Full Description
In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people's everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.
Contents
Abbreviations ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction. Violence and Intimacy 1
1. Displacement as Emplacement 37
2. Extralegality, Surveillance, and Police Violence 68
3. Psychiatric Demarcation of Sex/Gender 98
4. Touch, Gaze, and the Heteropenetrative State 130
5. Justice, Criminal Law, and Trans Femicides 151
6. Funerals and Experiments with Trans Kin 170
Coda 197
Appendix: On Method and Methodology 205
Notes 209
Bibliography 237
Index 265
