Browsing by Author "Emgin, Bahar"

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Exploring Women's Visceral Engagement With Electric Appliances in Turkish Kitchens
(Springernature, 2025) Karaosmanoglu, Defne; Ata, Leyla Bektas; Emgin, Bahar
This paper investigates the narratives and experiences of women regarding cooking with small electric appliances. It intends to offer a novel perspective on gender and technology studies by foregrounding the visceral dimensions of these encounters. Drawing from a larger project on the historical representations and lived experiences of domestic technologies in Turkey, it highlights how the embodied dimensions of cooking shape the ways women perceive, adapt, and integrate technology into their daily lives. This study is based on interviews with twenty-seven women across five cities in Turkey conducted between 2022 and 2024. While small electric appliances are often marketed for convenience and efficiency, we argue that focusing solely on their instrumental benefits neglects the complex and visceral ways women engage with technology. A visceral approach remains an undervalued lens for understanding these interactions, particularly as women's embodied knowledge and relationships to kitchen appliances challenge scholarship that prioritizes progress and efficiency. As active agents, many women resist these technologies, viewing them as misaligned with the embodied knowledge and practices integral to cooking. By reevaluating the relationship between food, gender, and technology, we propose that such disengagement challenges the positivist reliance on science and technology, emphasizing the importance of embodied knowledge and everyday practices in shaping women's interactions with technology.
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The Unlimited Joy, 'once You Start You Can't Stop': Masculinity in Domestic Technology Commercials in Turkey
(Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2024) Karaosmanoglu, Defne; Ata, Leyla Bektas; Emgin, Bahar
Recently, studies have begun examining men's interaction with domestic space to explore changing forms of masculinity and domesticity, arguing that housework has become a leisure activity for men, with domestic technologies serving as tools (toys) for them to engage with. In this article, we explore how men in Turkish television commercials of domestic technologies are portrayed and how these portrayals construct and reconstruct discourses of domesticity and masculinity. We aim to understand men's relationship with masculinity, home and domestic work in these commercials. Alongside leisure and fun, we explore the construction of discourses of masculinity and domesticity through specific themes such as the naughty scientist, the self-seeking purchaser, and the flirtatious chef. We argue that seeing more men on screen does not democratise domesticity since the equal share of workload at home is still far from being realised even in these portrayals. We also argue that domesticity is aestheticized with the participation of men and technology. Finally, women are used as instruments by men in reconstructing their masculinity through heterosexuality.