Geographies of place-affective trans-becoming: an ethnography of drag in Istanbul

This paper presents an ethnographic study of Dudakların Cengi, a drag and queer performing event series in Istanbul, where a community of predominantly trans and non-binary performers create a place of collectivity for self-expression and gender exploration. Drawing on trans and feminist geographical perspectives, we examine how the participants use drag as a way of creating shared imagery, exploring themselves in relation to gender, and producing places in the city through their performances beyond the stage. We conceptualise Dudakların Cengi as a place-as-becoming that emerges from the intensities of social ties, flows, narratives, and sensations. We also propose a geographical understanding of gendered embodiment to account for transness in new spatial ways that enable the interrogation of phenomena that do not immediately yield their relevancy to the category of gender. The data was collected in over three years of presence within the field through situated and reflexive participant observation, informal conversations, in-depth interviews, and the participants’ written narratives. We analyse the data with iterative cycles of grounded theory completed with continuous collaborative theorisation with participants. Through this collaborative theorisation, a series of concepts emerge that explain the experiences of the participants: opening drag, collectivising the stage, socialising in drag, urban navigation of gender, and an unfolding sense of drag. Together, these concepts help explain a novel understanding of place-affective trans-becoming.