Asli Zengin | Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey (original) (raw)
Books by Asli Zengin
Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World, 2024
In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and res... more In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.
Routledge Handbook on Women in the Middle East, eds. Suad Joseph and Zeina Zaatari, 2022
The Middle East has a long history of gender ambiguity, sexual fluidity, and erotic practices. Re... more The Middle East has a long history of gender ambiguity, sexual fluidity, and erotic practices. Recently, scholars of the Middle East have started paying more attention to these issues, both historically and ethnographically, posing remarkable challenges to dominant Western frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality that widely circulate and shape local worlds of gender pluralism across the globe. The primary goal of this chapter is to review this literature critically by bringing together existing debates, as well as emerging questions in the studies of gender nonconformity and transness in the Middle East. To that end, this chapter is organized into three parts: first, early anthropological and recent historical work on gender nonconformity; second, the scientific formation of “transsexuality” as a medico-legal category; and third, emerging challenges, conditions, and possibilities for gender-nonconforming and transgender lives within transnational frameworks of mobility, displacement, security regimes, war, and occupation.
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2022
In Sunni Muslim funerals in Turkey, the state, religious actors, and members of kin and family ho... more In Sunni Muslim funerals in Turkey, the state, religious actors, and members of kin and family hold the obligations and rights to the deceased, such as washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the dead body, which the author characterizes as care for the dead. The practices of care represent the deceased body in strictly gendered ways. For instance, the coffin design, the prayers at the mosque, the washing ritual prior to burial, and the rites of inhumation are different for women and men. This article examines the intimate economies of touch that take place while preparing the deceased body for a religious afterlife. Touch, in the form of washing, kissing, and caressing the deceased by family members, is central to showing the last deeds and bidding farewell to the lost one. However, past cases demonstrate that when the deceased is a trans person, corpse washers and family members may refuse to touch the body of the deceased during the washing ritual. Theorizing touch as an essential care work for the dead, the author discusses the limits of gendered and sexual belonging in the practices and discourses of mourning and grief in Turkey.
Hafıza ve Sanat Konuşmaları , 2020
This book is about the construction of sexual margins of “the state” as a specific relation betwe... more This book is about the construction of sexual margins of “the state” as a specific relation between the ordering functions of “the state” and women sex workers. The main point in this study is how “the state” establishes itself as a masculine body in these margins. To achieve this goal, it compares the regulations, disciplinary mechanisms and various practices related to legal prostitution on the one hand and illegal prostitution on the other.
By conceptualizing silence, space, and violence as analytical tools, a particular performance of “the state” is explored through margins in both sovereign and governmental terms simultaneously. In this context, while licensed and unlicensed women are continuously rendered exceptional subjects, the ways in which they are exiled to the margins of the state and of the public designate two different constructions of “the state’s” margins.
The main differences in the construction of these margins lies in the stability of the former compared to the fluidity of the latter. The main point that this comparison reveals is the extent to which the letter of the law is instrumental in constituting not only the legal sexual woman worker as subject, but also how,
through reference to these regulations, the illegal woman sex worker. However, in his latter case, regulations become extremely subject to individual wills, and therefore unstable, thereby constructing a space of arbitrariness that allows a form of sovereignty based on the constantly imminent exception.
Papers by Asli Zengin
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches de... more This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as not something final and complete but rather as a regenerative force for afterlives. Engaging with this framework, this section addresses the following questions: How do people process death into meaning and life for their communities, subjectivities, and political projects? How do sovereign and intimate claims on bodies, and the contestation among these multiple claims, shape the meaning of death and the production of afterlives? How does the symbolic and material life around death produce and shape people's emotional, religious, communal, and political worlds, as well as political economy and regimes of mobility and securitization? How do people create and/or transgress normative boundaries of religious, familial, political, and gender subjectivities through their negotiations over dying, rituals of death, and mourning? How do death and its afterlives help us develop new trop...
Jadaliyya, 2023
Disasters reveal and intensify already existing relations of power and forms of discrimination an... more Disasters reveal and intensify already existing relations of power and forms of discrimination and exclusion. Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria have not been exception to this harsh reality since several cities were fatally hit by earthquakes beginning on February 6. This disaster has once again shown that women, queer and trans people are among those who shoulder the harshest costs of the earthquake. Below is a brief collection of notes that lays out the gendered, sexual and racialized fault lines that have deepened the impact of this catastrophe, as well as an account of the feminist solidarity and support campaign immediately organized by women and LGBTI+s across Istanbul and Diyarbakir in response. Since day one, we, the Feminist Solidarity for Disaster Group, have been working together with the two major Kurdish women's organizations in Diyarbakir, the Rosa Women's Association and the Free Women's Movement (TJA), who have shown strong presence in relief efforts especially in the absence of the state in the earthquake zone and in the face of women's dismissal for their particular situation and needs. I am writing this piece to call on an international feminist solidarity and support for the already growing feminist coalitions between women, queers and trans people across Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria. And I am writing this piece by using a collective subject "we," as all these experiences and knowledge have emerged from the feminist collective relief efforts I have been part of for the past month.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022
Share Icon Share The Turkish cemeteries for the kimsesiz (literally, people who have no one) are... more Share Icon
Share
The Turkish cemeteries for the kimsesiz (literally, people who have no one) are graveyards where the state buries the bodies of those people who remain unidentified or unclaimed after a certain period of time. In practice, they are burial sites for the social outcast, namely homeless and underclass people, victims of honor crimes, disowned members of blood families, premature babies, and more recently, unaccompanied refugees. They also contain the bodies of political detainees who have been “disappeared” under police interrogation and state violence, along with radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas deemed “unidentified.” This article focuses on the cemetery for the kimsesiz in Kilyos, Istanbul in order to discuss the spatial ordering of death in the margins of social and political life in Turkey. These margins may be ethnic, religious, sectarian, or economic as well as gendered or sexed and sometimes medical. A close focus on this mortal topography of margins demonstrates the state's complicated relationship with the category of kimsesiz and the limits of social legibility and belonging in Turkey.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022
This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches de... more This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as not something final and complete but rather as a regenerative force for afterlives. Engaging with this framework,
this section addresses the following questions: How do people process
death into meaning and life for their communities, subjectivities, and political projects? How do sovereign and intimate claims on bodies, and the contestation among these multiple claims, shape the meaning of death and the production of afterlives? How does the symbolic and material life around death produce and shape people’s emotional, religious, communal, and political worlds, as well as political economy
and regimes of mobility and securitization? How do people create and/or transgress normative boundaries of religious, familial, political, and gender
subjectivities through their negotiations over dying, rituals of death, and mourning? How do death and its afterlives help us develop new tropes to think about migration, mobility, regimes of security, war on terror, belonging, intimacy, and care?
Feminist Studies, 2020
In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework drawn by special codes th... more In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework drawn by special codes that cover only ciswomen and trans women sex workers who hold official female ID cards. The state strictly regulates the domain of sex work through systematic police controls, health checks, and rules in brothel life. The brothel life is open to only men and inaccessible for women who do not work as registered sex workers. Police officers, medical actors and brothel owners usually withhold information about sex workers, and make it difficult for non-sex worker women to meet sex workers. Hence, any attempt to gather official information about sex work usually fail especially when the researcher is a ciswoman and a non-sex worker. Lack of access to this classified information, however, tells an important story about the sexual and intimate workings of state power. Narrating my multiple encounters with silence while conducting an ethnographic research on sex work in Istanbul in 2005, I examine the relationship between sex work, secrecy, and state power. In my discussion, I approach silence both as a productive analytical category and an efficient methodological tool, and demonstrate how the state turns knowledge about sex work into a secretive process, and hence, something intimate through the registers of silence. I conjoin the term, secret intimacies of the state, in order to understand this silencing process, and invite readers to think about the role of secrets and intimacy in the organization of state power in relation to transgressive and excessive spaces of sex.
Cultural Anthropology, 2019
Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim ri... more Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim rituals of death, practices of mourning, and discourses of grief in Turkey. In these ritual practices, family members hold obligations and rights to the deceased, including washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the body. These funeral practices represent the dead body in strictly gendered ways. However, when the deceased is a transgender person, his/her/their body can open a social field for negotiation and contestation of sexual and gender difference among religious, medico-legal, familial, and LGBTQ actors. Addressing the multiplicity of such struggles and claims over the deceased body of transgender persons, this article presents a mortuary ethnography that is formed through entanglements between Islamic notions of embodiment, familial order, gender and sexuality regimes, and legal regulations around death in Turkey. Rather than taking sex, gender, and sexual difference as given ...
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2016
This piece reflects on some ongoing tensions between cisgender women's and trans people&a... more This piece reflects on some ongoing tensions between cisgender women's and trans people's feminisms, suggesting specific frameworks to resolve these tensions into coalitional feminist organizing. To do that, the author draws on her ethnographic research and activist work in Turkey and proposes that a collective focus on the realm of death would bring feminist cis women and trans people together around a shared gender experience. In Turkey, the annual number of cis and trans women who are killed by cis men has been gradually increasing. This situation makes the availability of killing a shared gendered experience for cis women and trans people. Hence, organizing around the framework of " gender killings " would allow cis women and trans people to develop alliances to survive and transform the very material and symbolic conditions of their gender oppression.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2016
This article is about how sex, gender, and sexuality are governed in Turkey at the intersection o... more This article is about how sex, gender, and sexuality are governed in Turkey at the intersection of intimate contact and mandated encounters with medicolegal institutions and the bodies of sex/gender transgressive people. To explore this question, it brings two institutional processes together: trans women’s gender reassignment processes in public hospitals and gay men’s medical examinations to receive exemptions from compulsory military service. In both sites institutional observation and practice are preoccupied with penile penetration as a tool to eliminate and hence regulate sex/gender transgression. I argue that this institutional fixation develops specific proximities and forms of touch by the state on (and in) the bodies of trans women and gay men, which in turn plays a pivotal role in the institutional production of sexual difference and normative regulation of sexuality, desire, sex, and gender in Turkey.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2016
Anthropologica, 2014
In Turkey, production of “transsexuality” as a medicolegal category dates back to 1988. Amendment... more In Turkey, production of “transsexuality” as a medicolegal category dates back to 1988. Amendments in 2002 to the regulation of sexual transition shaped their present form, which requires psychiatric observation during the transition period, putting trans people under strict institutional supervision and evaluating them in terms of their gender role performance. Focusing on trans peoples’ experiences of psychiatric observation, this paper illustrates the medical steps trans people take to collect evidence of their “true” sex, and shows how psychiatrists evaluate these steps. It explores how negotiations between doctors and trans people work upon conflicting meanings of bodily time, sex, gender and sexuality.
Cambridge Anthropology, 2015
Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with ... more Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with dynamics of sensual and affective attachments and forms of desire. It is therefore integral to the formation of human selves and subjectivities, as well as communities, publics, collectives and socialities. The articles in this Special Section all offer an anthropological inquiry into intimacy, seeking a conceptual formulation that might capture its actual operations, the ways intimacy is done in talk and action. They thus contribute ethnographically to ongoing anthropological debates about intimacy, and explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined, shaped, constructed and transformed across different social worlds.
Feminist Bellek, 2022
https://feministbellek.org/erotizm/
Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World, 2024
In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and res... more In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.
Routledge Handbook on Women in the Middle East, eds. Suad Joseph and Zeina Zaatari, 2022
The Middle East has a long history of gender ambiguity, sexual fluidity, and erotic practices. Re... more The Middle East has a long history of gender ambiguity, sexual fluidity, and erotic practices. Recently, scholars of the Middle East have started paying more attention to these issues, both historically and ethnographically, posing remarkable challenges to dominant Western frameworks of sex, gender, and sexuality that widely circulate and shape local worlds of gender pluralism across the globe. The primary goal of this chapter is to review this literature critically by bringing together existing debates, as well as emerging questions in the studies of gender nonconformity and transness in the Middle East. To that end, this chapter is organized into three parts: first, early anthropological and recent historical work on gender nonconformity; second, the scientific formation of “transsexuality” as a medico-legal category; and third, emerging challenges, conditions, and possibilities for gender-nonconforming and transgender lives within transnational frameworks of mobility, displacement, security regimes, war, and occupation.
Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, 2022
In Sunni Muslim funerals in Turkey, the state, religious actors, and members of kin and family ho... more In Sunni Muslim funerals in Turkey, the state, religious actors, and members of kin and family hold the obligations and rights to the deceased, such as washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the dead body, which the author characterizes as care for the dead. The practices of care represent the deceased body in strictly gendered ways. For instance, the coffin design, the prayers at the mosque, the washing ritual prior to burial, and the rites of inhumation are different for women and men. This article examines the intimate economies of touch that take place while preparing the deceased body for a religious afterlife. Touch, in the form of washing, kissing, and caressing the deceased by family members, is central to showing the last deeds and bidding farewell to the lost one. However, past cases demonstrate that when the deceased is a trans person, corpse washers and family members may refuse to touch the body of the deceased during the washing ritual. Theorizing touch as an essential care work for the dead, the author discusses the limits of gendered and sexual belonging in the practices and discourses of mourning and grief in Turkey.
Hafıza ve Sanat Konuşmaları , 2020
This book is about the construction of sexual margins of “the state” as a specific relation betwe... more This book is about the construction of sexual margins of “the state” as a specific relation between the ordering functions of “the state” and women sex workers. The main point in this study is how “the state” establishes itself as a masculine body in these margins. To achieve this goal, it compares the regulations, disciplinary mechanisms and various practices related to legal prostitution on the one hand and illegal prostitution on the other.
By conceptualizing silence, space, and violence as analytical tools, a particular performance of “the state” is explored through margins in both sovereign and governmental terms simultaneously. In this context, while licensed and unlicensed women are continuously rendered exceptional subjects, the ways in which they are exiled to the margins of the state and of the public designate two different constructions of “the state’s” margins.
The main differences in the construction of these margins lies in the stability of the former compared to the fluidity of the latter. The main point that this comparison reveals is the extent to which the letter of the law is instrumental in constituting not only the legal sexual woman worker as subject, but also how,
through reference to these regulations, the illegal woman sex worker. However, in his latter case, regulations become extremely subject to individual wills, and therefore unstable, thereby constructing a space of arbitrariness that allows a form of sovereignty based on the constantly imminent exception.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches de... more This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as not something final and complete but rather as a regenerative force for afterlives. Engaging with this framework, this section addresses the following questions: How do people process death into meaning and life for their communities, subjectivities, and political projects? How do sovereign and intimate claims on bodies, and the contestation among these multiple claims, shape the meaning of death and the production of afterlives? How does the symbolic and material life around death produce and shape people's emotional, religious, communal, and political worlds, as well as political economy and regimes of mobility and securitization? How do people create and/or transgress normative boundaries of religious, familial, political, and gender subjectivities through their negotiations over dying, rituals of death, and mourning? How do death and its afterlives help us develop new trop...
Jadaliyya, 2023
Disasters reveal and intensify already existing relations of power and forms of discrimination an... more Disasters reveal and intensify already existing relations of power and forms of discrimination and exclusion. Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria have not been exception to this harsh reality since several cities were fatally hit by earthquakes beginning on February 6. This disaster has once again shown that women, queer and trans people are among those who shoulder the harshest costs of the earthquake. Below is a brief collection of notes that lays out the gendered, sexual and racialized fault lines that have deepened the impact of this catastrophe, as well as an account of the feminist solidarity and support campaign immediately organized by women and LGBTI+s across Istanbul and Diyarbakir in response. Since day one, we, the Feminist Solidarity for Disaster Group, have been working together with the two major Kurdish women's organizations in Diyarbakir, the Rosa Women's Association and the Free Women's Movement (TJA), who have shown strong presence in relief efforts especially in the absence of the state in the earthquake zone and in the face of women's dismissal for their particular situation and needs. I am writing this piece to call on an international feminist solidarity and support for the already growing feminist coalitions between women, queers and trans people across Turkey, Kurdistan and Syria. And I am writing this piece by using a collective subject "we," as all these experiences and knowledge have emerged from the feminist collective relief efforts I have been part of for the past month.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022
Share Icon Share The Turkish cemeteries for the kimsesiz (literally, people who have no one) are... more Share Icon
Share
The Turkish cemeteries for the kimsesiz (literally, people who have no one) are graveyards where the state buries the bodies of those people who remain unidentified or unclaimed after a certain period of time. In practice, they are burial sites for the social outcast, namely homeless and underclass people, victims of honor crimes, disowned members of blood families, premature babies, and more recently, unaccompanied refugees. They also contain the bodies of political detainees who have been “disappeared” under police interrogation and state violence, along with radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas deemed “unidentified.” This article focuses on the cemetery for the kimsesiz in Kilyos, Istanbul in order to discuss the spatial ordering of death in the margins of social and political life in Turkey. These margins may be ethnic, religious, sectarian, or economic as well as gendered or sexed and sometimes medical. A close focus on this mortal topography of margins demonstrates the state's complicated relationship with the category of kimsesiz and the limits of social legibility and belonging in Turkey.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 2022
This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches de... more This special section draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as not something final and complete but rather as a regenerative force for afterlives. Engaging with this framework,
this section addresses the following questions: How do people process
death into meaning and life for their communities, subjectivities, and political projects? How do sovereign and intimate claims on bodies, and the contestation among these multiple claims, shape the meaning of death and the production of afterlives? How does the symbolic and material life around death produce and shape people’s emotional, religious, communal, and political worlds, as well as political economy
and regimes of mobility and securitization? How do people create and/or transgress normative boundaries of religious, familial, political, and gender
subjectivities through their negotiations over dying, rituals of death, and mourning? How do death and its afterlives help us develop new tropes to think about migration, mobility, regimes of security, war on terror, belonging, intimacy, and care?
Feminist Studies, 2020
In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework drawn by special codes th... more In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework drawn by special codes that cover only ciswomen and trans women sex workers who hold official female ID cards. The state strictly regulates the domain of sex work through systematic police controls, health checks, and rules in brothel life. The brothel life is open to only men and inaccessible for women who do not work as registered sex workers. Police officers, medical actors and brothel owners usually withhold information about sex workers, and make it difficult for non-sex worker women to meet sex workers. Hence, any attempt to gather official information about sex work usually fail especially when the researcher is a ciswoman and a non-sex worker. Lack of access to this classified information, however, tells an important story about the sexual and intimate workings of state power. Narrating my multiple encounters with silence while conducting an ethnographic research on sex work in Istanbul in 2005, I examine the relationship between sex work, secrecy, and state power. In my discussion, I approach silence both as a productive analytical category and an efficient methodological tool, and demonstrate how the state turns knowledge about sex work into a secretive process, and hence, something intimate through the registers of silence. I conjoin the term, secret intimacies of the state, in order to understand this silencing process, and invite readers to think about the role of secrets and intimacy in the organization of state power in relation to transgressive and excessive spaces of sex.
Cultural Anthropology, 2019
Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim ri... more Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim rituals of death, practices of mourning, and discourses of grief in Turkey. In these ritual practices, family members hold obligations and rights to the deceased, including washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the body. These funeral practices represent the dead body in strictly gendered ways. However, when the deceased is a transgender person, his/her/their body can open a social field for negotiation and contestation of sexual and gender difference among religious, medico-legal, familial, and LGBTQ actors. Addressing the multiplicity of such struggles and claims over the deceased body of transgender persons, this article presents a mortuary ethnography that is formed through entanglements between Islamic notions of embodiment, familial order, gender and sexuality regimes, and legal regulations around death in Turkey. Rather than taking sex, gender, and sexual difference as given ...
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2016
This piece reflects on some ongoing tensions between cisgender women's and trans people&a... more This piece reflects on some ongoing tensions between cisgender women's and trans people's feminisms, suggesting specific frameworks to resolve these tensions into coalitional feminist organizing. To do that, the author draws on her ethnographic research and activist work in Turkey and proposes that a collective focus on the realm of death would bring feminist cis women and trans people together around a shared gender experience. In Turkey, the annual number of cis and trans women who are killed by cis men has been gradually increasing. This situation makes the availability of killing a shared gendered experience for cis women and trans people. Hence, organizing around the framework of " gender killings " would allow cis women and trans people to develop alliances to survive and transform the very material and symbolic conditions of their gender oppression.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2016
This article is about how sex, gender, and sexuality are governed in Turkey at the intersection o... more This article is about how sex, gender, and sexuality are governed in Turkey at the intersection of intimate contact and mandated encounters with medicolegal institutions and the bodies of sex/gender transgressive people. To explore this question, it brings two institutional processes together: trans women’s gender reassignment processes in public hospitals and gay men’s medical examinations to receive exemptions from compulsory military service. In both sites institutional observation and practice are preoccupied with penile penetration as a tool to eliminate and hence regulate sex/gender transgression. I argue that this institutional fixation develops specific proximities and forms of touch by the state on (and in) the bodies of trans women and gay men, which in turn plays a pivotal role in the institutional production of sexual difference and normative regulation of sexuality, desire, sex, and gender in Turkey.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, 2016
Anthropologica, 2014
In Turkey, production of “transsexuality” as a medicolegal category dates back to 1988. Amendment... more In Turkey, production of “transsexuality” as a medicolegal category dates back to 1988. Amendments in 2002 to the regulation of sexual transition shaped their present form, which requires psychiatric observation during the transition period, putting trans people under strict institutional supervision and evaluating them in terms of their gender role performance. Focusing on trans peoples’ experiences of psychiatric observation, this paper illustrates the medical steps trans people take to collect evidence of their “true” sex, and shows how psychiatrists evaluate these steps. It explores how negotiations between doctors and trans people work upon conflicting meanings of bodily time, sex, gender and sexuality.
Cambridge Anthropology, 2015
Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with ... more Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with dynamics of sensual and affective attachments and forms of desire. It is therefore integral to the formation of human selves and subjectivities, as well as communities, publics, collectives and socialities. The articles in this Special Section all offer an anthropological inquiry into intimacy, seeking a conceptual formulation that might capture its actual operations, the ways intimacy is done in talk and action. They thus contribute ethnographically to ongoing anthropological debates about intimacy, and explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined, shaped, constructed and transformed across different social worlds.
Feminist Bellek, 2022
https://feministbellek.org/erotizm/
Memory and Arts Talks 2020, 2022
MAD - Salgın Sonrası İçin Ekolojik Manifestolar, 2021
MAD - Ecological Manifestos for a Post-Pandemic World, 2021
We are in the early days of March 2020. Coronavirus slowly seeps into every aspect of our lives. ... more We are in the early days of March 2020. Coronavirus slowly seeps into every aspect of our lives. In the meantime, we are grappling with an ongoing massive crisis. For several years now, our agenda has been occupied by news from all around the world covering fires, typhoons, floods, droughts, melting glaciers, and increasing seasonal temperatures. Children are the ones who are protesting the crisis before anyone else. They oppose dystopias stealing their futures, and have been organizing in greater numbers since 2018. Extinction Rebellion has been emerging. Pioneered by the children, we make a final call to action for the planet, we raise our voices with all our might for redressing the ecological balance, and we are blaring out against those in power to stop the destruction of this planet that is our commons. A holistic approach towards our existence finds a place on our agenda and reaches many people thanks to children's rightful demands concerning the future. The assumed borders between culture, economy, and nature are being removed. The vital bonds that link them become blatantly manifest. With the climate crisis we are getting better inured to the fact that nature is neither separate from us nor it is under our control. On the contrary, from the air we constantly breathe to what we eat, we are completely immersed in nature as within so without. Indeed, we are setting sail towards a perception of existence which we can also call queer.
Feminist Studies, 2020
In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework drawn by special codes th... more In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework drawn by special codes that cover only ciswomen and trans women sex workers who hold official female ID cards. The state strictly regulates the domain of sex work through systematic police controls, health checks, and rules in brothel life. The brothel life is open to only men and inaccessible for women who do not work as registered sex workers. Police officers, medical actors and brothel owners usually withhold information about sex workers, and make it difficult for non-sex worker women to meet sex workers. Hence, any attempt to gather official information about sex work usually fail especially when the researcher is a ciswoman and a non-sex worker.
Lack of access to this classified information, however, tells an important story about the sexual and intimate workings of state power. Narrating my multiple encounters with silence while conducting an ethnographic research on sex work in Istanbul in 2005, I examine the relationship between sex work, secrecy, and state power. In my discussion, I approach silence both as a productive analytical category and an efficient methodological tool, and demonstrate how the state turns knowledge about sex work into a secretive process, and hence, something intimate through the registers of silence. I conjoin the term, secret intimacies of the state, in order to understand this silencing process, and invite readers to think about the role of secrets and intimacy in the organization of state power in relation to transgressive and excessive spaces of sex.
Early anthropological studies of what is now called transgenderism focused on cross-cultural vari... more Early anthropological studies of what is now called transgenderism focused on cross-cultural variations in sex/gender. The turn to anthropological work that began to draw upon the vocabulary of transgenderism did not expand until the emergence of transgender studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s, paralleling the rise of queer studies. Within this body of work, the material conditions and representational practices of trans people have been widely examined. By focusing on themes such as cross-cultural and historical analyses of sexed embodiment and human gender diversity, subjective experiences of gender identity, medico-legal practices regulating gender expression and transsexuality, these studies have investigated the assumed relations between sex, gender, biology and culture.
Yet, trans issues have remained marginal within anthropology partly due to the dearth of ethnographic research on non-Euro-North American trans communities and selves, whether in native locales or diasporic zones. With the exception of a few well-known studies (Blackwood 2010; Johnson 1997; Kulick 1998; Nanda 1990; Prieur 1998; Reddy 2005; Sinnott 2004), the literature is generally northern/western-centric, and further scholarly attention is needed to cultivate a more attuned approach to not only question the relevance of “Western” categories (i.e. transgender, transsexuality) to the lives of people in non-Euro-North American locales, but also to discuss differences in race, ethnicity, religion, class and location among “trans” people across cultures and societies. In light of this gap in literature, the presentations on our panel intend to contribute to discussions on “trans” embodiment, selves, communities, and politics in localized contexts. Given the wide expanse of the non-Euro-North American geography, this panel focuses on regions where transgenderism has been under-studied by anthropologists, specifically in certain African and Asian territories.
We ask the following questions with these regions in mind: How is “trans” understood cross-culturally, and in what ways is the category complicated in these local contexts? What kinds of trans subcultures and embodiments can we talk about in these geographies? How and to what extent do transnational flows of “Western” categories, capital, images, and knowledge impact these local trans identities, livelihood, and activism? How do science, technology, religion, culture, and society shape trans experience? How do medico-legal regulations and language configure transsexualism in various local contexts, and what kinds of consequences do these developments bring to trans people’s lives? How does violence operate through and shape trans subjectivities and existences, and what forms does violence take? How do nation-states intervene and shape trans people’s lives? How do trans people respond to these processes in their ordinary and political lives? What are the conditions for trans politics, and what kinds of political claims and imaginations are at stake? This panel explores a host of questions that emerge from studying precarious trans lives in Asian and African cultures.
"Universal definitions of family had been a salient topic of anthropological research until the l... more "Universal definitions of family had been a salient topic of anthropological research until the late twentieth century. Such definitions, however, began to be challenged and criticized for their inability to cover the broad range of practices and ideologies associated with the family. In particular the idea of “The Family” as an autonomous hetero-reproductive, biological unity has been a paramount one, yet it has been contested by the studies focusing on the roles played by the new medico-legal technologies of the body which change the very meaning of the family (e.g. reproductive policies, surrogacy and artificial insemination techniques, sex reassignment surgeries etc.), the role of “real” and “fictive” kinships in shaping subjects and the non-normative forms of families. Breaking with the endless and futile search for “essence,” the family has instead begun to be regarded as an ideological, social and cultural construct that is embedded in power relations and mechanisms and that is imbued with certain affective or emotional orientations and norms.
As a contribution to the recent anthropological explorations on family, in this panel, we want to rethink the family as a border-making site that produces categories, capacities and forms of inclusion, exclusion and imagination. We aim to discuss how the concept of family is woven through discourses, disciplines, and practices of the body, desire, sexuality, technology, community and politics, and what it means to inhabit the family on a daily basis as an experiential reality.
More specifically, we seek answers to the following questions: How are the borders of the family being shaped, contested and reconstructed in relation to new medical technologies of the body? How do these technologies transform the family ties, interpersonal relations and domestic norms? How do non-normative forms of community change the very meaning of family? What kind of intimate, social, cultural and political borders does the family draw in our everyday lives? How do we make use of the concept of family in our theorizations of gender, the body, sexuality, community and politics? What does it mean to think about the family as an alternative community or political form? Or does it still, whether in hetero or homo settings, continue to be a very productive site for certain normativities? As Halberstam (2011: 71) suggests, should we reject deploying the concept of family altogether since it is a “false narrative of continuity” that makes “connection and succession seem organic and natural”? What does it mean to undermine the family and emphasize other modes of relating, belonging, and caring for political and/or ethical relationships? Or can we talk about new emergences or creations of crossings between the family as a form and other forms of relating, belonging and caring? Does that necessarily mean the foreclosure of other alliances and coalitions, or can we think about the family as a form, which enables and produces particular intimacies, bonds and care that would otherwise go invisible and be silenced?
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Watson Institute, Brown University , 2019
This workshop draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as ... more This workshop draws on the associations between the dead and the living, and approaches death as not something final and complete but rather as a regenerative force for afterlives. Death evokes social, moral and political obligations that find public expressions in culturally and religiously shaped funeral ceremonies, burial rituals, and mourning practices and discourses. Death constitutes a field in and through which multiple forms of social membership (i.e. religious, familial, national, political, communal, global, etc.) are produced, reinforced and solidified. In that sense, death and afterlives present a wealth of compelling material to examine multiple social projects, cultural dynamics, religious frameworks, political claims, and power relations.
Engaging with these frameworks, this workshop will address the following questions: How do people process death into meaning and life for their communities, subjectivities, and political projects? How do death and afterlives gain meaning through the contestation of multiple sovereign and intimate claims on bodies? How does the symbolic and material life around death produce and shape people’s emotional, religious, communal, and political worlds, as well as political economy, regimes of mobility and securitization? How do people create and/or transgress normative boundaries of religious, familial, political, and gender subjectivities through their negotiations over dying, rituals of death, and mourning? How do death and its afterlives help us develop new tropes to think about migration, mobility, regimes of security, war on terror, belonging, intimacy, and care?
Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with ... more Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with dynamics of sensual and affective attachments and forms of desire. In that sense, it is integral to the formation of what is called “the human,” selves, subjectivities, as well as communities, publics, collectives and socialities. Anthropologists, by deploying ethnographic methods and immersing themselves in the everyday lives of their informants, have contributed a great deal to the investigation of such intimate domains. With this two-day workshop, we aim at contributing to the continuing anthropological discussions on intimacy, and explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined, shaped, constructed and transformed across cultures and social worlds.
As a fruitful starting point one may follow Ann Stoler’s approach and view intimacy as a site of constant query: as “the sensory, the affective, and domestic space” or as a domain that “builds borders, creates distances, marks off knowledge and shared forms of it” (2006:15). Or following Lauren Berlant, one may conceptualize intimacy as involving “an aspiration for a narrative about something to be shared” (1998: 281). Scholars have critically addressed the notion of intimacy where such narratives about sharing have become contentious, where intimate worlds have become the topic of fierce public debates. Intimacy thus seems to become visible precisely where it is being contested. This allows us to ask a whole set of questions: What are the social, cultural, political and economic conditions of intimacy? How are sentiments, desires and affect produced and distributed in social life? How does the production of knowledge and secrecy affect the domain of intimacy? What kinds of knowledge are rendered intimate, and what makes them intimate? What is it that is to be shared, as Berlant refers to, who does the sharing, and who is involved in crafting the narrative of sharing?
Anthropologists have long sought to investigate forms of intimacy that may be described as alternatives vis-à-vis given societal norms. In doing so, researchers have pointed out how such alternative forms of intimacy question and often transgress received notions of what is to belong to the private and the public domains and are thereby engaged in a negotiation over what types of interactions may and should be defined as intimate. Discourses and practices of intimacy are thus an important means of mediating between the private and the public, but even more broadly, between different socialities, spaces, and geographies. In this workshop, we would like to take up this idea of intimacy as a form of mediation, yet explore and investigate what forms of intimacy may be identified in relation to and beyond the domain of sex and sexuality.
We invite contributions that aims to make use of intimacy in a variety of geographical locations, addressing one or more of the following questions:
· How does intimacy relate to nationalism, the political domain, areas of consumption and religion?
· What social work does intimacy do in these contexts, how does it order various forms of sharing?
· Where do relationships start and where do they cease to be intimate?
· What kinds of affect, what forms of attachment and desire cast relationships as “intimate” in the first place?
· How much is intimacy nurtured by notions of privacy and publicity?
· To what degree is intimacy an effect of the interventions that seem to be threatening its very existence, interventions by various actors and agents such as state authorities, law, medico-scientific scholarship, multiple understandings of religion and the regulations related to it, the media and else?
