States of Exception: Legal Governance of Trans Women in Urban Turkey

Abstract

Based on life-story narratives of trans women, this article aims to shed light on the role of the law in their exclusion from public spaces in urban Turkey over the last four decades. In the light of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the sovereign exception, I argue trans women in Turkey routinely find themselves in the position of homo sacer: the bare life that has been rendered politically disqualified and consigned to death. Unlike in Agamben’s account, in which subjects are turned into homo sacers in a singular gesture of the sovereign, my analysis directs attention to the myriad ways states of exception can be created. The experiences of trans women in urban Turkey demonstrate that exceptional legal regimes can be generated by suspending – or by simply not enforcing – the law, as well as, conversely, by establishing an overwhelming presence of the law in daily life. Rather than opposing legality to sovereignty, I argue closer attention needs to be paid to the interfaces of law with negative forms of power and to increasingly sophisticated ways of articulating biopolitical concerns to legal practices revolving around sovereignty.

Violent Affections: Queer sexuality, techniques of power, and law in Russia

“…Law -as discourse -is understood as a crystallised version of power relations configured through these techniques (Foucault 1978b, 92-3;Golder and Fitzpatrick 2009, 72). Yet this explanation of power relations allows for little to no messiness or variability in the workings and products of power that are becoming increasingly evident, including through the analysis of law (Amietta 2021;Taşcıoğlu 2021). Nevertheless, it is an influential interpretation, and it is the first brick in my own reading of neodisciplinary power.…”

Trans theoretical approaches to memory and relatedness: Potentials and suggestions at the intersections of transgender studies and queer studies

“…This family life automatically connects the sustainability of domestic life (from hygiene to material and temporal order of the house) and children to women through motherhood where children learn the first lessons of being a “good human” and “good citizen” by staying within the gendered and sexualized limits of family life. Trans/queer feminist scholarship on Turkey reveals how practices that create these categories of citizenship through gendered and sexualized norms of being, becoming, and relating make enmeshment that demonizes, criminalize, and terrorize a woman who does not fit the limits of familial citizenship (Savci, 2020; Sirman, 2013; Taşçıoğlu, 2021; Zengin, 2016). In Turkey, where familial citizenship is the core of the relationship between family and nation, cis-hetero-normative kinship is positioned as the smallest and foundational unit of the Turkish nation.…”