This thesis analyses complex and contradictory discursive articulations of gender, modernisation, and nationalism, focusing on the case of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century. Coming from an understanding of the ‘archival turn’, it engages with the concept of ‘feminist genealogy’ and investigates subjectivities, negotiations, and normativities in the discourses of urban Muslim Ottoman women. The thesis examines the first 100 issues of the women-only magazine, Kadınlar Dünyası (Women’s World), published in Istanbul in 1913. This magazine is well-known in the feminist literature on Ottoman women’s movements, most of which has been written from a ‘herstory perspective’. This thesis builds on a poststructuralist feminist methodology, making the argument that analysing the constructions of subjectivities by negotiating normativities opens a space to further question discourses, rather than pre-given subjects.

With this aim in mind, this thesis unpacks the discourses on ‘Europe’ developed by the Kadınlar Dünyası writers through Meltem Ahıska’s concept of Occidentalism. By investigating the complex and contradictory ways in which KD writers used ‘Europe’ to support demands for Ottoman Muslim women’s engagement with modernisation, it analyses the construction of binaries between the categories of ‘Orient’ and ‘Occident’. The thesis suggests these binaries both challenge and reproduce normative binaries regarding femininities and masculinities. This research positions demands for women’s engagement with modernisation as a negotiation of changes and continuities. It analyses these negotiations by focusing on sexual normativities and productions of subjectivities in relation to ‘Other’ categories such as ‘rural Muslim’ Ottoman women and ‘non-Muslim’ Ottoman women. The negotiations included strategic usages of certain normative positions, such as motherhood, which are conceptualised with their affective constructions. This thesis also develops the concept of a ‘mood of commitment’, inspired by Sara Ahmed’s conceptualisation of ‘mood’, to explain the affective ‘atmosphere’ of the modernisation discourses during the late Ottoman Empire period.