Introduction: Violence and Intimacy (original) (raw)
Related papers
Mortal Life of Trans/Feminism: Notes on " Gender Killings " in Turkey
Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2016
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 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.
“STOLEN STORIES”: KURDISH LGBTT ACTIVISM IN DIYARBAKIR
2012
In Turkey, corporeal threats to Kurdish and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transvestite or transsexual people target both groups through governing policies and silent practices. Yet Kurdish LGBTT people do not experience violence in homogenous ways. Through original ethnographic fieldwork with two LGBTT organizations in Diyarbakir in summer 2012, I identify the ways in which a current assemblage of queer existence and survival are fiercely achieved under a landscape of extra-judicial structural oppression within LGBTT activism in Diyarbakir, Turkey. What emerges out of this work is a critique of how LGBT activism in Turkey has become complicit in governmentality within an increasingly neoliberal landscape. In contrast to the Turkish state, 'empowerment' has been used to generalize about a shared set of problems and interests for LGBT people, and pursue solutions through activism (Cruikshank, 1999). I also assert that stories of transsexual oppression become privatized common property resources and cultural products through 'accumulation of dispossession' (Harvey, 2005). This assemblage for “regulating economic life” through the casting of trans subjects into death worlds is at once a means of survival for privileged activists who benefit from funding and power hierarchies, and is problematically complicit in the fulfillment of transnational hierarchies which situate the Global North as liberators of the Global South. I explore this phenomenon by centering paradoxes to unity within LGBTT activism in Diyarbakir, Turkey, and by investigating LGBTT group discourses of unity. Several narratives of group conflict show that the values espoused by LGBTT activists are in conflict with their actions and everyday treatment of one another. In Chapter 1 I demonstrate how the ethos of unity espoused by group Rainbow is in conflict with personal motivations for income within a neoliberal landscape. In Chapter 2, I center a Rainbow Organization group discussion which reveals tensions surrounding gay and trans sex workers in the group. In my example, I read one LGBTT group as a contact zone, wherein the important issue of socioeconomic status and moral positions on the “wrong” practice of sexual relations by gay and trans sex workers under local norms of patriarchy emerge as a social paradox to LGBTT unity. In Chapter 3 I describe how trans women navigate hierarchies within their own sex-worker milieu. Under a mafia-like gang structure, violence is often used to regulate a competitive gay and trans sex-worker market. In Chapter 4, I argue that migration is simultaneously a paradox to group unity as well as necessary means of survival. Narratives of migration by LGBTT activists from Diyarbakir demonstrate the complexity of social hierarchies which are navigated by queer Kurdish subjects in Turkey—woman and man, biological son and queer family daughter, sex worker/activist and student, Kurd and Turk. In conclusion I argue that within the category of “LGBT,” Turkish ethnicised citizenship and Kurdish political movements are structurally positioned to prevent an easy coalition. The topic of Kurdish minorities is increasingly framed through a lens of multiculturalism under the state, Turkish LGBT activism, and the Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party (BDP). Trans is partitioned off from lesbian, gay and bisexual by neoliberal family values. Sex-workers are positioned to experience the utmost violence through extra-judicial policies related to military conscription. Enmeshed in the lives of nation, the ethnicised categories of Turk and Kurd, and under the state which governs the realm of the social through extra-judicial practices, and through the promotion of Islamic neoliberal family values, capital formations encourage Kurdish LGBT would-be NGOs to sell the only thing they have—their stories of death and oppression. These stories, however, cast trans women into an afterlife where they become fodder for activism from which they will never benefit. "Stolen stories" are thus emblematic of the broad constellation of the biopolitical realm of aggregate populations which serve as a resource for power under the Turkish nation-state.
The Afterlife of Gender: Sovereignty, Intimacy and Muslim Funerals of Transgender Women in Turkey
Cultural Anthropology , 2019
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 categories, I address them as a social field of constant and emergent contestation, which in turn marks the gendered and sexual limits of belonging in regimes of belief, family, kinship, and citizenship, and in practices of mourning and grief. I argue that death at the thresholds of sexual and gender regimes presents a space to discover novel connections between sovereignty and intimacy and to examine their coconstitution through the registers of violence endured by the gendered/sexed body.
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism in Turkey: A Historical Overview
Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism in Turkey: A Historical Overview
Based on an auto-ethnographic engagement with the feminist and transgender communities in Turkey, this research presents a historical examination of trans exclusionary radical feminist discourse emanated in the Anglo-American context, with a particular focus on its implications on local and political specificities of feminism and transgender politics in contemporary Turkey. Özet Türkiye’deki feminist ve trans topluluklarlarla oto-etnografik bir ilişkilenmeye dayanan bu araştırma, Anglo-Amerikan bağlamda ortaya çıkan trans dışlayıcı radikal feminist söylemin - özellikle günümüz Türkiye’sindeki feminizm ve trans politikalarının özgüllüğü üzerindeki etkilerine odaklanarak - tarihsel bir analizini sunar.