The film Kocek (Boy Dancer) is the story of a young man, Caniko, who is forced to accept what culture demands of him. What is unique about Caniko is his sexual ambiguity. He is physically a male, that is he has a penis and he participates in activities usual for men - playing football, brawling, drinking, exercising initiative, even displaying a poster of Cüneyt Arkin (a tough man of Turkish film during the seventies and eighties). Yet, Caniko's masculinity is contested by a smothered femininity. He has no beard line, there is never any five o'clock shadow, and other men either mock him about his ambiguous masculinity or they mistake (?) him for a woman and desire him.
Caniko is a gypsy which relative to his destiny is a state closer to nature than culture. He is an aggressive participant in the games of football he plays with his gypsy friends. It is while playing football that he meets Adnan. Adnan is a young, professional goalkeeper. He enjoys drinking sessions in the tavern, the occasional brawl, and women. Caniko and Adnan compete on the football field and become good friends. It is on the football field that the nature of their relationship is alluded to. Here, Caniko is the full forward, the scorer, the one who tries to score against the keeper, Adnan. Adnan is there to take the challenge and to resist Caniko's attempts to conquer him. It is on the football field that Caniko can play out his desire for total masculinity. When he actually scores a goal (i.e. scores against Adnan) his masculinity is confirmed and bolstered. On such an occasion, Adnan can demand of Caniko: "Who are you to score a goal against me? You broken man!" But Caniko, confident of his machismo retaliates with: "I have made lots of holes in buckets such as you!" In other words, Caniko has conquered many goalkeepers and proven his masculinity.
The football field is also the place for Adnan to play the feminine role he desires. This side of Adnan is referred to in the film in a fragmented and vague way. For example, the brawl in the tavern in which Caniko and Adnan join together to fight against men, Raziye's comment at the end of the film: "We must both die. We must both die," Adnan's appearance in Raziye's dream as the woman for Caniko. In addition, Adnan refuses to play the role assigned to him by society. This is seen on the beach when he and Raziye adopt the conventional roles of society and in an epic way play them. Their near nudity emphasises their biological sex and their behaviour - Adnan becoming active, the initiator and controller of events and Raziye becoming passive, the recipient of events - emphasises their social roles. Both are unhappy and both begin to argue. It is on the beach (a stereotyped place for romance) that Adnan tells Raziye: "I wish you were Caniko." In the auction he also refuses the masculine role of bidding for Raziye. Most significantly though, is his status as a goalkeeper. Like Raziye, he is a spectacle for a male audience, a source of men's elation and frustration. He is a figure whose role is to prevent being scored against; that is to prevent being penetrated. In one scene, Caniko and his friends are voyeurs (and therefore masculine) and the 'sex' they witness the unwitting exhibitionists performing is a toy game of football. Likewise, for Caniko and Adnan, the football field is the place to perform, it is symbolic sex, it is a site where Caniko can show himself to be anything but a "broken man."
Caniko is thus an aggressive and assertive young man. But even he is aware of his ambiguous sex. Whilst staring at his smooth, unblemished face in the mirror he threatens to cut himself (a form of punishment a man inflicts on a woman for disobedience) if he doesn't obey his desires to look more like a man. As Caniko, the protagonist is restless, frustrated, unhappy. An irrepressible desire he has is to dance. In the streets he dances; in the tavern he dances; on tables he dances. Whilst watching a belly dancer with his male friends he is disturbed. Here Caniko is the spectator, not the spectacle. He usurps the female dancer and becomes the spectacle by starting to dance in front of his friends. By attracting the male gaze he takes on female form. In his discussion of Jacques Lacan and Laura Mulvey, Madan Sarup writes: The male subject is the imagined source of the gaze and the female subject is the imagined recipient of the gaze. Indeed, in our culture, voyeurism is the active or 'masculine' form of the scopophilic drive (pleasure in looking at another person as an erotic object), while exhibitionism is the passive or 'feminine' form of the same drive(1992: 158).
So Caniko is confused, or rather society sees him as a tangle, both physically and scopophilically. His desire is to be a man who is gazed upon. Yet, society will only allow the woman to be the recipient of the gaze. Even when he isn't dancing, Caniko connotes what Laura Mulvey calls "to-be-looked-at-ness" (1985: 309). Caniko, whether he likes it or not, has an "erotic impact" on men. It isn't necessarily that they think he's a woman and therefore desire him. It is more likely they desire him and thus think of him as a woman. And so, in order to possess and conquer him, he is abducted, made to dance and almost killed when would-be rapists discover he has a penis. Caniko has blurred the polarity of the sexes that society tries to reinforce by the voyeurist/exhibitionist divide. He is not tolerated because he can erotically capture the male gaze. He is almost murdered and in fact as far as his masculinity goes, he is murdered. The protagonist can survive, but the contradiction can't.
Caniko is killed and Raziye is born. The pains of birth are equivalent to the protagonist trying to accept her femininity. Men have forced her to receive her sexuality. In turn, Nadjia the owner of the dance house coaxes her into accepting what men have now made impossible for her to deny. She is thus a midwife for the birth of Raziye. The lure which proves irresistible for a reluctant Raziye is the dance costume Nadjia offers her. Raziye wears it, makes her appearance, and to the accolades of all present shows herself an outstanding and delightful dancer. Raziye's acceptance of her femininity is the crucial part of the film.
Structurally, the film hinges on this point. Raziye replaces Caniko and the protagonist, instead of being restless and unhappy becomes settled and happy. Adnan, who prior to Raziye's 'appearance' is a womaniser and social failure (drinks, brawls, sleeps around), becomes a social success by devoting himself to only one woman, Raziye.
| Personage \ Time | Before acceptance of her femininity | After acceptance of her femininity |
| Caniko/Raziye | restless & unhappy victimised by men | settled & happycontrols men |
| Adnan | social failure | social success |
Caniko can also be considered a social failure prior to accepting his femininity and a social success after acceptance. Raziye goes on to show herself as an attractive but resisting woman. Men jostle and argue to have her. She resists their advances, remains unconquered and eventually marries Adnan. The men who on the football field symbolically, but not falsely, made clear their desires find a way that is socially acceptable to be together. It is society that enforces the form of that relationship. Using the Greimasian semiotic square, the film can be analysed thus:
"Man" and "woman" show relations between contraries, as does "non-woman" and "non-man". Adnan is non-woman because on the football field he isn't man but neither is he woman. He is womanless woman - everything that man isn't supposed to be and therefore woman (passive, waiting to be penetrated and conquered), and yet clearly not woman and therefore womanless. Caniko is non-man, manless man. On the field he is everything woman isn't supposed to be and therefore man (active, eager to penetrate and conquer), and yet society reminds him he will never be accepted as a man and he is therefore manless. Both resisted their genders - Adnan as goalkeeper and Caniko as scorer. In the end though, they realise union by adopting the conventional form of marriage.
In psychoanalytic terms, Raziye's acceptance of her femininity recalls Laura Mulvey's comment on the cinematic function of the displayed woman: Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as an erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as erotic object for the spectator in the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen (1985: 309).
Throughout the whole film the protagonist is an erotic object for the characters within the screen. It is only after she accepts her femininity that she becomes an erotic object for viewers. This is the case not only in the scenes of dancing but also in Raziye's frequent use of a bikini, tight short pants, and walks through the streets reminiscent of the catwalk.
The point of the film can be seen as attracting the male gaze without being conquered. It is perfectly manifest in the protagonist who fails as Caniko but succeeds as Raziye. It is shown in a veiled and much weaker way with Adnan as goalkeeper. The protagonist survives in society through a transformation. In Caniko, nature and culture were antagonistic but found a unity in his dancing. Nature had granted him a hermaphroditic like quality. Culture in the form of the expectations and demands of men wouldn't tolerate it. Culture succeeds in the form of castration and her new condition at once natural (the doctor said so) and cultural (a joint creation by mutilator and surgeon) is the one in which she finds peace and acceptance.
WORKS CITED
Mulvey, Laura."Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Movies and Methods Vol.2. An Anthology. Ed. Bill Nichols. California: University of California Press 1985, p. 305-15.
Sarup, Madan. Jacques Lacan. Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.
JEREMY STEEL
(jeremy@bilkent.edu.tr)