This is an ethnographic study of a television show titled Esra Erol’da Evlen Benimle (Marry Me on the Esra Erol Show), the most popular of the televised matchmaking formats in Turkey since it premiered in 2007. The marriage show is part of the daytime flow of television broadcasting in Turkey that, as an entertainment format, sets the everyday rhythms of life and provides content for debates/judgements on – as well as being an increasingly popular route to – marriage. I explore the marriage show as a reality show format, which is an outcome of the global flow of media images, narratives and genres. As such, it is a television show that translates the neoliberal imaginary of the self as an aspect of subjectivity in search of survival, security and happiness, into the Turkish context. What distinguishes the marriage show from other reality show formats is that it orients the self towards the desire and expectation to get married as a means of survival. To explore marriage as an orientation of the self through television, I contextualise the show within the contemporary practices, policies and debates of the family in Turkey. By deploying the concept of frame, I investigate how the format is produced by normatively framing the narratives of the participants as marriageable subjects, while also registering the show as a quality program which is seriously dedicated to marrying people within the norms and conventions of marriage in Turkey. Taking the production space of the marriage show as the field of research, and female subjectivity as the particular focus, this study is an endeavour to show how practices, tensions and sensibilities pertaining to marriage and family in Turkey produce female subjects, bodies, self-narratives and movements across the intense present of television production.

published_or_final_version / Chemistry / Master / Master of Science

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The rhombus and parallelogram orbits are interesting families of periodic solutions, which come from celestial mechanics and the N-body problem. Variational methods with finite order symmetry group are used to construct minimizing non-collision periodic orbits. We study the question of stability or instability of periodic and symmetric periodic solutions of the rhombus and the equal mass parallelogram four body problems. We first study the stability of periodic solutions for the rhombus four body problem. An analytical description of the variational principle is used to show that the homographic solutions are the minimizers of the action functional restricted to rhombus loop space [23]. We employ techniques from symplectic geometry and specifically a variant of the Maslov index for curves of Lagrangian subspaces along the minimizing rhombus orbit to prove the main result, Theorem 4.2.2, which states that the reduced rhombus orbit is hyperbolic in the reduced energy manifold when it is not degenerate. We second study the stability for symmetric periodic solutions of the equal mass parallelogram four body problem. The parallelogram family is a family of Z_2× Z_4 symmetric action minimizing solutions, investigated by [7]. In this example, the minimizing solution [7] can be extended to a 4T-periodic solution using symmetries through square and collinear configurations. The Maslov index of the orbits is used to prove the main result, Theorem 5.3.1, which states that the minimizing equal mass parallelogram solution is unstable when it is non-degenerate. / Thesis (Ph.D, Mathematics & Statistics) -- Queen's University, 2012-11-26 11:30:29.688