An Evaluation of Tahsin Yücel’s Kumru ile Kumru in the Context of Domestic Labor and Invisible Work

Abstract

This study focuses on the boundaries and domains of the hegemonic relationship that the female subject establishes with her peers, outside the male/female hierarchy. This focus is carried out within the framework of feminist theory, specifically through social gender codes. The study is the result of an effort to explain sociological codes through the concepts of home, family, and woman, taking a feminist perspective into account. Based on Tahsin Yücel’s work Kumru ile Kumru, social statuses and constructions of environment are examined in the context of subject, power, and identity. The reasons that determine the relationships between Kumru, who works as a cleaning worker, and the middle-class women whose houses she cleans, and that reveal their differences, are addressed through the relationships presented in the novel. Constructions of femininity, while forming the male/female dichotomy, define themselves through the Other and produce discursive practices. Therefore, the emerging difference points to centers of power. Power is transformed into new discursive practices according to the positioning of the environment. The invisibility of domestic labor and products of manual labor is concealed within the power constructions of these practices. In conclusion, based on the character of Kumru in the novel, centers of power and Kumru’s process of existence and self-realization are evaluated. Kumru’s inability to overcome power discourses and to make sense of her situation, while moving along the boundaries of the working class and the middle class, is addressed throughout the novel. The hierarchical relations that constitute these boundaries are examined.