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What is an archive, and how does it relate to our sense of history and, moreover, to our sense of the present? This question stands at the interstices of bureaucracy, historiography, and memory. Needless to say, it is also a highly political question. This article deals with the politics of archives, specifically as it manifests itself in Turkey. My aim in looking at the problem of archives is to further raise questions about the relation of history, memory, and truth. The politics of archives is a significant topic today, not only in Turkey, but also, for example, in many post-communist countries, regarding which past records of the old totalitarian regimes should be made public in the age of so-called democracy. In this respect, archives are not only the concerns of historians who are interested in recovering the past, but also of political rulers who aim to frame the past for present purposes.

Women figure centrally in representations of modernity and of nations. This has caught the attention of researchers both in the West and in the context of "Third World" nationalisms. Yuval-Davis states: "[I]t is women –not just (?) the bureaucracy and intelligentsia—who reproduce nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically" (1997, p. 2). However, an analysis of "women" as the subjects of the nation differs from a perspective that dwells on the representations of women produced by a (mostly) male elite. Jordanova argues that the Enlightenment in the West was a set of mental and practical activities of the male elite "who gained influence because of their ideas and 'knowledge'" (1995, p. 64), and whose concern was "to establish the validity of their vision of the world" (p. 64). She shows convincingly that these activities were "sexual" in nature.