Trans Worldmaking Struggles In Turkey

Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World is a compelling archival and ethnographic exploration of transness in Turkey, highlighting the complex interplay of violence and intimacy that shapes the social and institutional fabric of everyday life. This book reveals that trans-feminist practices and politics in Turkey emerge from intricate relationships and negotiations with the neoliberal, pro-Sunni Turkish government, which imposes increasing authoritarianism alongside moralistic securitization, ultra-nationalism, and cisheteronormative state ideologies. Aslı Zengin guides the reader through various social and institutional spheres within the urban experience in Istanbul, exposing how trans people mobilize against the mundane and normalized violence of cisheteronormativity and its biopolitical and necropolitical registers. These include critical interactions with state legal, medical, and religious institutions, police, familial structures, and feminist and LGBTQI+ organizations. The book contributes to scholarship on transness, neoliberalism, Islam, urban geography, affect, and gender and sexuality politics.Demonstrating the entanglement of world-shattering politics and life-making practices, Violent Intimacies engages with transness from the perspective of struggle intertwined with subjectivities, embodiments, places, narratives, feelings, and fragmented (not linear) temporalities in everyday Istanbul. It also teases out global themes such as trans medicalization, trans femicides, and LGBTQI+ terminology within the historical and cultural specificities of Turkey. Transness in the Turkish context does not become a graspable phenomenon for dominant Euro-American theorizations in transgender studies to examine their applicability or failure. Moving beyond a static, often Western-centric identification category or specific way of being in the world, transness in this work unfolds as a site of theory in its own right that assembles embodied social knowledge, experiences, and collective creative political performances. In doing so, Zengin also explores how local and global terms for sexed and gendered practices, identities, and bodies coexist in a Middle Eastern context.The book poses a challenge to the idea of metronormativity that has circulated in the scholarship on queer/trans geography, which associates sexual and gender minorities with megacities and, in the case of Turkey, would celebrate urban centers such as Istanbul as progressive. This popular discourse associates the rural/East with backwardness in the larger geopolitical picture while it narrates the metropolitan/West as modern and progressive. While such binaries have long been challenged in different contexts, it is still noteworthy that Zengin does not theorize trans existence and consciousness in Istanbul as an urban (read Westernized) possibility or romanticism. Instead, she illustrates how trans people inhabit, claim, and transform the urban world, which is both violent and intimate, as a physical reality and imaginative space. Zengin's approach can serve as a segue for other scholars to examine how state policies and practices forge the geographic aspects of today's sexual and gender politics in Turkey, expanding this scholarly inquiry beyond Istanbul.Zengin aligns with scholars in trans studies who challenge the idea that sex, gender, and sexuality are the only lenses through which to understand trans issues. She advocates for a more comprehensive and intersectional approach that explores transness in relation to the authoritarian management of social difference, the social production of violence and care, and the affective dimensions (e.g., touch/gaze) in everyday human interactions. As Zengin recounts how embodied and affective practices manifest in everyday places, such as streets, houses, hospitals, mosques, and courtrooms, the reader gains insight into the cisheteronormative forces that sexualize and gender these practices, as well as their relationship with the dynamics of racialized violence, nationalist religiosity, and neoliberal governmentality. For example, Zengin's discussion of a cemetery for the kimsesiz illustrates how these specific graveyards, established by the Turkish state for unclaimed or unidentified deceased individuals, serve as spatial markers for the deaths of the marginalized—specifically those who are gendered, classed, and racialized and who have been rejected or cast out by their homes or society. These cemeteries are burial sites for transgender people disowned by their blood families, homeless individuals, victims of femicides, premature babies, unaccompanied refugees, and mostly leftist and Kurdish political detainees who have forcibly disappeared under police interrogation and state violence. Zengin argues that these spatial designations render trans people anonymous, cast their bodies out from socially recognizable scripts of mourning, and abstract the kin practices outside the cisheteroreproductive family.Violent Intimacies eloquently captures Zengin's years of active companionship with the transgender community and their activism in Istanbul. It invites us to envision alternative ways of inhabiting conventional and naturalized scripts of belonging, family, and kinship. A careful reader will notice on the last page that Zengin intentionally chose not to include most stories of violence, discrimination, and exclusion within the trans community in Istanbul. Zengin's intellectual and political desire does not seem to disguise the messy situations she has observed over the years but instead avoids making trans people more vulnerable. Given that academic knowledge production is always selective and a work of curation, one can still rightfully ask what is at stake when we refuse to write certain things, especially when collectives, including trans activist circles, need accountability and must face their complicities based on their racial, sectarian, and class backgrounds. What are the limits of trans gesture and worldmaking in Turkey? While asking such questions is valid, readers may still appreciate scholarly refusals to retell as an offer to consider ethnographic storytelling as not necessarily tied to closures and permanent resolutions but as open, flowing, and never complete. As such, Zengin's timely book promises to ignite many future conversations on analytical and methodological approaches to the anthropology of queerness and transness in Turkey, the Middle East, and beyond.