Dancing modernity : Gender, sexuality and the state in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic.

Early Ottoman dance practices that took place in gender segregated spaces and allowed for a certain degree of sexual explicitness and expressions of homoerotic desire were disavowed among Turkish elites in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "Belly dance" became associated with non-Turkish performers, while the Tanzimat and Young Turk state employed the theater to perform emerging ideas about 'Turkishness' and the 'New Woman.' In the early Turkish Republic, the new cadre of Kemalist military officers and bureaucrats altogether rejected its Ottoman heritage and danced the waltz in a close embrace to the music of Western orchestras.

This thesis charts significant changes in dance practices between the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic in order to examine the articulation of modern views of gender and sexuality.

Dance played a formative role in shaping Turkish modernity and framed moral issues about gender, sexuality, and public space, reflecting and reshaping social life at the same time.