Ömer Seyfettin’s Short Story “The Rainbow”: A Precursor of Transgender Narratives

Ömer Seyfettin, the founder of the modern Turkish short story and a widely read literary figure, published “The Rainbow” (“Eleğimsağma”) in 1917 in a magazine. The story revolves around a ten-year-old girl, Ayşe, and her gender transformation as part of a struggle against masculine hegemony and suppression. Although this transformation takes place through the protagonist’s dream, Seyfettin successfully showcases how gender roles and stereotypes become central in building respectful, acceptable, and powerful personas in society. The story also helps to question the so-called domestic roles of women by juxtaposing the responsibilities of the two genders based on existing cultural norms. To this end, this study aims to investigate how established gender roles in a patriarchal society are called into question and how gender fluidity defies stereotypical understanding of gender representation in a male-dominated society. The analysis of this gender transformation in the story will be made through the concept of performativity which has been introduced by Judith Butler. Though biologically female, Ayşe enjoys activities such as riding, wrestling, shooting, and playing in the streets, which are almost always associated with the male gender. Furthermore, she is subjugated to societal and religious pressure to act like a girl and cover her body. In this respect, Ömer Seyfettin’s “The Rainbow” can be hailed as a leading narration that puts gender performativity in the limelight at the beginning of twentieth-century Turkish literature.