Sex Under Intimate Siege: Transgender Lives, Law and State Violence in Contemporary Turkey

My doctoral research is about the production of marginalized sexualities through both the exercise of power and resistance to it. Focusing on legal codes and regulations surrounding sex reassignment surgeries (SRSs), sex work, hate crimes targeting trans people, and state officials' (juridical actors, police, doctors, forensic medicine people) legal and extralegal relations with trans people in Beyoglu, Istanbul, I scrutinize the transformation of trans lives into the microphysical domain of state power for the symbolic and material production of sexual and gender difference in Turkey. I also analyze how trans people respond to this process in their everyday lives. Starting with the queer history of Beyoglu, and trans people's everyday experiences of spatial discrimination, marginalization and displacement by the police, capital owners, landlords, and neighbors since the 1960s, I investigate how myriad forms of everyday violence shape trans people's political and intimate subjectivities. The construction and deployment of "transsexuality" as a medico-legal category is also part of this violent process. I elaborate on the work of this category to discuss how medico-legal actors of the state evaluate transsexuality, and hence, one's "true" sex, and open trans people's bodies to violent proximities and intimacies. Overall I argue that the categories of sex and gender are integral to the formation and intimate workings of Turkish state power as the state seeks to govern and regulate not only bodies and sexuality, but also subjects' intimate conducts and desires. The second part of my dissertation focuses on trans people's responses to these relations of violence, including the making of transgender community - a form of family and trans activism. In many cases, practices that are understood culturally as essential family duties (i.e. providing emotional and financial protection, caring for the body at death) are re-claimed by the trans community, replacing the assumed role of the family and announcing the community as "the real family." I discuss family as one of the most contested intimate sites in transgender people's lives, a site that is intimately intertwined with an ethics of care in the face of everyday violence. Arguably another expression of this ethics of care is trans activism in Istanbul. By looking at how trans people organize and mobilize around hate crimes, police violence and state control over SRSs, I scrutinize trans people's definitions of and struggle for queer justice in institutional spaces, as well as the street.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0