THE GENDERED BLIZZARD: POSTMODERN FRAGMENTATION AND THE CRISIS OF GLOBALIZATION IN ORHAN PAMUK’S SNOW

Abstract [English]

At the dawn of the new millennium, the shift in local and international paradigms has become massive, marked by a blurring of economic, social, and cultural boundaries. In Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, the city of Kars serves as a microcosm of this transition, where the “buzzword” of Globalization meets the aesthetic and philosophical fluidity of postmodernism. This paper analyses these two phenomena not as separate entities, but as an intermingled system, the “conjoined twins” of contemporary existence that dictate human behavior and values. However, a critical gap exists in traditional readings of this intersection: the specific role of the female subject. While Globalization offers the promise of “cultural mixing” and hybridity (Said, 1993), it often does so at the expense of women, whose bodies are used as symbols of national or religious “purity.” In Snow, the suicide of the “headscarf girls” represents a radical postmodern micronarrative, a rejection of both the secular State’s forced modernization and the fundamentalists’ patriarchal control.

This paper will demonstrate how Pamuk uses a postmodernist framework to depict a Turkish society in flux, arguing that the true impact of Globalization is felt most acutely in the shifting domestic and public roles of women. By examining the tension between Westernized moral values and traditional heritage, we can unearth a “borderless” world that remains deeply divided by gendered lines.