WCOLW · Women's Criminality in the Ottoman Literary World (1860-1922)

This project sketches a broader framework for the characterization of women offenders, expression of women crime committing, and their involvement as both victims and offenders in criminal cases not only in fictional narrations of Ottoman literature but also in real cases that made news in the Ottoman press. I will critically address male-centric discoursing, repetitive imputations, stereotypical and cliché wordy choices, and reiterative vocabulary for the identification of female criminals by examining Ottoman newspapers, magazines, journals, and books from the late Tanzimat period (the 1860s) up to the demise of the Empire (1922). This work will mainly utilize feminist criminal approaches that follow iconoclastic ways to stand up against the systematic underestimation and negligence of androcentric crime theories and their effects on historical narratives. These all restrict women’s participation and involvement in criminal cases and identify female perpetrators without their criminal agency. As a part of this understanding, their voices as wrongdoers were mostly silenced in the Ottoman press and literary works. In this regard, this study will especially dwell on women offenders who committed offenses contrary to their vulnerable, fragile, and sensitive stereotypical features, all too frequently used as the reasons for the incapability of women to commit serious crimes. Succinctly, the major goals of this project are to analyze the perspective, vocabulary, wording, and conceptualization by the Ottoman press and intellectual productions in the narrations of women’s delinquency and the identification of criminal women’s agency through literary criticism and to raise the voices of Ottoman criminal women in real and fictional crime stories in the light of feminist criminal theory.