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Archive

Essays

Critical writing on film, television, advertising, and culture — adapted from the CultPost podcast and elsewhere.

40 essays

Türk edebiyatı romanlarını çağrıştıran soyut bir illüstrasyon

Arzu, Yoksunluk ve Baba: Aylak Adam ile Anayurt Oteli'ne Psikanalitik Bir Bakış

Türk edebiyatına psikanalitik bir bakış
Abstract illustration evoking hidden memory and surveillance

Hidden Memories: The 1961 Paris Massacre in Michael Haneke's Caché

Buried colonial memory in Haneke's Caché
Abstract illustration evoking early Republican Turkish political thought

The Kadro Movement: From Marxism to Kemalism

A Turkish intellectual circle's path from Marxism to Kemalism
Aerial illustration of a walled garden with a red thread leading a figure away across an open field

Lines of Flight: Desire, Deterritorialization and the Return of Authority in "Unchosen"

Deleuze and Guattari on Netflix's Unchosen
A museum display case of small objects, a watch, and a folded embroidered cloth

Class, Archive, and Impossible Testimony in "The Museum of Innocence"

Love and curatorial power across Pamuk's novel, museum, and series
An empty wooden crib beside a curtained window overlooking an open field

Die My Love as a Narrative of Abjection

Motherhood, desire, and the fragility of the coherent self
A retro television illustration with colored ribbons of signal passing through it

Popular Culture as a Site of Struggle

Stuart Hall, articulation, and the possibility of alternative meanings
A domestic worker cleaning a glass table in a bright apartment

Secrets We Keep and the Nordic Equality Myth

Migrant care work behind Denmark's affluent facades
A retro television showing a woman's face merging into circuitry

Reading Cassandra as a Cyborg

Gender, surveillance, and the limits of technological liberation
A pastel illustration of a circular game board with guard towers

Squid Game as a Postmodern Narrative

When an anti-capitalist story becomes a capitalist commodity
A cracked mirror with a young hand and an older hand reaching toward each other

The Substance as a Feminist Doppelgänger Narrative

Ageism, the divided self, and the grotesque body
A remote wooden cabin in a snowy mountain landscape

Anatomy of a Fall and the Death of the Author

Barthes, interpretation, and the production of truth
A silver serving dome and champagne glasses with worn work boots stored underneath

Class and Poverty as Advertising's Absent Referents

Why class inequality stays invisible in advertising
A pink handbag and sunglasses on a Parisian café table

Reading Emily in Paris with Barthes

Stereotypes, myths, and invisible class differences
A torn paper collage globe wrapped in a measuring tape with a blank price tag

Can a Country Be a Brand?

Nation branding, soft power, and lessons from around the world
A red garment sealed in plastic on an industrial conveyor belt

La Casa de Papel as a Product of the Culture Industry

Adorno and Horkheimer meet Money Heist
A red rose on a windowsill between two lit apartment windows at night

Representing Religious Conservatism in "One Love" and "Red Roses"

Who gets to represent religious-conservative life on Turkish TV
Rows of glass cloches over soil, with one containing a single growing red plant

The Handmaid's Tale as a Feminist Dystopia

Reproductive biopolitics and the fragility of rights
A dim, old-fashioned nightclub table with two glasses, a key, and a photograph

The Club: Historical Reckoning and the Autobiographical Pact

Minority memory and counter-history in "Kulüp"
Two empty chairs and a table on a whitewashed terrace overlooking the sea

Holidays in Greece Through Bourdieu

Class, distinction, and cultural capital
A man stands at the edge of a large sinkhole in a cracked, arid landscape

Burning Days: Representing Provincial Turkey as a Malevolent Other

Şerif Mardin's center–periphery lens on Turkish cinema
Collage illustration of a megaphone emerging from a shopping bag

Brand Activism: A Critical Perspective

From Bernays to Benetton on brand activism
A figure standing inside overlapping panes of colored glass casting layered shadows

Intersectionality in Media and Popular Culture

Overlapping identities beyond single-axis feminism
A red silhouette of a woman walking out of a blue doorway with a shopping-bag shadow

Can Advertising Be Feminist? The Contradictions of Femvertising

Nike, Dove, Always, and the limits of feminist marketing
Abstract illustration evoking Brechtian theatre and distance

Mourning at a Distance: Brecht, Psychoanalysis, and Mother Courage

Distance, mourning, and the interrupted work of grief in Brecht
Abstract illustration evoking absurdist theatre and resistance to meaning

Absurdity as Resistance: Language, Memory, and Jouissance in Beckett and Ionesco

Language, memory, and resistance in the theatre of the absurd
A dark, symbolic illustration evoking fascist-era art politics

Entartete Kunst and the Fascist Appropriation of Modernism

Fascist aesthetics, Futurism, and the politics of “degenerate art”
Abstract illustration evoking Vico and myth in modern thought

Vico After the Enlightenment: Myth, Fiction, and Twentieth-Century Thought

Vico's afterlife in Adorno, Kafka, and Bakhtin
Abstract illustration evoking fragmented autobiography

Writing the Self in Fragments: Barthes, Nietzsche, and the New Autobiographer

Fragmentation and coherence in the autobiographical “I”
Abstract illustration evoking performative language and minor literature

How Literature Performs: Autobiography, Minor Literature, and the Politics of Repetition

Austin, Butler, and literature as a performative act
Abstract illustration evoking feminist utopian and science fiction

Beyond Gender, Within Language: Herland and The Left Hand of Darkness

Gender, language, and feminist utopia in speculative fiction
Abstract illustration evoking Macbeth and psychic trauma

The Crown That Cannot Be Possessed: Trauma and Repetition in Macbeth

Trauma, kingship, and repetition in Shakespeare's Macbeth
Abstract illustration evoking Gogol's The Overcoat

The Coat That Returns: Repetition and the Signifier in Gogol's The Overcoat

Repetition and the signifier in Gogol's classic tale
Abstract illustration evoking the French New Wave film movement

Seeing Modernity: Youth, Realism, and the French New Wave

Youth, realism, and rupture in the French New Wave
Abstract illustration evoking Poe's Purloined Letter and Lacanian reading

The Letter That Positions Us: Poe, Lacan, and the Structure of Reading

Lacan's return to Freud through Poe's Purloined Letter
Abstract illustration evoking carnival and the grotesque body

The World Turned Upside Down: Carnival, Grotesque, and Temporary Liberation

Bakhtin on carnival, the grotesque body, and temporary liberation
Abstract illustration evoking cinematic time and movement

Movement, Time, and the Postwar Image: Notes on Deleuze's Cinema

Deleuze on the movement-image and the time-image
Abstract illustration evoking classical Hollywood film history

From Continuity to Conglomerates: The Development of Classical Hollywood Cinema

Five periods in the development of classical Hollywood cinema
Abstract illustration evoking Italian Neorealist cinema

Italian Neorealism and the Problem of Cinematic Reality: Zavattini and Bazin

Zavattini, Bazin, and the neorealist claim on reality
Abstract illustration evoking Soviet revolutionary cinema

Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda: Modernity, Labor, and the Limits of Revolutionary Vision

Modernity and labor in Vertov's revolutionary newsreels