Ozan Can Yılmaz
Bio
Metropolitan University, B.A. & M.A.
Université Catholique de Lille, M.A.
University of Vienna, Ph.D.
Marmara University, Ph.D.
University of Cambridge , ELT
University of Sheffield , Teacher Trainer in ELT
My research interests include feminist theology, Catholic cultural studies, sociology of religion, cultic studies, gender studies, anthropology of childhood, and transnational migration.
Peter Lang, 2022
While a multiplicity of identity markers affect the dynamics of intercultural communication, the intersectionality of gender and religion deserves more scholarly attention. This book takes the dissimilar cultural concepts and identity performance as a starting point, exploring the significant role that religious indoctrinations play in the construction and performance of gender. It features contributions by scholars in the field of communication, gender, and cultural studies, including theoretical reflections on the socio-cultural formation of identity, dogmatic impositions on gender roles, and the performance of gender identity in intercultural settings.
Ongoing Research
The Male Vulva at Military
Freud's concept of penis envy posits that young girls, upon recognizing the anatomical distinction between males and females, develop a sense of inferiority stemming from the absence of a phallus. The resulting envy and desire for the male organ become integral aspects of female psychosexual development, shaping their relationship with their own bodies and influencing their interactions with the opposite sex. However, this analysis seeks to extend this concept by metaphorically conflating and contrasting penis envy with the imagined construction of a male vulva in the military context. By exploring the underlying dynamics of abjection and its association with the effeminate and homosexuality, this paper addresses the gendered complexities surrounding sexuality.The concept of the imagined construction of a male vulva emerges as a counterpoint to penis envy. This conceptual metaphor reveals a deep-seated abjection towards the feminine and effeminate, ultimately implicating individuals who identify as homosexual in the military. While penis envy fixates on the perceived lack within the female anatomy, the male vulva calls attention to the potential for an alternative construction of male genitalia. By envisioning a male counterpart to the female vulva, this construct unearths the imaginaries of homosexual indignities and effeminized threats to the masculine identity in its counter-positioning to that of the female, feminine, and, therefore, the effeminate.The male vulva serves as a manifestation of societal unease towards non-conforming gender identities and sexual orientations, while it can be conceptualized as the imagined embodiment of abjection associated with the effeminate non-heterosexual. The vulva is also a Lacanian phallic symbol that is relentlessly objected to and refused in order to consolidate the imaginaries of male identity against itself. To the extent phallic absence disables masculinist privileges for women, the vulvic presence allows for the non-masculinized forms of effeminate subordinates.
Transnational Motherhood as Mission
This study reconceptualizes transnational motherhood, with particular focus on missionary motherhood, as a process of re-territorializing maternal affect, understood as sustained gendered labor through which emotional and moral substance of motherhood is continuously relocated across spatial, temporal, technological, and relational configurations shaped by cross-border separation and institutional mobility. Rather than treating motherhood as a stable identity maintained at a distance, it conceptualizes it as an ongoing formation produced through uneven relations of power, care, and obligation in transnational and missionary contexts. Based on in-depth narrative interviews with six missionary mothers from diverse national backgrounds and migration trajectories, the analysis examines how maternal subjectivities are formed through everyday practices of childrearing, religious vocation, and cross-border mobility, with attention to institutional, moral, and spatial constraints of missionary life. It traces how affective dimensions of motherhood—love, longing, and responsibility—are reconfigured through mediated communication technologies such as phone calls and video communication, material exchanges including remittances and gifts, embodied experiences such as pregnancy and psychosomatic strain, and transnational kinship arrangements in which caregiving is redistributed to grandparents and extended family members. Findings show maternal labor in missionary transnational contexts is structured by persistent gendered asymmetries positioning women as primary carriers of emotional, relational, and reproductive responsibility, even where caregiving is formally shared. These asymmetries are reinforced through spousal dynamics, institutional expectations, and embodied constraints of mobility and reproduction. The study argues re-territorialization is not a singular adjustment or emotional response, but an ongoing embedded form of reproductive labor that remains unrecognized.