Abstract:

This work aims to analyze the experience of sexuality, which is oppressed within the patriarchal social structure, by focusing on Adalet Ağaoğlu’s novel, Ruh Üşümesi (Numbness of the Soul). As a result of gender inequalities, sexuality is not an experience that can be practiced by everyone equally. For women in particular, sexuality is a social sphere with much societal pressure and control attached to it. In addition, social norms control and regulate the sphere to which sexuality belongs. Hence, experiencing sexuality depends on certain prerequisites. Ruh Üşümesi problematizes an imaginary sexual experience of a woman and a man and has the potential to transform the existing normative structure of society and to liberate oppressed sexuality. In this context, the article analyzes Ruh Üşümesi by focusing on women’s social experiences in a patriarchal society using the method of feminist literary criticism. Social pressures and conditions with regard to sexuality not only oppress women but also force them to develop strategies in order to deal with these social pressures while at the same time also oppressing the men. Uncovering the ways in which social pressure is experienced within literary texts and how characters resist this social pressure brings to sight the subjects’ experience of struggle within a patriarchal society by exposing this pressure.

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