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Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History by Didem Havlioğlu

2019; University of Tulsa; Volume: 38; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tsw.2019.0032

1936-1645

Michael D. Sheridan,

Turkish Literature and Culture

Reviewed by: Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History by Didem Havlioğlu Michael D. Sheridan MIHRÎ HATUN: PERFORMANCE, GENDER-BENDING, AND SUBVERSION IN OTTOMAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, by Didem Havlioğlu. Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2017. 256 pp. $55.00 cloth. Didem Havlioğlu’s Mihrî Hatun: Performance, Gender-Bending, and Subversion in Ottoman Intellectual History argues that the late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Ottoman woman poet Mihrî Hatun (hatun being a title meaning “lady”) capitalized both on her sociocultural advantages as a member of an elite family and on “glitches and gaps” in the male-centered discourse of Islamicate love poetry to carve out a space for herself and her work and challenge the hegemony of that discourse (p. 100). Drawing on an array of primary and secondary sources, most notably Ottoman tezkires (biographical encyclopedias of poets) and Judith Butler’s conception of gender as performance, Havlioğlu’s excellent study solidly contextualizes Mihrî and her work while also shedding new light on how gender (of both the poet and the poetic persona) shaped early modern Ottoman poetic discourse. Havlioğlu’s argument focuses on two areas: the sociocultural environment in which Mihrî worked and the discursive and aesthetic tradition within and from which she produced her texts. As Havlioğlu states, we know little of Mihrî’s life. She came from a prominent family in Amasya—a relatively small town in northern Anatolia with an outsized influence because Ottoman şehzades (crown princes) served as governors there—and she likely received a good education both at home and in prominent Sufi circles (pp. 79–84). Most of our information on Mihrî comes from the tezkires, especially those by Latîfî and Âşık Çelebi, who wrote two generations after Mihrî. Havlioğlu devotes almost the entirety of the first chapter, “A Lucky Star Is Born,” to their discussions of Mihrî. As the book’s introduction outlines, women poets were by no means unheard of in the Ottoman context, but neither were they common. Both Latîfî and Âşık Çelebi adopted a strongly gender-inflected discourse to address “the uniqueness of [Mihrî’s] situation” and “the complexities of including a woman in a male-dominated space such as poetry” (p. 49). In this, Havlioğlu argues, one of their primary concerns was championing her presence on the poetic scene while also defending her against possible accusations of immorality by asserting that “she came to this world a maiden and left it as a maiden” (qtd. p. 50). The highly erotic charge of Ottoman love poetry necessitated this approach. The figure of the [End Page 443] beloved in this poetry was, while somewhat androgynous and idealized in a neoplatonic manner, generally conceived of as a young boy. Thus, Mihrî’s use of this discourse in her poetry, coupled with her likely presence in mecâlis (salons or gatherings) where poetry was performed, was disruptive and potentially scandalous; she was a woman in a male-dominated space and discourse, writing and reciting eroticized lyrics that described the characteristics of male beloveds. Part of the biographers’ strategy for both retroactively and proactively defusing this tension, Havlioğlu asserts, was to “attribute manlike or masculine qualities to her” since poetry in the Islamicate tradition—whether lyric, panegyric, or satiric in nature—had always been closely associated with masculinity (p. 43). Havlioğlu’s reading of the biographers’ discussions of Mihrî, as well as her analysis in the second chapter, “Meclis as a Space of Artistic Production,” largely follows the previous scholarship in the field. Yet with her subsequent readings of Mihrî’s poetry, the author ventures into novel and intriguing territory. She bases her analyses not only on the biographers’ attributions of masculinity to Mihrî, but Mihrî’s own claims to the supposed masculine qualities of a poet—“reason, courage, spirituality, and the ability to control one’s desires”—even while openly identifying as a woman in her work (p. 127). In this way, Havlioğlu argues, “she deconstructed the binary gender construction of the Ottoman poetic discourse and redefined the genders through poetry” (p. 127). In her readings of...