From mystical to morbid love : the emergence of sexual science and gender ideology in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic

Abstract

This paper investigates the construction of Ottoman/Turkish sexual scientific knowledge and gender norms in the early twentieth century. It traces the shifting definitions of love and explores how its mystical meaning was displaced to allow for the production of a new body of statements that would constitute the modern discourse of sexuality and gendered identity. By focusing on cross-cultural entanglements between European and Ottoman-Islamicate traditions, it shows how the established ideas about love, mysticism, and morality were amalgamated with the imported sexological apparatus not in a totalizing but, instead, in an eclectic and relatively unsystematic fashion. It draws on evidence from the works produced by the founders of neurology and psychiatry in Turkey, namely Mazhar Osman, Nazım Şakir, and Fahrettin Kerim, as well as other texts on love and sexual pathology. It concludes that in these works love retains its ontological foundation as a unifying and harmonizing source, but within a changing social and cultural context that promulgates a strict gender division and heteronormative behavior. As such, love represents an impossible ideal degenerated into lower passions, perverse desires, and hence morbidity. Ultimately, love finds for itself a place as a sacred bond between husband and wife within the nationalist narrative, cementing the notion that it is only possible within the boundaries of companionate marriage.