Modern Girls Don’t Just Want to Have Fun: Desire in Turkish and Japanese Women’s Writing

Abstract

The figure of the Modern Girl first emerged in Euro-American contexts during the 1910s, associated with fashion, consumer culture, and urban lifestyle. In Japan and Turkey, Modern Girls began to appear in the 1920s, and embodied new forms of femininity marked by public visibility, increased economic independence and sexual autonomy. Yet in both cultures, Modern Girls were often portrayed in cartoons, magazines and male-authored texts as a provocative, morally ambiguous figure—reduced to consumers or objects of desire. In contrast to these reductive portrayals, women writers offered more complex representations that centred not on how Modern Girls were perceived, but on how they saw, felt, and expressed themselves. In this paper, I explore how Japanese authors Osaki Midori (1896–1971), and Nomizo Naoko (1897–1987), as well as Turkish authors Suat Derviş (1901–1972), and Nezihe Muhiddin (1889–1958) portray Modern Girls’ desires. In the selected texts, the desire to create emerges as a shared drive among Modern Girl characters. A comparison of these texts reveals how Modern Girls’ desire to create was shaped differently by the gendered expectations, patriarchal norms, and national anxieties specific to Turkish and Japanese contexts. Ultimately, I argue that exploring desire in women’s writing allows us to rethink Modern Girls not as stereotypes found in male-dominated representations, but as complex subjects beyond restrictive narratives.

About the presenter

Aslı Kaynar is a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland. Her project explores representations of Modern Girls in early 20th-century Turkish and Japanese women’s writing through a feminist poststructuralist lens. She also works as a freelance editor and literary translator. Her Turkish translations include three books from the Anne of Green Gables series by L. M. Montgomery and Onnamen by the Japanese author Enchi Fumiko.