Manifestations of gendercidal trauma in the short stories of Kirkor Ceyhan

Official URL: http://192.168.1.20/record=b1266202 (Table of Contents)

Gendercide is a term that refers to genderization of terror in war and the gender-selective strategies adopted by the perpetrators to liquidate the victims. The turbulent years of 1915 in the Ottoman Empire also had sex-specific implementations against the Armenians. The gendercidal strategies adopted by the Ottoman Empire against the Armenians can be characterized by the re-selection, dislocation, conscription and extermination of Armenian men at first hand and the concomitant isolation, concentration and Islamization of Armenian women. Therefore, I focused on how literature conveys gendercidal trauma and how trauma challenges representation. In doing so, I adopted psychoanalytic concepts such as impossibility of language, loss, mourning and working through to historical analysis in the short stories of Kirkor Ceyhan. Whilst scrutinizing the manifestations of gendercidal trauma in Armenian-Turkish literature I analyzed the short stories of Armenian author Kirkor Ceyhan since he has a uniqe stance in Turkey as an author who has delineated the gendercidal trauma pertinent to 1915 in his short stories. Ceyhan takes a different attitude from his late 19th and early 20th century Armenian-Turkish male counterparts such as Migirdic Margosyan, Agop Arslanyan, Hagop Mintzuri, Hamasdeg, Zaven Biberyan and Vahan Totovents by delineating the gendercidal trauma related to the Catastrophe and breaking the silence in his short stories. Thus, his narrative focuses on conscription, Islamization and circumcision of Armenian men and the sexual exploitation, Islamization and absorption into Muslim households of Armenian women.