Screen Media Research Centre, Brunel University
Research Seminar
A Coup de Genre: The Trials and Tribulations of Bülent Ersoy
Alisa Lebow (Brunel University) and Baºak Ertür (Birkbeck College)
Wednesday 28 March, 5pm, GB117, Gaskell Building. All welcome.
One of Turkey’s best known singers, Bülent Ersoy, was at the height of her career when she had gender reassignment surgery in 1981. She had risen to fame against a backdrop of political unrest in the late 1970s, and her very public gender transition coincided with the most repressive period in the republic’s history, namely the military regime established by the September 1980 coup d’état. Despite the tempestuous climate, news of her clothes, jewellery, make-up, bikini, and hormone induced breasts made it to the front page of mainstream papers almost weekly. In April 1981, during the very week of her gender reassignment surgery, a film featuring Bülent Ersoy and her gender troubles went on general release. This wild genre-bender of a film, The End of Fame (ªöhretin Sonu, Orhan Aksoy) is a nearly lost camp gem of Turkish cinema.
The finale of the film is a trial scene, with Bülent standing before a judge, ostensibly for causing an affray, but more convincingly in terms of the film’s topsy-turvy narrative, for transgressing the laws of gender. A supposedly male Bülent expresses his/her regrets and promises the judge that from now on s/he will behave. Ersoy could not have known that this trial scene would serve as a sort of pre-enactment, to be endlessly repeated in real life in the years to come. Indeed, soon after her operation, she was banned from performing publicly, under a decree that prohibited “homosexuals” from performing in bars, clubs and similar public venues. Thus began her two intertwined legal battles: one for recognition as a woman, and the other for the lifting of her stage ban, both granted to her after seven years of trials and tribulations.
Our presentation interweaves an analysis of The End of Fame with Bülent Ersoy’s real life trials, to explore the challenges posed by the star’s public persona, not only to genre and narrative, but to the law itself, allowing a unique perspective on the fitful logics and legal hysterics of the Turkish September 12, 1980 coup d’état.
Directions to Brunel and campus maps can be found at: http://www.brunel.ac.uk/about/campus/directions
For more details, please contact:
Geoff King
Professor of Film Studies
Director, Screen Media Research Centre
School of Arts
Brunel University
gkindiefilm.com, a website dedicated to the study of American indie film
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