Home-City Geographies in 1940s Istanbul: A Feminist Reading of Suat Derviş’s Fosforlu Cevriye

This article explores Suat Derviş’s Fosforlu Cevriye (1944) as a literary case for rethinking home-making in the city. Drawing on Blunt and Sheringham’s (Citation2019) “home-city geographies,” which conceptualize dwelling as a socially negotiated, spatially dispersed process, it traces how belonging is forged beyond the domestic interior. Set in 1940s Istanbul amid accelerated modernization, the novel follows Cevriye, a sex worker navigating streets, waterfronts, inns, and ruins with embodied knowledge, unsettling normative associations between home and enclosure. Through routine, care, sensory engagement, and tactical movement, she stitches together urban sites that temporarily assume domestic functions as places of warmth, refuge, sociability, and survival. This fragile yet tenacious mode of inhabitation shows how home can be assembled from the city’s margins, in friction with the classed and gendered regimes of a transforming society. The article thus contributes to feminist geographies of home by showing how urban home-making can take shape through improvised infrastructures of endurance in a city marked by transformation, uneven access, and regulation.