Tunay Altay | Humboldt Universität zu Berlin (original) (raw)

Papers by Tunay Altay

Sexualities, 2024

This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer mi... more This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants' subjectivities and politics in today's Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of 'migrant drag' in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, 'building queer mountains' appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, 'building queer mountains' shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be 'crossed' and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.

European Journal of Politics and Gender, 2023

This article explores how the experiences of queer migration shape and inform racialisation, and ... more This article explores how the experiences of queer migration shape and inform racialisation, and how racial categories, such as 'whiteness' and 'non-whiteness', are employed by queer migrants from Turkey in relation to their narratives of belonging and non-belonging in Germany. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Berlin between 2018 and 2022, I aim to show how racism is ambiguously attached to migration and sexual difference, and how ideas of racial difference enable queer migrants to form political collectives and make their experience intelligible to themselves and others. Instead of approaching racialisation as an all-or-nothing finality, the participants often use narratives of non-belonging to distance themselves from the public majority (defined as 'heterosexual' and 'white') and employ hybrid minoritarian identities, such as 'queer people of colour', to translate their difference to other queer migrant and racialised groups in Berlin.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2022

Since their arrival in Germany as guest workers, women of Turkish background have been subject to... more Since their arrival in Germany as guest workers, women of Turkish background have been subject to stigma and discrimination. Based on interviews with 20 mothers of Turkish background in Germany who send their children to private schools, we reveal the complex experience of stigma and discrimination interwoven with the experience of immigrant motherhood and parenting in educational institutions. We then analyze the stigmacountering strategies adopted by mothers in Berlin's private schools. We argue that mothers of Turkish background who send their children to private schools respond to stigma and discrimination by capitalizing on their own privileges: economic opportunities, educational attainment, and aspirational global cultural capital. While they adopt strategies motivated by their understanding of "good motherhood," they deemphasize ethnic boundaries and emphasize class status with boundaries often drawn against "uneducated" and "Middle Eastern" immigrants, aiming to reposition themselves as members of a privileged international group in Berlin.

European Journal of Women's Studies, 2022

COVID-19 has precipitated an increase in political homophobia in Turkey. This article focuses on ... more COVID-19 has precipitated an increase in political homophobia in Turkey. This article focuses on the interlocking processes of LGBTQ marginalization and exclusion in Turkey with the purpose of uncovering how political homophobia is enforced, experienced, and navigated by LGBTQ people in Turkey during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the help of two critical conceptual tools, pink line and queer strategies, I first propose a multi-layered conceptualization of political homophobia that is drawn through (1) anti-LGBTQ boundary regimes that shape the everyday lives of LGBTQ people and (2) sexualized bordering processes that filter and block digital LGBTQ representation and visibility in Turkey's digital publics. I then analyze the everyday strategic uses of digital platfroms by LGBTQ activists and community organizers in Turkey. Invested in this complexity, this article draws from the ethnographic data of 20 interviews with LGBTQ people whose lives have crossed paths in several digital LGBTQ groups during the pandemic. Henceforth I argue that these digital LGBTQ groups have facilitated ways of connectivity among LGBTQ people in Turkey which limit exposure to the COVID-19 virus while partially freeing them from the restrictive limits of the nation-state and its political homophobia.

Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 2021

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2020

Bordering situates immigrant sex workers at the margins of an already marginalised industry and n... more Bordering situates immigrant sex workers at the margins of an already marginalised industry and naturalises the legal conditions of their dispossession and precarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Berlin, we offer a situated intersectional analysis of the everyday bordering experiences of Muslim trans*immigrant sex workers from Bulgaria (hereafter TISWs). Focusing on three interactional contexts – minority belonging within EU and German politics, encounters with medicolegal institutions, and the new sex work regulation in Germany – our study demonstrates both that everyday bordering experiences derive not solely from national border enforcement and citizenship regulation but also from intersectional sociocultural barriers imposed by non-state actors, while the internal bordering practices of the German state exacerbate the exclusion and marginalisation of sex/gender transgressive people and sex work. We conclude that despite their physical existence as EU citizens in Berlin, TISWs’ everyday bordering experiences require a more nuanced understanding of intersectional systems of oppression which postpones TISWs’ arrival in Berlin indefinitely.

Independent Communication Network, 2020

Medizinethnologie #WitnessingCorona, 2020

Travel restrictions became a global response to combat the spread of COVID-19. According to an an... more Travel restrictions became a global response to combat the spread of COVID-19. According to an analysis from April 2020 at least 93 percent of the global population live in countries with coronavirus-related travel restrictions. Nearly half of that proportion – some 3 billion people in all – are in countries that are almost completely closed to travel. Severe travel restrictions have promoted a disparity between "foreign residents" and "citizens" and constrained the movement of migrants, refugees, and other "noncitizens," leaving them stranded away from their homes. Against this background, in this contribution I offer some reflections on borders, homes, and citizenship by exploring the experiences of some of Europe's noncitizens and their struggle to return home.

Books by Tunay Altay

Edinburgh University Press, 2024

Resisting Far-Right Politics provides an empirically grounded exploration of different case studi... more Resisting Far-Right Politics provides an empirically grounded exploration of different case studies on anti-LGBTQ and anti-gender mobilizations of the far-right in Europe and the Middle East. The contributions engage with multilayered histories of gender and sexuality politics that connect the Middle East and Europe, informed by histories of colonialism, racism, and border controls. A second underlying objective of this volume is to contribute to decolonized knowledge production by de-centering Europe and simultaneously de-exceptionalizing the Middle East. The contributors commit to respecting the heterogeneity and complexity of these regions by focusing on grounded and life experiences. Ultimately, this volume illustrates a conceptualization of the broad spectrum of. far-right politics and queer feminist critiques as manifested in a wide array ofding academia, politics, and everyday lives.