Aga Khan Lecture Series: Erin Hyde Nolan "A Technology of Femininity: The Imperial Camera in the Abdülhamid II Albums"

Erin Hyde Nolan: AKPIA Fellow; Visiting Assistant Professor, Bates College

This lecture explores technologies of femininity as a fundamental analytic in the history of Islamic art. It maps and analyzes twenty portraits of Muslim girls alongside other gendered photographic spaces in the Abdülhamid II albums to reveal how the imperial camera acted as a technology of femininity—an agent of authority at work on the body in both the Ottoman past and in the Turkish present. Bound together in one bespoke album, these photographs visualize the Ottoman female body, picturing how it was shaped by imperial norms, social expectations, and gender standards in the last decade of the nineteenth century. They conceptualize empire and gender together, providing a focused lens through which the two were intertwined and institutionalized. At the same time, the album serves as a teleological device, enforcing, in the case of the court, heteronormative subservience and religious piety from a young age. It documents children through the (pro)creative apparatus of the camera, engineering a vision of empire that includes female bodies, their reproductive potential, and a future citizenry that these bodies might create.