Table Of ContentQUEER IN TRANSLATION:
PARADOXES OF WESTERNIZATION AND SEXUAL OTHERS IN
THE TURKISH NATION
by
Evren Savci
_____________________________________________________________________
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(SOCIOLOGY)
August 2011
Copyright 2011 Evren Savci
UMI Number: 3478063
All rights reserved
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DEDICATION
This dissertation is dedicated to the gey, lezbiyen, biseksuel, transeksuel, travesti,
lubunya, ayi, baç, feminen and, escinsel people of Turkey,
with infinite gratitude, love and respect....
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation is the accumulation of years of love, support, friendship and
mentorship of many wonderful people. The first set of thank you I owe to my wonderful
parents Birsel and Cavit Savci, whose unyielding love, support and belief in me has
allowed me to flourish into the person I am today. There truly are no better parents. I am
also thankful to my brother Onur who has kindly forwarded me any news he thought
might be of interest to me. Knowing that he is proud of me and the work I do makes me
stand taller in the world. My fiancée Kim Peirce had a near-Ph.D. experience, and I thank
her for surviving it with me and for making my breaks so precious and fun, even when
they were as short as ten minutes. I feel very lucky to have learned from and grown with
her love, support, understanding and patience through one of the hardest processes of my
life.
I am very grateful to my committee members Mike Messner, Macarena Gomez-
Barris and Jack Halberstam who have contributed tremendously to this project. Mike's
gentle but firm push has helped me move along this path that turned out to be much
harder than I had anticipated. His commitment to reading every single chapter, and
making sure they were delivered systematically, as well as the dissertation group he put
together has been instrumental —I will venture to say to all of us— in keeping on
writing, even when writing did not come easy. I also thank my dissertation group
members Kristen Barber, Suzel Bozada-Deas, James McKeever, Cenk Ozbay, Nicole
Willms, and Tal Peretz for their careful reads of my chapters and valuable comments.
iii
The directed readings I have conducted with Maca that focused on the relations of
colonialism, nation, sexuality, gender, and governmentality helped set up much of the
underlying theoretical framework of this project. I am very grateful for that, as well as for
her refreshing approach to Sociology. I thank Jack for introducing me to Queer Studies,
and for years of priceless support, and deep inspiration. His imprints on this project are
momentous, and I truly appreciate the extent of his involvement in a project he was not
chairing.
I thank Sharon Hays for her brilliant mind and beautiful soul, and for her
tremendous influence on the kind of intellectual I have become over the years. I also
thank her for being an amazing friend, and an intellectual and emotional support over the
years. There have been other generous souls some of whom I have learned from during
graduate school, and others who have provided feedback on my project: I thank Tim
Biblarz, Josh Kun, Sarah Course, Bethany Bryson, Paul Amar, Fatima El-Tayeb,
Chandan Reddy, Jyoti Puri, Sima Shaksari, Louise Cainkar, and Dana Collins for their
willingness to listen and help.
I was lucky to be at an institution and department that supports graduate students
wholeheartedly. I am thankful to our graduate director Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo who
fought for any bit of funding for us, and for all the financial support USC Sociology and
Gender Studies have provided over the years in various forms. I also am a thankful
receiver of a USC merit fellowship, USC College international field research award, a
Phi Beta Kappa international graduate student fellowship, and an honorable mention for
ASA Sexualities dissertation award, all of which have provided the financial (and moral)
support to get through the dissertation research and writing. I also cannot thank enough
iv
the wonderful USC Sociology staff, Lisa Rayburn, Stachelle Overland, Amber Thomas
and Melissa Hernandez, who have made the road considerably less bumpy —every Ph.D.
knows how much we owe our degree to the hard work of the staff of our departments.
I feel blessed to have met radiant graduate students throughout my graduate career
that have made academia feel like home. Thank you to Laura Portwood-Stacer, Carey
Sargent, Cenk Ozbay, Jess Butler, Inna Arzumanova, Meghan Moran, Yetta Howard,
Gino Conti, Deb Al-Najjar, Laura Fugikawa, Alexis Lothian, Wendy Cheng, Micaela
Smith, Anjali Nath, Engin Volkan and Sinan Birdal. Laura and Carey have been through
the thick and thin of graduate school with me. Their friendship means the world, and I
only can hope I am able to be there for them as much as they are for me.
Finally, this dissertation would have never been written without the help of the
queer people of Turkey. I cannot express my gratitude for the generosity of so many
people with their time and their friendship, many of whom opened their homes to me,
have introduced me to others, have spent long hours with me during interviews. I owe a
very special thank you to Sinan Goknur, who I consider part of my family. He helped me
through this project from start to finish on every level, and for the most time I would have
been lost without his insights. Baran Ergenc has literally taken me by the hand and
introduced me to all the trans sex workers I have gotten the chance to speak with, as well
as the bear community. It would be only fair to say I owe half of this dissertation to him.
I thank Tuna Erdem and Seda Ergul for making their home a second home to me during
my fieldwork. And I thank every single person who has accepted to be interviewed, who
I cannot name here for the sake of anonymity. I truly hope that this dissertation will some
day become a book they will be happy to have been a part of.
v
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Dedication ii
Acknowledgments iii
Abstract viii
Chapter 1. Introduction 1
Sociology of Sexualities versus Queer Studies: Queer Negativity, the
"Anti-Social" Turn and Social Sciences 7
Understanding Sexuality —Writings from the Diaspora and the "non-West" 22
Global Queers, Queer Globalizations 26
State, Nation, and The Queer 31
On Methodology 38
A Guide Through the Chapters 44
Chapter 2. Turkey and Its Civilizational Others 49
The Making of the Turkish Nation-state and the Modern Turkish Citizen 49
Women and the Nation 54
Of Race and Class 59
Modernizing Nation and Sexual Regulation 65
Theorizing Power 73
Chapter 3. Universal Human Rights and the Production of an Islamic Backlash 80
Universal Human Rights, Equality and Freedom 88
The Rhetoric of Turban Debate in Contemporary Turkey 91
Tracing the Islamic Backlash —"Kendine Musluman" versus "Herkese
Musluman" 100
Subjects of Cruelty, and Subjects of Rights 106
An Illness or a Sin? 115
Chapter 4. Who Killed Ahmet Yildiz? Seeking Justice in Modernizing Turkey 134
Situating the Story in Global Context: Turkey Under Western Eyes 136
The (Turkish) State and the (Kurdish) Family 139
On Honor, Islam, and the Problem with the Urge to Legislate 153
vi
Chapter 5. We Keep the Secrets of this Nation 164
Becoming Trans, Becoming a Sex-worker 165
Citizenship and Exclusion
1) Spatial Exclusion from Neighborhoods 167
2) The Law of Offenses/Misdemeanors and Transformation of
Public Space 175
3) Travesti Teroru (Transvestite Terror) and Eradication of
Monstrous Bodies 190
Keeping the Secrets of the Nation 201
Chapter 6. Western Knowledge, Politico-Cultural Capital and Belonging
Among Queer Women in Istanbul 206
Critiquing Massad's Gay International 209
Lambda's Criteria 213
The Club 216
Entertaining Class 221
The Problems with Kadinca
Challenges to Gender Displays of the Women at the Club 225
Challenges to Door-policy 227
Politics of Solidarity versus Politics of Rights 234
Politics as Constraint versus Politics as Liberation 239
A Place that Belong to Women 247
On Putting Down and Destroying 253
Chapter 7. Conclusion 259
References 266
Appendices
Appendix A: Thoughts on Methods and Being in the Field 292
Appendix B: Informants 298
vii
ABSTRACT
In my dissertation, through looking at contemporary urban queer formations and
politics, I theorize about the complex ways in which power and abjection operates in the
context of Turkey's post-Empire, Westernizing nation-state formation. I argue that queer
formations, subjects and subcultures are particularly fruitful places from which to
understand how power operates in Turkey, as they have been historically cast to a
particular space between state regulation and state negligence. While queers have not
been cast as the civilizational Others of the modernizing Turkish nation, or as a threat to
national unity or identity, there has been a quiet, national imposition of monogamous,
adult reproductive heterosexuality as the norm for the new Republic.
Using four case studies that emerged from my fieldwork in Istanbul and Ankara,
Turkey, based on ethnographic methods, as well as in-depth interviews and analysis of
popular/media discourses, I analyze what these sites reveal about the mechanisms of
abjection of the modern westernizing nation-state, especially the roles played by
processes of sexualization, racialization, secularization, criminalization and gendering of
citizen subjects within the context of national aspirations for "civilization." I lay out how
systems of justice and other forces of the state work to mark certain bodies as criminal, or
simply push them outside of juridicial and political subjectivity and citizenship, how
Western knowledges and discourses of gender and sexuality and human rights travel and
get articulated and mobilized in ways that can and do contribute to divisions among
queers and among larger groups "Others" of the secular Turkish nation-state, and about
viii
the uneasy relationship the secular nation-state has to other structures, such as feudal
kinship systems, and religion that have the power to produce alternative regimes of truth,
and deploy military/police functions. I provide these analyses through putting both the
sexual, and the social at the heart of my critical inquiry, which I argue is essential for
transnational and interdisciplinary queer studies.
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