Intersectional Lens Reveals Migrant Women’s Inner Lives in Menekşe Toprak’s Fiction

A new study published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications offers a systematic literary analysis of the work of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak, arguing that her fiction can best be understood through the framework of intersectionality. The research, conducted by Efnan Dervişoğlu and Tuncay Bilecen of Kocaeli University, examines how overlapping structures of power—gender, migration status, and cultural affiliation—simultaneously shape the inner lives and social positions of Toprak’s female protagonists. The study positions the author, who is herself a migrant woman writer, as a significant voice in contemporary migration literature.

Toprak is primarily known for her short stories. Her first collection, Letter in the Suitcase (Valizdeki Mektup), appeared in 2007, followed by a second collection, Which Language is Love (Hangi Dildedir Aşk). She then shifted to novel writing with The Children of July (Temmuz Çocukları) in 2011, and went on to publish The End of Lament (Ağıtın Sonu), The Whisper of Bees (Arı Fısıltıları), and Déjàvu. From her earliest stories onward, the study notes, Toprak has created introspective characters and returned persistently to themes of gender, identity, and the experiences of migrant women. That consistency across nearly two decades of publication is precisely what makes her body of work suitable for a sustained analytical treatment rather than isolated readings of individual books.

The theoretical core of the study is intersectionality, a framework that originated in legal and feminist scholarship and has since spread across the social sciences and humanities. Its central methodological claim is that categories of identity and disadvantage do not operate in isolation. A person’s experience of, for example, gender discrimination cannot be fully understood without also considering how migration status, class, language, and cultural background interact with it. In the context of literary analysis, this means that a character who is both a woman and a migrant is not simply subject to two separate pressures added together; she inhabits a distinct social position created by the intersection of those structures, with its own emotional and political texture.

Applied to Toprak’s fiction, the framework allows the researchers to ask a precise question: how are these overlapping axes of identity narratively constructed, emotionally expressed, and structurally encoded in her texts? The distinction among those three modes is one of the study’s technical contributions. Narrative construction refers to how characters’ intersecting identities are built into the plot, setting, and point of view. Emotional expression concerns how the psychological consequences of intersecting power structures are rendered in the characters’ inner lives. Structural encoding, in turn, refers to the way the architecture of the fiction itself—its organization, recurring motifs, and patterns of characterization—carries the imprint of those same structures.

The researchers employed thematic close reading as their primary method. Close reading is the traditional instrument of literary scholarship: the sustained, line-by-line attention to how a text makes meaning through word choice, imagery, narrative sequence, and silence. By making it thematic, the analysis directs that attention specifically toward recurring clusters of meaning connected to gender, displacement, and belonging. This method is well suited to a corpus like Toprak’s, in which the same preoccupations surface across short stories and novels written over many years, because it allows patterns to be traced across the whole body of work rather than within a single text.

What emerges from this approach, according to the study, is a picture of fiction in which the personal and the collective are continuously intertwined. Toprak’s protagonists do not experience migration merely as a change of location. The analysis suggests that her work offers nuanced literary insight into the interplay between personal and collective forms of displacement, belonging, and agency. In other words, the individual character’s sense of who she is—her language, her memory, her relationships—is depicted as inseparable from the larger histories of movement, settlement, and cultural negotiation that surround her. This is a hallmark of what scholars of migration literature look for: writing in which the private interior life becomes a lens on transnational experience.

The authors’ own biography is relevant to this reading, and the study treats it as such. As a migrant woman writer, Toprak does not simply observe transnational experiences from the outside; the researchers argue that she reflects them in her protagonists from a position of lived knowledge. This does not mean the fiction is autobiographical in a simple sense, but it does mean that the emotional register of the work—the texture of displacement, the negotiation between languages and cultural affiliations—carries an authenticity that the study identifies as central to its literary significance. The double position of author and characters, both navigating gendered expectations and cultural displacement, creates what the researchers describe as a mutually illuminating relationship between the writer’s perspective and her fictional worlds.

The study also situates its contribution within a broader scholarly landscape. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, the journal that published the work, has in recent years featured a cluster of interdisciplinary research on migration, including ethnocultural and sociological analyses of historical migration documents and artificial-intelligence-based studies of how migrants are visually portrayed across different countries. Against that backdrop, the new analysis adds a literary dimension: where sociological and computational approaches measure migration’s external patterns, Toprak’s fiction—and the intersectional reading of it—documents its internal, psychological, and emotional dimensions. The researchers explicitly state that their interdisciplinary approach illuminates the emotional, political, and psychological dimensions of migration in her work.

Methodologically, the study demonstrates how a social-science framework can be imported into literary criticism without losing the specificity of the literary object. Intersectionality supplies the analytical categories—gender, migration status, cultural affiliation—but close reading supplies the evidence, drawn from the texts themselves. The researchers report no competing interests and note that the article involved no studies with human participants, which is typical for textual analysis. The work was received in late 2024, accepted in September 2026, and published as an open-access article, making the full analysis freely available to other researchers working on Turkish literature, migration studies, or feminist literary theory.

The significance of the study extends beyond a single author. Contemporary migration literature is one of the fastest-growing fields in the comparative study of world literature, and scholars have increasingly sought rigorous frameworks for reading fiction written from within the migrant experience rather than about it from a distance. By demonstrating that intersectionality can be operationalized through thematic close reading—tracking how intersecting identities are constructed, expressed, and encoded across a coherent body of work—Dervişoğlu and Bilecen provide a transferable model for analyzing other authors who write at the intersection of gender and transnational displacement. Their conclusion that Toprak deserves recognition as a significant voice in contemporary migration literature is thus both a claim about one writer’s achievement and an argument about where the most illuminating questions in migration literary studies are now being asked.

Subject of Research: An intersectional literary analysis of gender, migration, and identity in the fiction of Turkish author Menekşe Toprak

Article Title: An intersectional approach to the literary universe of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak

Article References: An intersectional approach to the literary universe of contemporary Turkish author Menekşe Toprak. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41599-026-09071-1

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41599-026-09071-1

Keywords: Menekşe Toprak, intersectionality, Turkish literature, migration literature, gender studies, female protagonists, thematic close reading, displacement, belonging, contemporary fiction, literary analysis, transnational identity