Identity: Sema Kaygusuz

“In the last 10 years, I believe women’s minds have remained completely free of male-dominated language norms; I think this is a great strength. I am sure that this language - which teaches a new vocabulary to the mainstream media, the male-dominated political landscape, the academia, and to the public - will soon be described as a feminist leap forward. Powerful concepts, minor thinking methods against major cultural norms, began to be rapidly renewed. For example, many women know and use the concept of mansplaining today. In other words, the women's movement went beyond being a political, organised volunteer activity undertaken by certain groups, and got in touch with individuals and their everyday life. It is no longer easy to predict where and how the women's movement will manifest itself. Every power construct, big and small, from domestic affairs to the public, the governance and the judiciary, will soon become a subject of women’s language big time. Culture has a lot to suffer from us."

Writer Sema Kaygusuz, who has been awarded many national and international prizes for her innovative and experimental body-of-work, is among the universal representatives of contemporary literature thanks to her skilfully constructed literary language. Kaygusuz’s work focuses on nature and humanity, with situations that unsettle and encourage the reader to question. The stories of lonely women come to the forefront in Kaygusuz’s works; these women who fight for their choices and try to resist life, somehow pay the price of freedom.

The writer, in her article for the Libération Newspaper’s series on “Being a woman in a Muslim country”, has remarked that the question of being a woman in a Muslim country indicates a deep-rooted Islamophobia as she emphasizes the anti-secular, discriminatory and orientalist nature of this question. The book "Gaflet-Modern Türkçe Edebiyatın Cinsiyetçi Sinir Uçları" (Hamartia – The Nerve-endings of Modern Turkish Literature), 2019, compiled by Sema Kaygusuz and Deniz Gündoğan İbrişim, discusses how sexist discourse is produced by literature. Kaygusuz has remarked that a feminist reading decodes the masculine tools of domination which infiltrate and sneak into texts, and that in the future no book would be read neglecting feminism, and that it would be incomplete if done so.