Transgressing Violence: The Rupture of Gender and Community in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul

Violence plays a pivotal role in the formation of new nations that often result in the annihilation of minorities. While it’s a weapon symbolising power over the minority community in the public sphere, it acts as an assertion of patriarchy in the private sphere. This paper investigates violence inflicted upon women in Elif Shafak’s The Bastard of Istanbul (2006) within the context of the Armenian genocide. By foregrounding this study on Veena Das’s (1995) understanding of women’s bodies as national territory, it explores how gender exploitation mirrors the violation of minority communities at the macroscopic level. Das opines that violence on women’s bodies is reflective of violence on a collective group within the context of political upheaval. This paper articulates dominance as an outcome of anxiety that stems from being overpowered, whether by women or by cultural minorities, which is exposed in the form of domestic violence and cultural friction, respectively. It analyses the concealment of domestic violence within the parameters of a family to the suppression of the Armenian genocide in modern Turkey. Finally, it underlines how the power narrative silences the ritualistic subjugation of gender and race. This study examines the idea of nationalism on the palimpsest of patriarchy and demonstrates gender-based violence through the lens of literature.

Keywords: Violence, gender, intersectionality, patriarchy, community.