Zorunlu heteroseksüellik ve Türkiye muhalefet alanı üzerine bir tartışma

This introduction theorizes the formative relationship between violence and intimacy through the lenses of the trans everyday in Turkey. The intimate world is the trans everyday—that is, trans people’s bodies, their personal relationships, and trans spaces of inhabitation and socialization—is, in very violent ways, made sexually and morally legible and less ambiguous by the cisheteronormative organization of the street, the police, the medical institution, the legal domain, and the family and kinship. Yet the violent conditions of trans lives in Turkey are, at the same time, the conditions of trans empowerment, resistance, resilience, and the struggle in intimate ways. The theoretical concept of violent intimacies brings together stories of victimization and survival, abandonment and adoption, marginalization and resistance, death and life that might otherwise appear dissimilar. A focus on the trans everyday shows how the violence constitute a social field of creative living within which trans people invent and shape forms of intimacy that allow them to inhabit the world.

Violence & Intimacy

2024

Displacement as Emplacement

2024

This chapter is a story of trans geography in the urban landscape of Istanbul. Situating the sexual and sex/gender-transgressive character of Beyoglu within a broader social context of ethnic, religious, economic, sexual, and gendered spatialized otherness, the chapter delineates the historical and contemporary significance of space and place making to trans lives and queer possibilities. Cisheteronormativity, as a form of communal and spatial intimacy, incessantly marks trans people’s bodies as unfamiliar, out of place, and transgressive. Trans people are displaced from the visual and material field of public life in violent ways that include the use of spatial techniques of surveillance and securitization, extralegal police violence, urban transformation projects, and the flow of neoliberal capital into their neighborhoods. Yet everyday trans struggles over urban landscape are not only about constant displacement and forced mobility but also about spatial intimacies in the forms of inhabitation, cohabitation, and emplacement.

Extralegality, Surveillance, & Police Violence

2024

This chapter examines the changing relationship among law, securitization, and trans people between the 1960s and 2010s. This period was marked by significant transformations in the deployment of the police force to criminalize and punish trans people in both public and private spaces. The chapter elaborates on the forms of violent intimacies constituted between trans people and police officers, who embody state power through legal and extralegal means of surveillance and securitization. By constantly negotiating the process of surveillance and securitization, trans women oblige the police to introduce new legal and extralegal strategies to control and regulate, and hence these trans women shape the police itself. In fact, violence, as a social and cultural relation, conditions and transforms the praxis of law and the domain of extralegality into a process that is mutually shaped and coformed by trans people and the police.