Comprehensive Child Marriage Research Library
Growing Up Married: In Conversation with Eylem Atakav
Author(s):
Object Type:
Khosroshahi, Zahra
Journal Article
Year & Month/Season:
2018
Winter
Publication/Publisher:
Girlhood Studies
Peer Reviewed
false
PDF Available?
false
Public Link:
ISSN (If Available)
1938-8209
If Journal Article:
ISBN (If Book):
Page Start
N/A
Page End
N/A
Volume
11
Issue
3
DOI
10.3167/ghs.2018.110309
N/A
Students Against Child Marriage's Object Summary:
In 2016, Turkish feminist media scholar and filmmaker, Eylem Atakav, created Growing Up Married as a documentary of the Turkish child marriage experience. While only 27-minutes long, this film “focuses on four women from Turkey who were forced into marriage” (p. 101). This article includes a brief analysis of the Atakav’s film and a conversation between her and the piece’s author, Zahra Khosroshahi. Survivor voices and experiences are often omitted from empirical explorations of child marriage (p. 103). Atakav fights this tendency in her documentary and allows for these experiences to be heard in the mainstream. Through their conversation, published in the journal Girlhood Studies, Khosroshahi is able to further bring a non-academic text back into a scholarly environment, thus allowing for the four survivors’ voices heard from in Atakav’s film to resound in a space that all too frequently forgets them.
Article Abstract (If Available):
Child marriage affects many young girls and women all over the world, and yet, while the number of cases is extremely alarming, there appears to be hardly any awareness of the subject, never mind public visibility. The consequences of forced marriage are dire with severe psychological, physical, and social impact on girls and women. If we are to raise awareness, the silence surrounding forced child marriage needs to be broken. In her documentary film Growing Up Married (2016), feminist media scholar Eylem Atakav faces the issue head-on. Her film brings to the screen four women from Turkey who were forced into marriage as children; as adults, they recollect their memories, on camera, for the first time. Growing Up Married-a milestone of feminist filmmaking in its celebration of women's narratives of survival-foregrounds their voices as they tell their stories of having been child brides.