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Scholarship on the Armenian Genocide as a gendered event and process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 December 2015

Lerna Ekmekçioğlu*
Affiliation:
Department of HistoryMassachusetts Institute of Technology

Abstract

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Type
Debate
Copyright
© New Perspectives on Turkey and Cambridge University Press 2015 

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References

1 Akçam, Taner, “Zorla Assimilasyon Konusu Niçin İhmal Edildi?” in Ermenilerin Zorla Müslümanlaştırılması (Istanbul: İletişim, 2014), 78Google Scholar. It should be noted, however, that the surviving generation and their children did pay attention to the study of the Armenian orphans and produced a number of books about the topic in Armenian. For example: Kranian, Hramyag, “Hay Vorputiune,” in Kersam Aharonian ed., Hushamadean Medz Yegherni, 1915-1965, 3rd ed. (Beirut: Zartonk Oratert, 1987), 926-952Google Scholar; Libarid Azadian, Hay Vorpere Medz Yeghnerni (Glendale, CA: L. Azadian, 1995).

2 Sanasarian, Eliz, “Gender Distinction in the Genocidal Process: A Preliminary Study of the Armenian Case,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 4, 4 (1989): 449461CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Kaprielian-Churchill, IsabelArmenian Refugee Women: The Picture Brides 1920–1930,” Journal of American Ethnic History 12, 3 (1993): 329Google Scholar; Miller, Donald E. and Miller, Lorna Touryan, “The Experience of Women and Children,” in Survivors: An Oral History of the Armenian Genocide (California: University of California Press, 1999) 94-117Google Scholar; Sarafian, Ara, “The Absorption of Armenian Women and Children into Muslim Households as a Structural Component of the Armenian Genocide,” in In God’s Name: Genocide and Religion in the Twentieth Century, eds. Omer Bartov and Phyllis Mack (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 209221Google Scholar; Dadrian, Vahakn, “Children as Victims of Genocide: The Armenian Case,” Journal of Genocide Research 5 (2003): 421438CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Derderian, Katharine, “Common Fate, Different Experience: Gender-Specific Aspects of the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1917,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies 19, 1 (May 2005): 125CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Tachjian, Vahé and Kévorkian, Raymond, “Reconstructing the Nation with Women and Children Kidnapped during the Genocide,” Ararat 45, no. 185 (2006): 4-16Google Scholar; Tachjian, Vaheé, “Recovering Women and Children Enslaved by Palestinian Bedouins,” in Raymond Keévorkian and Vaheé Tachjian, eds., The Armenian General Benevolent Union, One Hundred Years of History (Cairo: AGBU, 2006)Google Scholar; Peroomian, Rubina, “Women and the Armenian Genocide: The Victim, the Living Martyr,” in Samuel Totten ed. Plight and Fate of Women During and Following Genocide (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2009), 7-24Google Scholar; Bjørnlund, Matthias, “‘A Fate Worse than Dying:’ Sexual Violence during the Armenian Genocide,” in Dagmar Herzog, ed., Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1658CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Ekmekçioğlu, Lerna and Bilal, Melissa, ed.s, Bir Adalet Feryadı: Osmanlı'dan Türkiye’ye Beş Ermeni Feminist Yazar, 1862-1933, ed. (İstanbul: Aras Yayıncılık, 2006)Google Scholar.

5 See Göçek, Fatma Müge, The Transformation of Turkey, Redefining State and Society from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 185-210Google Scholar. It should be added that owned by Turkish human rights activists, Belge Publishing House (established in 1977), especially their Mare Nostrum series, was also influential in this process.

6 Çetin, Fethiye, Anneannem (Istanbul: Metis, 2004)Google Scholar. It is indicative of the intellectual climate of the time that in 2003 Yeşim Ustaoğlu produced her much-acclaimed film Bulutları Beklerken (Waiting for the Clouds) which was about a young Greek girl who had been forcibly Islamized and had to live with her secret background for fifty years.

7 The first one was Can, Serdar, Nenemin Masalları (İstanbul: Umut, 1991)Google Scholar.

8 Çetin, Fethiye and Altınay, Ayşe Gül, eds, Torunlar (Istanbul: Metis, 2009)Google Scholar.

9 Özgül, Ceren, “Legally Armenian: Tolerance, Conversion, and Name Change in Turkish CourtsComparative Studies in Society and History 56, no. 3 (2014), 622-649CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10 Ritter, Laurence and Sivaslıan, Max, Kılıç Artıkları: Türkiye’nin Gizli ve Müslümanlaştırılmış Ermenileri (Istanbul: Hrant Dink Vakfı Yayınları, 2013)Google Scholar.

11 Peroomian, Rubina, “A Secret Rather Buried,” in And Those Who Continued Living in Turkey after 1915, the Metamorphosis of the Post-Genocide Armenian Identity as Reflected in Artistic Literature (Yerevan: Armenian Genocide Museum-Institute, 2008), 85-108Google Scholar; Adak, Hülya, “Gendering Denial Narratives of The Decade of Terror (1975-1985): The Case of Samiha Ayverdi/Neşide Kerem Demir and Hatun Sebilciyan/Sabiha Gökçen,” Journal of Genocide Research, 17, 3 (2015) 327343CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12 Baş, Berke, Hush!, 2009Google Scholar; Akkaya, Devrim, Diyar, 2013Google Scholar.

13 Tachjian, Vaheé, “Gender, Nationalism, Exclusion: The Reintegration Process of Female Survivors of the Armenian Genocide,” Nations and Nationalism 15, 1 (2009): 6080CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Watenpaugh, Keith David, “The League of Nations’ Rescue of Armenian Genocide Survivors and the Making of Modern Humanitarianism, 1920–1927,” American Historical Review 115, 5 (2010): 13151339CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Ekmekcioglu, Lerna, “A Climate for Abduction, A Climate for Redemption: The Politics of Inclusion during and after the Armenian Genocide.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55, no. 3 (2013): 522553CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kurt, Ümit “1915 Kıyımları: Zabel Yeseyan'ın Raporu”, Toplumsal Tarih, Sayı: 250, Ekim 2014, s. 84-87Google Scholar.

14 Kaprielian-Churchill, Isabel, Sisters of Mercy and Survival: Armenian Nurses, 1900-1930 (Antelias, Beirut: Armenian Catholicosate of Cilicia, 2012)Google Scholar.

15 Rowe, Victoria, “Armenian Women Refugees at the End of Empire: Strategies of Survival,” in Panikos Panayi and Pipa Virdee, eds., Refugees and the End of Empire: Imperial Collapse and Forced Migration in the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 152-174CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Okkenhaug, Inger Marie, “Religion, Relief and Humanitarian Work Among Armenian Women Refugees in Mandatory Syria, 1927–1934,” Scandinavian Journal of History (2015): 1-23Google Scholar.

16 Üngör, Uğur Ümit, “Orphans, Converts, and Prostitutes: Social Consequences of War and Persecution in the Ottoman Empire, 1914–1923,” War in History 19, 2 (2012): 173192CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Akçam, Taner, “Assimilation: The Conversion and Forced Marriage of Christian Children, in The Young Turks’ Crime against Humanity: The Armenian Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 287339Google Scholar; Akçam, Taner, Ermenilerin Zorla Müslümanlaştırılması (Istanbul: İletişim, 2014)Google Scholar.

17 For example, Osmanlı Belgelerinde Ermeniler, 1915–1920 (Ankara: T. C. Başbakanlık Devlet Arşivleri Genel Müdürlüğü Osmanlı Arşivi Daire Başkanlığı, 1994).

18 This is exactly the position of the author in this book: Atnur, İbrahim Ethem, Türkiye’de Ermeni Kadınları ve Çocukları Meselesi, 1915–1923 (Ankara: Babil, 2005)Google Scholar.

19 In December 1948 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Article II defines the genocide as “the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. See https://treaties.un.org/doc/Publication/UNTS/Volume%2078/volume-78-I-1021-English.pdf