Out of Politics into the Culture: Mediatizations of Neo-Ottomanism and Gendered Nostalgia in Turkey

Neo-Ottomanism as a political ideology has been a major component of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey, particularly since 2007. It is based on the aim to revitalize the glory of the Ottoman Empire in contemporary Turkey with a nationalist and Islamic reinterpretation of history, which is also predominantly patriarchal. Cultural reflections of the ideology have also been widely seen in daily life, popular culture, and media, primarily in TV series and Islamist news media, newspapers, and magazines. Selecting two media fields, TV series and Islamist women’s magazines, this paper discusses the mediatization processes of neo-Ottomanism and its gendered meanings through various representations of history. In addition to presenting their different approaches, the paper examines how these representations are in dialogue with one another and creatively translate, re-interpret, aestheticise or challenge the political messages of neo-Ottomanism for their audience. After discussing the gendered nostalgia in popular Turkish history dramas, the paper focuses on how this ideology is reproduced in three different Islamist women’s magazines with an aim to understand and emphasize the creative agencies of the women editors and authors of the publications in reproducing, aestheticizing, and popularizing neo-Ottomanism. The first set of data about the magazines is obtained from the archive research covering the period 2011-2021. The contents about Ottoman history, culture, and heritage are selected and visually and textually analysed. The second set is composed of interviews with the authors and the editors of the publications about the production process and the dominant themes. This wide range of data shows that references to Ottoman history aim to create a public memory and restorative nostalgia about the pre-Republican past, present Ottoman sultans as role modes, guide the audience in forming identities based on traditional gender roles, and ultimately make a nationalist-Islamist ideology a central part of culture and daily life. This dynamic and creative process also shows that neo-Ottomanism is not a top-down political ideology but a two-way flow of meanings and imageries between the political and cultural spheres.