The Shadow of the Subaltern in the City: Zerre

Abstract

Starting in 2000, New Turkish Cinema has given room to different representations in relation to gender, class, identity and spaces, parallel to the era's social heterogeneity. The image of the subaltern is one of the most recurring representations in these narratives. In this context, this study aims to analyze the ways in which New Turkish Cinema represents the subaltern's daily life practices, problems, contradictions, relations of oppression and subordination, and if there is any, modes of resistances. The analysis will focus on the film, Zerre (Erdem Tepegoz, 2012), and its protagonist Zeynep, who is positioned as the subaltern in terms of spatial, class-based, and embodied boundaries. The theoretical framework of the study will draw on the works of Antonio Gramsci, Ranajit Guha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gyanendra Randey, Dipesh Chakrabarty, all pertinent to subaltern studies. In this context, the analysis is based on the social conditions defining subalternity. The representation of subaltern was studied by using the social criticism method. Zerre focuses on the image of the subaltern by narrating the story of Zeynep's struggle for survival, as an individual who is pressured by urban poverty and unemployment, while also narrativizing the socioeconomic formation of subalternity. At the same time, the importance of gender in the relationship between the subaltern and those in power, as often pointed out by subaltern studies scholars, is an important aspect that is underlined in this film's analysis. Finally, it has been concluded that when the gender of the subaltern is female, the relationship of domination established by the ruling class is much more severely practiced, and particularly based on body politics.