Transnational feminit reading of Women Who Blow on Knots through Lugones’ "'World”-Travelling"

What is it about?

In this paper, I propose a transnational feminist reading of Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran’s 2013 novel Women Who Blow on Knots through Lugones’ “Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” I argue that the trope of travel in Women Who Blow on Knots underlines the “world”-travelling of four women whose encounter with each other brings forward a transnational understanding of solidarity— one that is not a pernicious totalizing unity but a coalition constructed with a deep understanding of the nuanced plurality of different locations and histories.

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Photo by Womanizer Toys on Unsplash

Photo by Womanizer Toys on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This paper brings transnational feminist debates into contact with Ece Temelkuran’s 2013 novel Women Who Blow on Knots, a playful narrative relating the encounter of four women and their travel across the Middle East within the background of the Arab Spring. While the novel mainly takes place in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Lebanon, it has many references to other countries such as Turkey, the U.S. and France, and presents an insightful geopolitical analysis of transnational relations. The paper shows that looking at the novel’s pluralistic context and playful form not only enables a relentless questioning of historical material contexts but also offers possibilities for a transnational, decolonial feminist writing.

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