If our goal is to access knowledge that can become more profound the closer we come intellectually and politically, one way to achieve this is through interdisciplinarity, as outlined by feminist methodology.

“I’ve been telling you all along, wherever you look, you see little girls,” I said. “Since the first day you started talking, all the children you’ve mentioned have been girls. And what you see in these girls is also quite clear. You said it yourself; Zeynep’s delicacy, her darkness struck you. Nur’s physical image resurrected in Zeynep. Nur, too, once was a little girl; you first met her as a little girl and were taken aback. You found Şermin playing with the earth, just like you found Nur. And Şermin doesn’t push you away like Nur does; on the contrary, she opened her arms to you with love. When you found the warmth you couldn’t find in Nur in a three-year-old girl, you instantly connected with her. But what you were attached to wasn’t the girl herself; it was the closeness you found in Şermin, which you were searching for in Nur. You’re still the same; wherever you look, your eyes are on girls.”

“Maybe,” said Yasef, “but you can’t see where your eyes are focused because you’re too focused on where other people’s eyes are falling.”

I decided to stop reading the book I couldn’t focus on because of the thoughts swirling in my mind and write this piece instead. Those who know me are aware that I’ve been saying Nihan Kaya’s name for quite some time now. In the following paragraphs, I want to share my thoughts and feelings about her books from someone positioned both inside and outside the disciplines, as much as I can.

First, let me briefly introduce Nihan Kaya. From my perspective, she is a scholar and writer who completed her undergraduate studies in English Language and Literature, followed by a master’s degree in Psychoanalysis and a PhD in Comparative Literature, currently working as a faculty member at MEF University. She has written numerous novels, short stories, and critical essays and is also currently writing children’s fairy tales. If I have to summarize her years of experience and knowledge in a few sentences, it would be something like that. I became aware of her only about a year ago. I won’t go into a long introduction here, but I’d like to give due credit to the wealth of her work. At my regular bookstore, as I was passing through the Popular Books section without even stopping, Nihan Kaya’s books caught my eye with their intriguing titles. I struggled with myself for seconds, questioning why I had a bias against this section, reminding myself that I should try it just this once. I stopped and started looking at the books: Kırgınlık (Resentment), Buğu (Mist), Gizli Özne (Hidden Subject), and Disparöni (Dyspareunia). There was a style, a language, a depth, a rush of information I wasn’t familiar with. I wanted to buy them all, but I chose to start slowly, savoring the experience as a ritual. So, I bought Kırgınlık.

I won’t go into a detailed review, as this is more of a promotional text. But there’s a section in Kırgınlık called “Kazlar” (Geese) that I found particularly striking:

“Do you know why you speak so comfortably? Because you are a man! Since you are a man, your body is one. But a woman’s body is divided into three parts. Her relationship with her body is different when she is alone with it, when she faces society, and when she is with a man in her life. A woman’s relationship with her body is therefore fragmented, therefore complex. A man doesn’t need to change his relationship with his body in front of society. Because society accepts the male body as it is, it is easier for a man to accept his own body as it is. The body of someone whose body is one naturally behaves as you do. From your seat, you say ‘This woman is beautiful. That woman is fat. The world is wrong,’ just like that…”

From start to finish, this passage was part of a heated discussion that touched on literature, art, creative writing, criticism, novels, and the educational system, all unified by a gender, biology, psychology, and sociology discourse that incorporates postmodern fragmentation and complexity, and goes beyond them to create a new synthesis. This blew my mind…

A few days later, I bought İyi Aile Yoktur (There Is No Such Thing as a Good Family) from another bookstore’s Bestsellers section. A few days after that, I bought Buğu from the Psychology section of the same bookstore. Later on, I found Gizli Özne in the Turkish Literature – Novel section. In the following days, after a collective effort with the bookstore staff, I found Yazma Cesareti (The Courage to Write) in the Essays section. Over time, I would find these same books in various other bookstores, categorized under completely different sections. Why do I mention this? What difference does it make where I bought a book from? It matters, very much so, because usually, the sections or categories in bookstores announce which field a writer belongs to or which writers belong to a certain field. But in this particular case, I realized that the categorization of Nihan Kaya’s books, both in general and individually, was based on how they were perceived individually. It seems there was difficulty in categorizing them clearly.

Within that context, interdisciplinarity is often misunderstood, and consequently misapplied, in Turkey. Interdisciplinarity is not just about combining courses from different disciplines or having each chapter of a book written from a different disciplinary perspective. Instead, it’s about disciplines merging and intermingling within each other, creating something new and different that goes beyond their individual boundaries.

The Courage to Write and Nihan Kaya’s works blur the lines between fields such as psychology, literature, and philosophy, revealing how interdisciplinary thought creates new layers and bridges connections between previously unrelated realms. It’s this very merging of distinct areas that gives depth and a more profound significance to her writing, offering not just reflections of the disciplines, but new paradigms that transcend them.

I hope this sheds light on Kaya’s intricate use of interdisciplinarity and gives a deeper appreciation of her works.