suggests that public spaces offer individuals the opportunity to compare themselves with others, recognize their uniqueness, and realize themselves. Following this perspective, and considering that women’s movements took root in cities, we might argue that urban networks of relationships did indeed offer women spaces of freedom. However, the city is also a site of power, where authority manifests and makes its discourse visible.
As Henri Lefebvre contends, space is never neutral. City is a space where hierarchical power dynamics are skillfully exercised and where, depending on shifting political concerns, masculine discourse continually works to constrain women’s experiences.[8] As consumption and leisure habits transformed throughout the nineteenth century, a new nightlife culture emerged: one that, unsurprisingly, bore the imprint of a male-dominated gaze.
Just as modern cities created spaces that brought out conflicting experiences for urban dwellers, so too did the night become a time when women’s desires, hopes, fears, and longings clashed with, or sometimes complemented, those of men, or when women’s freedoms were curtailed by the freedoms of men.[9] Judith Walkowitz, who focuses on the urban and criminal worlds of nineteenth-century England, argues that at night, two dominant representations of the city emerged: the city night as a “dangerous sexual labyrinth,” and the city night as a “fairyland of consumer pleasure.”[10] These representations reflected the tensions experienced by state authorities as they oscillated between preserving public morality and maintaining economic vitality. The first representation ‒ through newspapers, magazines, and police reports ‒ offered narratives of sexual violence and crime that effectively limited women’s visibility in public space. The second marketed an imaginary world of pleasure aimed at male consumers.[11] Globally, women who ventured into the streets at night were generally framed, both in relation to patriarchal perspectives, in two ways: either as “predatory” women who sought to ensnare men through temptations such as alcohol and gambling, or as “victim” women who were subjected to sexual assault and violence simply by stepping outside. In both cases, the justification that “the night is unsafe” effectively restricted women’s right to access and use urban space.[12] But by whom?
“Woman, street, and night! Like water, gunpowder, and fire: three irreconcilable elements!”
Istanbul, a port city where the flow of people, goods, and information was exceptionally rapid, was not immune to the transformations taking place in cities across the world. In the second half of the nineteenth century, European-style cafés, bars, restaurants, beer halls, and theaters in Istanbul drew in many people; these new venues opened the door to experiences previously unknown. Street lighting and developments in transportation technologies were among the factors that increased urban mobility. Infrastructure projects of this kind were accelerated to meet the needs of the growing population, ensure their safety, and maintain control over them.[13] These cultural, administrative, and infrastructural transformations opened up new spaces of freedom and employment for city dwellers, but at the same time, the growing visibility of women in urban life became a new source of concern for municipal authorities.
From the 1850s onward, Istanbul’s population began to rise due to postwar migrations. Women made up a significant portion of the urban poor within this population. While some of these women found work in the service sector, others began to take on roles coded as being outside accepted moral norms. As women increasingly occupied public space within the chaotic experience of modern life, tensions began to emerge, both among women from different social classes and between women of different ethnic backgrounds. Women’s public visibility and their unregulated sexual experiences rendered their bodies a target of administrative and legal control, as well as social anxiety and concern.[14] Although the changes in the city’s social topography offered new freedoms to its inhabitants, women became culturally and economically more “vulnerable.” The rapidly transforming physical and social landscape of the city gave rise to new male-dominated spaces, while women’s freedoms were increasingly constrained in relation to those of men.
In his memoir Üç Nesil Üç Hayat (Three Generations, Three Lives), Turkish writer and journalist Refik Halid Karay (1888–1965) famously remarked, “Woman, street, and night! Like water, gunpowder, and fire: three irreconcilable elements!” With this vivid metaphor, Karay underscored the deep cultural anxieties and social restrictions surrounding women’s presence in public spaces after dark in the late Ottoman period. His observation reflects a broader societal consensus in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the number of women who ventured into the streets at night was extremely low.[15]

Man: Mademoiselle, I can follow you to the ends of the world.
Woman: My house is not that far away!
Along with Karay, some other authors provided the hints of Istanbul nights in their writings. Ahmet Rasim (1865–1932), in his own memoirs, recounted that physical harassment such as pinching women on the streets was widespread. He noted that women responded to such assaults either by verbally confronting their attackers, beating them with umbrellas they carried, or using sharp pins hidden in their clothing to punish the harassers.[16] Reşat Ekrem Koçu (1905–1975), who meticulously documented urban life in late Ottoman Istanbul, also described the city’s streets as spaces where women were kidnapped, harassed, and subjected to male violence.[17]
Memoirs also reflect that as the city’s streets became more illuminated, the nights came alive, and the laughter of women began to fill public spaces.[18] While street lighting did offer women a greater sense of security and enabled freer movement in public, numerous efforts were made to restrict women’s presence on the streets at night. For instance, Article 18 of the 1865 Tramway Regulation stipulated that carriages designated for men would run until midnight, while those for women would stop operating at sunset.[19] Regulations also dictated how Muslim women were to dress when outside, even specifying the type of fabric their veils should be made from. In short, women were expected not to act or appear in ways considered “immodest” or contrary to “Islamic manners and official warnings”; those who did could be punished by the Ministry of Police.[20]
There were also rules requiring that women not go out after certain hours. Despite all these restrictions, Koçu noted that public promenades were places “where Istanbul women proudly displayed their beauty.” Still, whenever women went out for any reason, they were expected to be accompanied by male family members. Otherwise, a woman walking alone could easily be labeled “immoral.” Only elderly women were permitted to go out alone, as it was assumed that men would not “harm” them.[21]
Sadri Sema (1880–1964), another writer of the period, recalled in his memoirs about the early 1900s that women seen outside at night were often considered “immoral” or “sinners.” In response, he offered this advice to women: “Let’s say you’re going to fetch a doctor or a midwife. There’s no man at home. Then the woman should tuck a bundle under her arm as she goes out. That bundle would act as a shield, a kind of protection against the rabble. Vagabonds wouldn’t bother a woman carrying a bundle!”[22] As this example shows, even when a woman needed to leave the house, appearing as an elderly woman or a bundle-carrier was thought to shield her from assault by “riffraff.”
The regulations aimed at controlling women’s visibility in public spaces within certain moral norms coexisted with newspapers, magazines, and literary works that reflected the masculine discourse of the period. For instance, an illustration published in the journal Tiyatro in 1874 depicted a woman holding a glass of alcohol and playing cards, portraying these three “vices” as forces that ruin people’s lives.

In many novels, women appearing in public spaces unaccompanied by a male relative, a servant, or an elderly woman were portrayed either as prostitutes or as women readily available for sexual encounters. Literature scholar Hülya Yıldız provides examples of how male authors associated women with immoral behavior through their fictional characters. In Namık Kemal’s (1840–1888) İntibah (Rebirth, 1876), the “improper” woman Mahpeyker meets Ali Bey in Çamlıca Park, falls for him, and ultimately leads him to ruin. In Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s (1864–1944) Şık (Chic, 1883), Şöhret Bey encounters his mistress, the Levantine prostitute Madam Potiş, during a “Beyoğlu Night.” In Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem’s (1847–1914) Araba Sevdası (Carriage Affair, 1896), Bihruz Bey encounters the femme fatale Periveş Hanım in a carriage. According to Yıldız, these narratives use the presence of women in public spaces as a literary device to associate them with immoral occupations and behaviors.[23] Or, in crime fiction works such as Millî Cinâyât Koleksiyonu (Anthology of National Crimes, 1914) written by Vassaf Kadri and Süleyman Sudi, women appear not as victims but as criminal perpetrators.[24]
It is hardly surprising that the authors of these works, which constructed such negative images of women, were men. Their writings reflected and reinforced patriarchal anxieties about changing gender roles and the presence of women in public spaces. Similarly, contemporary newspaper reports described public venues, spaces with a diverse mix of Europeans, Levantines, Muslims, non-Muslims, women, and men, as newly emerging zones of social and moral corruption. These accounts portrayed the very visibility of women in public as a threat to the social order, associating it with moral decay and criminality. However, it is important to highlight that women writers of the period, as well as activists within the Ottoman women’s movement, actively challenged the narratives that victimized and criminalized women. They argued for women’s right to participate in public life, insisting on their agency, respectability, and capacity for citizenship in the face of discourses that sought to marginalize or exclude them.[25]

Briefly, the authorities of the late Ottoman Empire sought to control not only the co-presence of men and women, but also the mingling of people from different social and class backgrounds, fearing that such interactions would disrupt the political and social order.[26] This control was exerted both through administrative mechanisms such as the municipality and the police, and through writers and newspapers, agents who reproduced patriarchal/male-centered discourse and played a major role in transforming the public imagination. The streets of Istanbul were represented as “unsafe” for “virtuous” women, spaces that could at any moment render them victims of sexual or physical assault. This representation, shaped nearly a century ago, greatly facilitated the domination of the female body by patriarchal discourse, and continues to do so to this day.
“We’re not giving up the nights, the streets, or the squares!”
In a 2014 talk, Sibel Özbudun stated that male domination in cities divides women into two categories: day women and night women. Day women are considered “private”; mothers, sisters, wives, lovers, and thus belong to someone. Night women, on the other hand, are not private:
They cannot be someone’s sister, mother, wife, or lover. No one can truly know them or hold them in the palm of their hand. They may be included only in the shared domain of male interest and possession. Every man has a ‘right’ to them; trying to claim that right for oneself alone is ‘against the code’… They are always the target and object of a hostile, degrading lust.[27]
Because this perception remains deeply ingrained in Turkey, the physical violence, harassment, or sexual assault a woman experiences, especially at night, can still be legitimized under “various pretexts.” By setting boundaries around clothing and behavior, “modest woman” models are defined, and those who fall outside of these definitions are rendered vulnerable to any kind of attack. Laughing out loud, wearing leggings, wearing a strappy dress, being on the street late at night, asking a stranger for directions or the time… All these can be presented as justifications for male violence.
Across the world and in Turkey, feminist movements have sought to develop new policies to challenge the gendering of urban space and the public sphere. They have argued that the relationship between private and public spaces is deeply intertwined, and that patriarchal control is maintained not only at home but also in workplaces, schools, and streets, through restrictions imposed on how women can exist in these spaces.
Launched in Turkey in 2003, the March 8 Feminist Night Marches stand against patriarchy, sexism, discrimination, heterosexism, and male violence. With the slogan “We won’t give up the nights, the streets, or the squares!”, these marches have continued for years, defying all forms of repression and confronting the darkness with beams of light. These symbolic marches have asserted that using public spaces, day or night, without fear is a right, and that in the face of any assault or male violence, it is not the women who should be blamed.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ca2k8KZgzZM/?igsh=aWVkdTdsYmkxZTlz
Unfortunately, in Turkey, where male violence continues to rise daily, the current political regime shows little interest in creating safe public spaces. Rather than including women in decisions about the city, it aims to erase their visibility and produce male-free zones that allocate space to women only within state-defined boundaries: pink buses and taxis, women-only beaches, and the like.[28]
The male-dominated culture that excludes women from public spaces is not unique to the current political regime in Turkey. However, it is evident that in Turkey, this patriarchal discourse has been significantly reinforced by recent policies of war and militarism. Alev Özkazanç points out that one of the key dimensions of the increasingly authoritarian political regime following the Gezi Uprising is its gender regime. She notes that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) has distinctly intensified sexist, discriminatory, and homophobic processes, and attributes this, in part, to the growing struggle of women to claim their right to live.[29] This struggle has become ever more urgent as femicides continue to rise dramatically in Turkey, with women being murdered by men, often in contexts where they attempt to assert their autonomy or leave violent relationships. These killings have become a stark symbol of the lethal consequences of entrenched patriarchal violence, which the current regime has consistently failed to address and, at times, has even indirectly encouraged through its rhetoric and policies.


The political power, having shifted from Islamic conservatism to an openly fascistic form, continually reproduces new modes of male dominance while intensifying patriarchal violence ‒ not only against women but also targeting LGBTQ+ individuals, youth, and even animals. The AKP’s neoliberal and neo-conservative policies of urban and spatial transformation have significantly heightened surveillance and control over any form of dissent or criticism directed at government policies. As a result, the freedom to inhabit and navigate urban spaces has become increasingly restricted, with pressures extending beyond the nighttime into every aspect of daily life. The atmosphere of authoritarianism, reinforced by these urban policies, effectively constrains civic participation and undermines the plurality and heterogeneity of the public sphere.
Within this context, the declaration of 2025 as the “Family Year” must be read not as a neutral or supportive gesture toward social cohesion, but as an extension of a broader authoritarian project that deploys the notion of “family” as a regulatory ideal. By foregrounding the heteronormative, patriarchal family unit as the foundation of national morality and stability, the state intensifies its efforts to domesticate women, erase queer existence, and delegitimize youth dissent. While the initiative introduces economic incentives, such as birth allowances, marriage loans, transportation and tax discounts, and consumer subsidies, it instrumentalizes these supports to normalize a narrow, reproductive, and moralized conception of the family. Rather than addressing systemic gendered violence or deepening social justice, “Family Year” displaces structural inequalities by reframing them as individual or moral failings, while reinforcing a vision of society in which women’s roles are confined to caregiving, obedience, and biological reproduction. Through this framework, the family becomes not a site of care, but a site of discipline and exclusion, functioning as a political technology to naturalize gender hierarchies, marginalize non-normative identities, and extend state control over intimate life.
As feminist activist Cemre Baytok observes, “When women reject the gender roles imposed on them, there are no places for them to go.” There are no public facilities to take on care work, or where such facilities exist, they are often privatized; nor are there adequate shelters or state support systems to enable women to build lives free from male violence. Rather than investing in the creation of genuinely safe urban spaces and public environments, the political regime confines women to increasingly restricted spaces and stricter regulations, subjecting them to heightened social and spatial control and rendering their lives even more precarious.
***
We see how remarkably similar the discourses and policies regarding women’s visibility and mobility in urban spaces are, even across two very different historical contexts. These discourses and policies, which aim to exclude women from urban spaces and the public sphere, continue to persist by relying on traditional moral codes and the belief that the city can never be safe for women. Women who were once confined to the binary of “chaste” and “sinful” and prevented from going out onto the streets a century ago are now expected to live within the boundaries defined by patriarchy, justified by the claim that the city is extremely dangerous. Women who step outside these boundaries become targets of the political regime and masculine violence; crimes and acts of aggression against women become normalized and easily internalized. With neoliberal and neo-conservative spatial policies turning the city into a site of profit-making, urban life becomes unsafe for women not only at night but throughout their entire lives.
Notes
[1] “Le Assasinat de la Rue de Taxim” Le Moniteur Oriental, 12 May 1896, “Kamilya Faciası Yahud Taksim Sokağı Cinayet-i Müdhişesi,” Malumat, 2 Mayıs 1311 (14 May 1896), “Le crime de la rue Taksim” The Oriental Advertiser, 19 May 1896, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi Y.PRK.UM 34-119 28.Z.1313 (10 June 1896).
[2] “Maktul Kamelya,” Servet-i Fünun, no 270, 2 Mayıs 1312 (14 Mayıs 1896). For more information about this murder see Nurçin İleri, “Between the Real and the Imaginary: Late Ottoman Istanbul as a Crime Scene,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association, vol. 4, no. 1 (May 2017): 95–116.
[3] When these murders came to light, Berber Yanko, who was believed to be Kamelya Hanım’s lover, was among the first suspects and was questioned. After a long investigation, it was claimed that the household servant had killed Kamelya, her mother, and the dog, then committed suicide. There were also rumors that the palace was involved in the murders. According to the stories, Kamelya was the mistress of Nurettin Pasha, husband of Zekiye Sultan, daughter of Sultan Abdülhamid, and the exposure of the relationship between the Pasha and Kamelya allegedly led to these murders. See, “Triple Murder” The Oriental Advertiser, 11 May 1896.
[4] For the details of the news see, http://www.birgun.net/haber-detay/bagdat-caddesi-nde-universite-ogrencisine-tecavuz-eden-saldirgan-yakalandi-101805.html, access date: 25 June 2025.
[5] For the survey and reactions see http://onedio.com/haber/bagdat-caddesi-ndeki-tecavuz-hakkinda-sosyal-medyada-cirkin-anket-666337, access date: 25 June 2025.
[6] Carlo Salzani, “City as a Crime Scene: Walter Benjamin and the Traces of the Detective,” New German Critique 34, no.1 (2007): 165–187.
[7] Fatmagül Berktay ile Söyleşi: “Osmanlı-Türk Modernleşmesinin Özneleri, Simgeleri, Küskünleri: Kadınlar,” söyleşi: Ece Zerman, Toplumsal Tarih, no. 178 (2008): 38–44.
[8] Henry Lefevbre, Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1974), 341.
[9] Many urban historians and sociologists argue that the vast majority of sources they rely on for studies focused on cities and women were produced by men, and therefore most women’s stories are reflected through the male perspective. See Joachim Shlör, Nights in the Big City: Paris, Berlin, London 1840–1930 (London: Reaktion Books, 1991), 166.
[10] Judith Walkowitz, “Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London” Representations, no. 62 (Spring, 1998): 21.
[11] This imaginary world is depicted in great detail in the novels of Ahmed Midhat Efendi, Ahmet Rasim, and Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem. See Ahmed Mithat Efendi, Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi, İstanbul 1875, Henüz On Yedi Yaşında, İstanbul 1881, Karnaval, İstanbul 1881, Dürdane Hanım, İstanbul 1882, Müşahedat, İstanbul 1891; Ahmet Rasim, Fuhş-ı Atik, İstanbul 1922, Gecelerim, İstanbul 1899; Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem, Araba Sevdası, İstanbul 1898.
[12] Matthew Beaumont, Nightwalking: A Nocturnal History of London (London: Verso, 2015), 4.
[13] Nurçin İleri, “Nightlife and Temporal Order in fin de siécle Istanbul,” Etudes balkaniques 2 (2017): 295–325.
[14] The increase in efforts to control prostitution and the female body through municipal and health regulations toward the end of the nineteenth century is not coincidental. See Müge Özbek, “The Regulation of Prostitution in Beyoğlu [1875-1915].” Middle Eastern Studies 46, no. 4 (2010): 555–68 and Ebru Boyar and Kate Fleet, Ottoman Women in Public Space (Leiden: Brill, 2016.) For the control of male body see Seçil Yılmaz, “Threats to Public Order and Health: Mobile Men as Syphilis Vectors in Late Ottoman Medical Discourse and Practice,” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 13, no. 2 (2017): 222–243.
[15] Refik Halid Karay, Üç Nesil Üç Hayat, (İstanbul: İnkilap Kitapevi, 1996), 109.
[16] Ahmed Rasim, Dünkü İstanbul’da Hovardalık, 51.
[17] Reşat Ekrem Koçu, “Açık Saçık Gezme Yasağı,” in İstanbul Ansiklopedisi (İstanbul: İstanbul Yayınevi, 1946-1953), 202–04.
[18] Karay, Üç Nesil Üç Hayat, 112–115.
[19] See, Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri, İ.MMS 30-1265, 1865 and Avner Wishnitzer “Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul” Comparative Studies of South Asia Africa and the Middle East 37, no.2 (2017): 245–261.
[20] Koçu, “Açık Saçık Gezme Yasağı,” 202-4. According to Koçu, bans on dressing immodestly were intermittently enforced starting from the mid-eighteenth century. Even during periods when there were no curfews on going out at night, regulations were introduced that restricted women from being outside after a certain hour.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Sadri Sema, Eski İstanbul Hatıraları (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1991), 140.
[23] Hülya Yıldız, “Limits of the Imaginable in the Early Turkish Novel: Non-Muslim Prostitutes and Their Ottoman Muslim Clients,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 54, no. 4, (2012): 556.
[24] Gülhan Balsoy, “Crime, Gender, Sexuality: Female Villains in Late Ottoman Crime Fiction,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 54, no .1 (2022): 141–148.
[25] Ebru Aykut, “Kısa Ömürlere Derkenar: Öfkemiz Daim Olsun,” Duvar, sayı 23 (2015): 45–48. See also Başak Deniz Özdoğan, “In the Beginning Was “A Woman”: Motivation, Agency, and the Will of Fatma Aliye,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 6, no. 2 (2019): 55–72.
[26] It was a common belief that the heterogeneous population constantly interacting with one another in the city, and the different alliances of ideas this composition would produce, would encourage chaos and rebellion and thus posed a threat to the ruling power. See İlkay Yılmaz, Serseri, Anarşist ve Fesadın Peşinde: II. Abdülhamid Dönemi Güvenlik Politikaları Ekseninde Mürur Tezkereleri, Pasaportlar ve Otel Kayıtları. İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2014.
[27] Sibel Özbudun, “Kent-Doğa Direniş ve Kadın” oturumu, “Kadın Katliamlarına, Erkek Şiddetine, Gericiliğe Karşı; Karanlığı Yırtmak ve Yaşamı Savunmak İçin ‘Yaşam Nöbeti’ndeyiz!” etkinliği, Ankara, 24 Kasım 2014.
[28] Sakine Günel, “Mahrem Mekan Kimin Rahatı İçin?,” Dosya: “Aile, AVM ve AKP Kıskacında Kadınlar,” Feminist Politika, sayı 24 (2014): 24–25.
[29] Alev Özkazanç, “Türkiye’deki Son Süreç ve Cinsiyetçi Politikaları Üzerine Alev Özkazanç ile Söyleşi,” Kültür ve Siyasette Feminist Yaklaşımlar, sayı 28 (2016): 21.
About the Author
Nurçin Ileri received her PhD from the Department of History at Binghamton University in 2015. Her dissertation, A Nocturnal History of fin de siècle Istanbul, casts light on the social and material geographies of night that went beyond the dichotomies of the ‘city of glittering leisure and consumption’ or the ‘city of indigence and vice.’ Her dissertation research has led to several publications in peer-reviewed journals including Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Journal of the Ottomanand Turkish Studies Association, Etudes balkaniques, and New Perspectives on Turkey. After teaching and working at Boğaziçi and Işık Universities (2012–2018), she spent one year as a post-doctoral scholar in the Department of History at the Université Grenoble Alpes (2018–2019) and six months as a visiting researcher at the Center of Metropolitan Studies of Technische Universität Berlin (2019–2020). Between 2020–2023, she was a EUME Fellow associated with the IGK Work and Human Life Cycle in Global History (re:work) of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. With the financial support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, she continues to be a an affiliated EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin and visiting researcher at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam.
Citation: Nurçin Ileri, Women, Visibility, and Politics of Night from Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 31.07.2025, https://trafo.hypotheses.org/60490
OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Forum Transregionale Studien (July 31, 2025). Women, Visibility, and Politics of Night from Ottoman Empire to Contemporary Turkey. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved January 18, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/14g8i


