The Ideology of Women’s Emancipation as Ontogenesis of the Subject

Abstract

The article focuses on the issues of Christian national minorities (Armenians) who lived in the Ottoman Empire during and after the Tanzimat period: their national identity, women’s issues, the possibilities of developing the ontogenetic concept of female subjectivity. Such development can be defined as ontogenesis of a social and a literary-cultural subject, which involves capacities of a woman and potential for social and cultural integration. The study aims to identify the features of the subject in the context of the transformations of literary-cultural and historical-political concepts based on the philosophical and anthropological worldview of female authors and typology of culture in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century. The study examines and interprets how an Armenian woman living in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century underwent a gradual transformation from being a silent object of subjugation and domestic captivity into a social, literary-cultural, and historical-political subject. The actuality of the research lies in its interdisciplinary nature: the material was analyzed through connections between Literary Studies, History, Philosophy, and Sociology, by means of historical-comparative, phenomenological, and socio-philosophical research methods. Following the geopolitical changes in the historical-political, socio-eco-nomic, and legal systems of the Ottoman Empire during the period in question, the social role of women was reconsidered based on the ideology of women’s emancipation, which was defined as ontogenesis of the female subject. The analysis of this kind has been attempted for the first time.

Keywords:

w o m e n’s emancipation, Western Armenia, ontogenesis, Ottoman Empire, Constantinople