Necropolitics of ıntimacy: family violence and trans lives in Türkiye

This article examines the violence experienced by trans individuals in Türkiye within family and intimate relationships, treating it as a structured, enduring regime rather than a series of isolated acts. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 17 trans individuals, the study uses reflexive thematic analysis to trace how violence originates within the family and extends into intimate relationships, public spaces, and institutional encounters. The analysis brings together Agamben's state of exception and bare life with Mbembe's necropolitics and politics of enmity to show how trans individuals are excluded from legal and moral protection and governed through abandonment, exposure, and slow death. Relocating Agamben's concepts from the concentration camp, his paradigmatic site of exception, to the family, the article distinguishes domination within family membership from the revocation of membership itself and treats bare life as a negotiated asymptote rather than an inhabited condition. The findings show that violence is normalised through discourses of love, protection and morality, while state institutions often withdraw from their protective role or become sites of secondary harm. Preventing violence against trans individuals requires political interventions that simultaneously address familial relations, intimate life, and institutional responsibility.