Recently, ‘rent boys’ have become increasingly visible in the queer social spaces of Istanbul. They come from impoverished areas of the city and engage in compensated sex with other men. In this article, I examine how these heterosexually identified rent boys assemble and perform exaggerated masculinity in order to negotiate the tensions between their local socially excluded environments and an burgeoning western-style gay culture while they conduct their ‘risky’ sexual interactions with other men. Exaggerated masculinity repairs and masks the subverting effects of compensated sex for rent boys’ heterosexual subjectivities and makes them closer to the hegemonic ideals of masculinity. Through intense participant observation and 20 recorded interviews with rent boys and their clients, this study demonstrates how rent boys perform an assiduous self-governance through symbols and implicit meanings vis-à-vis different and contradictory class positions, gender identities, and sexual acts.
Today Turkey is one of the few Muslim-majority countries in which same-sex sexual acts, counternormative sexual identities, and expressions of gender nonconformism are not illegal, yet are heavily constrained and controlled by state institutions, police forces, and public prosecutors. For more than a decade Turkey has been experiencing a “queer turn”—an unprecedented push in the visibility and empowerment of queerness, the proliferation of sexual rights organizations and forms of sociabilities, and the dissemination of elements of queer culture—that has engendered both scholarly and public attention for sexual dissidents and gender non-conforming individuals and their lifeworlds, while it has also created new spaces and venues for their self-organization and mobilization. At the point of knowledge production and writing, this visibility and the possible avenues of empowerment that it might provide have been in jeopardy: not only do they appear far from challenging the dominant norms of the body, gender, and sexuality, but queerness, in all its dimensions, has become a preferred target for Islamist politics, conservative revanchism, and populist politicians.
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