Reactivating Turkey’s Erotica Archives on Netflix: Feminist Reparative Fabulation and Its Ambivalences in Erşan Kuneri

Streaming platforms offer cultural producers in right-wing populist regimes a paradoxical space that enables aesthetic experimentation and political critique within commercial and ideological limits. Combining archival research and close reading, this essay examines these dynamics through the Turkish Netflix original Erşan Kuneri (2022–2024). Revisiting the history of erotic Turkish cinema, the series forgoes historical accuracy for feminist reparative fabulation —a speculative mode that activates archival gaps to reimagine gendered and sexualized pasts. The show’s fabulatory structure resists reproducing archival abjection or capitalizing on trauma. This fabulation, alongside its sex-positive feminism and irreverent tone, provoked criticism across the political spectrum. Yet Erşan Kuneri ’s most significant limitations lie in its promotional strategy and limited engagement with queer archives. Moreover, while the show pays homage to female actors of erotic cinema, it offers them limited platform or resources. Feminist reparative fabulation thus becomes an ambivalent site of imaginative intervention and structural limitation.