Deviant Attachments

Abstract This article examines a long-lasting complex web of discourses imbued with sexual anxiety and moral panic as a site of power, knowledge, and signification about the ethno-religious Alevi lifeworld in Turkey. It demonstrates how the narratives and representations of “deviance” mobilized by the state have organized Turkish politics around national morality, security, and dissent toward populations in ethnic, sectarian, and sexual margins. A close reading of an assemblage of archives in political and cultural repertoire from both the imperial past and the present secular nation-state makes it possible to suggest that the dominant representation of Alevi culture is hypersexualized, one that is placed outside the sexual and sectarian normativity, and Alevi bodies are a religiously queered population systematically produced in the Turkish national imagination. In doing so, the article pushes the boundaries of Alevi scholarship. It brings Aleviness into dialogue with theoretical discussions of sexuality, queerness, nationalism, and affect in feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and queer of color critique. By employing auto-ethnography, the author considers the affective and political implications of the so-called deviant status applied to Alevi and LGBTI+ people and makes parallel reading of queer and Alevi solidarity in the context of the Sunni-Islamist governance of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).