EUME
2023/ 2024

Gülhan Balsoy

Late Ottoman Politics of Family, Gender, and the Making of Familial Citizenship

Previous Fellowships: 2010/ 2011

Gülhan Balsoy is a professor of history at Istanbul Bilgi University. She received her PhD from the Department of History at Binghamton University in 2009. Her dissertation was published as The Politics of Reproduction in Ottoman Society, 1838–1900 (Routledge, 2013). The Turkish translation of this book, Kahraman Doktor İhtiyar Acuzeye Karşı: Geç Osmanlı Doğum Politikaları Doğum (Can Yayınları, 2015) has won the 2016 Yunus Nadi Social Sciences and Research Award. She participated in the “(Over)medicalization of Childbirth as a Public Problem” project funded by Agence Nationale de la Recherche. Her works have been published in journals, including the International Review of Social History, Middle Eastern Studies, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies. Her research interests focus on the history of women, gender and sexuality, social history, and the history of medicine in the late Ottoman context. She is working on a book project where she searches for the links between gender and poverty in late nineteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul. She is also co-directing a project on the history of death and mortality in early nineteenth-century Istanbul. Gülhan was a EUME Fellow in 2010/11, and returns as an affiliated EUME Fellow in 2023/24.

2023/ 2024

Late Ottoman Politics of Family, Gender, and the Making of Familial Citizenship

My research aims to provide an account that explores the politics of family through a gendered perspective and with the purpose of shedding light on the question of the process of the making of citizenship in the late Ottoman context. Throughout the nineteenth century, the nature of the Ottoman state and tools of governmentality underwent major transformations giving way to a redefinition of state-subject relationships. In this process, the family was redesigned as the model of the modern state through legal, administrative, and medical technologies and discourses. However, what makes the Ottoman case interesting is the very crisis families faced in this period. At the very same time, the family was being idealized as one of the most important social institutions; political turmoil, economic disintegration, and environmental disasters triggered a massive family crisis. In this research, I will search the two-way processes where the legal, administrative, and medical policies refashioned the family and constructed an ideology of familial citizenship and where the actual family crisis shaped this ideology in return. Pulling the threads of these intertwined processes, this research will discuss late Ottoman politics of family and the making of the familial citizen.

2010/ 2011

Gender and the Politics of Female Body: Midwifery, Abortion, and Pregnancy in Ottoman Society (1838–1890s)

During her stay in Berlin she will be working on a book based on her dissertation about the gendered aspects of the population policies and politics of female body in the late Ottoman Empire. She will also conduct her research on a new project that examines the medical institutions for women in the Ottoman society.


All fellows

Publications

Events