Abstract Book of the 7th International Conference on Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
Year: 2025
[PDF]
From Precarity to Passion: Navigating Love and Work in Modern Turkish Romantic Comedies
Ass. Prof. Burcu Dabak Özdemir
ABSTRACT:
This study discusses the work lives, types of labor, class characteristics, and how these provide narrative possibilities for love in romantic comedies aired on Turkish television after 2010. By establishing a narrative connection between work life, labor types, class characteristics, and love, the study focuses on how post-2010 popular culture circulates changing and transforming social and economic classes within everyday life practices. Based on this, romantic comedies aired after 2010 are listed, and 63 series are identified. From these, rural-based series (often related to professions like farming, agriculture, animal husbandry, or fishing), sitcoms, and series where the work involved does not significantly contribute to the narrative, are excluded. In the remaining 31 series, the jobs of the romantic leads (both men and women) are listed, their professions defined, and labor types classified. In 14 of these series, women are predominantly depicted in precarious jobs related to creative labor, while the male characters are portrayed as the bosses of the workplace. In 4 series, female characters work in household jobs while the male characters are portrayed as landlords, again in a boss status.
The general similarities between the narratives of the series are as striking as the class similarities. The female character, due to necessity—such as the threat of being married to someone she does not want, the danger of returning to her hometown because she cannot earn money in Istanbul, or the obligation to pay off a family member’s debt—begins working in a job that is associated with the precarious class, often defined as an intern, secretary, errand girl, or assistant. However, this female character generally has no experience, training, or even interest in the job she enters. The workplace she enters does not conform to the usual dark, grey, and boring workspace she is used to. Instead, it is a vibrant, dynamic, and youthful workplace, often in fields like advertising, fashion, design, or software, which involve innovation, creativity, and sometimes new technologies. The owner of this company is a male character who has established his business at a young age due to his creative and genius approach, either by starting his own company or inheriting it from his father. Once the female and male characters meet in a hierarchical work environment in a colorful, creative space that extends beyond the workplace itself, interaction between them becomes inevitable.
Soon, the female character discovers her innate creativity, which she believes is meant for this job, and climbs the career ladder to become the head designer or lead copywriter. However, before reaching this point, she will attract the attention of not only her boss but also her rivals, with her ingenious solutions to various problems, and the narrative will be built around love and jealousy. Of course, the narrative will conclude with the establishment of the “holy family,” or the implication of this, abandoning career and work-life pursuits. The series will end with a supposedly happy ending. Thus, the existing ideology, through these romantic comedies that are constructed at the easiest level of understanding, will circulate the classes it has changed according to its needs within the cultural domain.
Building on this observation and cycle, this presanatation first discusses the concept of precarity. After identifying the place of precarity as a newly emerging class in popular culture, the elements that constitute precarity are examined along with the series characters. The narrative possibilities this class transformation provides to love stories are analyzed. Through the connection built between love and precarity, a discussion on the circulation of new classes in popular culture is presented.
Keywords: Turkish romantic series, Precarity, Love, Class