Ideal Family, Citizenship, and Hygiene: Representations of Electric Household Appliances in Early Republican Turkey
By Nurçin İleri. Early Republican discourse on hygiene-focused modernization in Turkey intersected with the visual and rhetorical representations of electric household appliances. Those appliances functioned less as everyday tools than as material and symbolic markers of an imagined modernity. Rather than reflecting local realities, they projected a normative vision of the future and of women’s roles in society and the household. While these technologies ostensibly eased women’s labor, they simultaneously disciplined it, making women both carriers and regulated figures of modernity.


