{"id":49683,"date":"2013-07-12T09:19:40","date_gmt":"2013-07-12T08:19:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/sexuality-and-solidarity-after-gezi\/49683\/"},"modified":"2013-07-12T09:19:40","modified_gmt":"2013-07-12T08:19:40","slug":"sexuality-and-solidarity-after-gezi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/sexuality-and-solidarity-after-gezi\/","title":{"rendered":"Sexuality and Solidarity after Gezi"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 28 June, the inhabitants of Kayac\u00c4\u00b1k village gathered to protest the ongoing construction of a kalekol<\/em> (a high-tech military post with automated weapon capabilities) in the Lice district of Diyarbakir, located in Turkey\u2019s Kurdistan. Lice district had been repeatedly burned down by \u201canti-terrorism\u201d operations of the Turkish state in the 1990s\u2013operations that claimed hundreds, if not thousands, of lives buried in undisclosed mass graves to this day. This time, the brutal military response to the protest\u2013in the middle of a peace process currently underway between the Turkish state on the one hand and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) guerillas and the larger Kurdish movement on the other\u2013left nine people wounded, and claimed the life of an eighteen-year-old protestor, Medeni Y\u00c4\u00b1ld\u00c4\u00b1r\u00c4\u00b1m. The news of the deadly military response spread quickly via Facebook and Twitter, and a protest march from the Galatasaray Square to Taksim Square was called at six pm the following day. This day also happened to be the sixth day of the Twenty-First LBTT Pride Week in Istanbul. In light of these calls for protest the \u201cAlliances and Oppositions\u201d panel, aimed at discussing the LGBTQ communities\u2019 solidarity with other oppositional groups after Gezi, was immediately postponed. \u00a0All participants at the event were subsequently encouraged to join the ranks of the protestors at Galatasaray Square.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Serra Akcan\/NarPhotos<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

When the LBGT individuals joined the march towards Taksim Square with their rainbow flags, the slogans protestors chanted included, \u201ceverywhere is Lice, everywhere is Resistance!\u201d and \u201cResist Lice, \u2018same-sexers\u2019 (e\u00c5\u0178cinseller<\/em> in Turkish) are with you!\u201d Shortly after the march started to dissipate after a sit-in protest at Taksim Square, the second and biggest dance party organized under the auspices of the Pride Week got under way at Garaj Istanbul, a concert hall also located in Taksim. After deliberations about canceling it altogether in the midst of another atrocity committed by the Turkish state, the show, featuring an unplugged performance by the brilliant Kurdish vocalist, Aynur Do\u00c4\u0178an, went on. Protest chants in solidarity with Lice repeatedly interrupted, or rather provided the choir to, the performance.<\/p>\n

In the midst of overwhelming news reporting and political analyses of the \u201cresistance\u201d from a variety of perspectives, \u00a0the LGBTQ community\u2019s presence at Gezi Park has at best been reduced to a quirky footnote\u2013a footnote indexing the \u201cliberal\u201d and \u201copen-minded\u201d nature of the nascent alignment of resistance at Gezi Park. At worst, these analyses presented the LGBTQ community as the miner\u2019s canary for the nefarious plans of the Erdo\u00c4\u0178an administration: one marking the moralizing thrust behind the government\u2019s urban renewal project of the red-light and entertainment district of Beyo\u00c4\u0178lu at large, of which the demolition and \u201credevelopment\u201d of the Gezi Park was only a small part. With their rainbow flags and creatively sarcastic slogans and banners, of the LGBTQ community\u2019s strong presence at Gezi was taken as a mere visual embellishment to serious analyses of other things and communities assembled under the banner of \u201cresistance:\u201d From analyses of the changing cultural outlook of Marxist and socialist political formations and shifting parameters of class relations in Turkey, to those of the sustainability of the \u201cresistance\u201d movement in the near future, their presence without exception escaped critical scrutiny in English- and Turkish-language media alike, when it was not deliberately sidelined to the fringes of the analytical frame reserved for more \u201cpressing\u201d matters and more \u201csizeable\u201d communities.<\/p>\n

Contrary to this overwhelming tendency, I want to situate the LGBTQ individuals and their collective political action at and beyond Gezi at the center of my analysis. If we approach them as political subjects to be reckoned with, I suggest, we could learn a few lessons about the connections between sexuality and solidarity. Such lessons could help us rethink the allegedly modular alignment of modern state power and (homo)sexuality beyond familiar frameworks that either posit the latter as an effect of (neo)imperial cultural forms making their way into the Middle East, or present its \u201cprotection\u201d or \u201ctoleration\u201d as the latest litmus test of how \u201cliberal\u201d and \u201cdemocratic\u201d a state is.<\/p>\n

Gezi Park was not only the biggest \u201ccruising\u201d spot for the community, not unlike Park-e Laleh in Tehran, the Tiergarten in Berlin, or the Rambles in New York\u2019s Central Park. It was also the last remaining \u201cqueer\u201d space for working-class folks denied access to the burgeoning \u201cqueer\u201d scene of Istanbul, which was built around an increasing number of high-end bars and clubs. From sex-workers and hustlers looking for customers, to men looking to have sex with men, to the occasional romantic looking for hir lover, the marble steps of the park, themselves \u201cconverted\u201d from the tombstones of the Armenian cemetery that once stood in its place, have seen it all: Gezi Park had been a space of seemingly \u201cstrange\u201d encounters that cut across class, political ideology and gender identity divides long before its occupation by a variety of activists and concerned citizens. For the \u201cLGBT Blok\u201d with their impressive frontline struggle against police brutality, enshrined in the picture below, the struggle was squarely about the Park and more. Furthermore, the sustained presence of the \u201cBlok\u201d at Gezi was not peopled by seasoned activists or cruising regulars alone. On the contrary, the \u201cLGBT Blok\u201d in particular and other emergent factions of dissent that occupied the park pulled in previously \u201cunaligned\u201d or \u201capolitical\u201d individuals into the protests. Not unlike pious youth at odds with the vicious capitalism of the Erdo\u00c4\u0178an administration, who became increasingly politicized through their encounters with the \u201cAnti-Capitalist Muslims,\u201d LGBTQ individuals encountered their community anew as a politically viable one through the \u201cBlok,\u201d blurring the activist\/regular folk distinction even more. It was precisely this process of \u201cpoliticization\u201d and the resultant comfort of self-expression as political subjects that set the stage for solidarity among diverse factions at Gezi.<\/p>\n

For the LGBTQ community in particular, it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that the decade-long Pride slogan, \u201cWhose Morality is Public Morality?\u201d found its most concrete footing at Gezi. As Samuel Delany describes the remaking of midtown Manhattan, in Times Square Blue, Times Square Red, the \u201curban renewal\u201d project underway in the Beyo\u00c4\u0178lu aimed not only at building spaces deemed more profitable for late capitalism, but also at cleansing the district of its allegedly immoral inhabitants and practices. To paraphrase Erdo\u00c4\u0178an, in order to ensure the \u201csafety\u201d and \u201cwell-being\u201d of Turkey\u2019s youth and build his \u201cconservative generation<\/a>\u201d through increased procreation (\u201cat least three children<\/a>\u201d per couple, he repeatedly ordered), Beyo\u00c4\u0178lu had to be cleansed, and the LGBTQ spaces dismantled. In other words, Erdo\u00c4\u0178an\u2019s larger \u201crenewal\u201d project has always been equally interested in generating capital accumulation and heterosexual procreation.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Lambda Istanbul<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

With trans sex-workers\u2019 homes on Bayram Sokak in Taksim and Avc\u00c4\u00b1lar recently raided by the police, sixty-nine trans individuals murdered because of their gender identity since 2002 alone, and the former Health Minister calling same-sex desire an \u201cillness,\u201d the LGBT community in Turkey has been under sustained attack for quite some time. The LGBT community, in other words, had all the reason to stand in solidarity with the Kurdish movement, and not only because the \u201cKurdish\u201d Peace and Democracy Party (the BDP in Turkish) has been the sole supporter of including sexual orientation and gender identity in the new constitutional amendment addressing the equality of all citizens. It was because both communities, which are by no means mutually exclusive, have realized that it was the same political project that aimed at persecuting Kurds and queers alike.<\/p>\n

This is not to say that there were no attempts made at rendering the aforementioned communities as mutually exclusive. On 15 July 2008, Ahmet Y\u00c4\u00b1ld\u00c4\u00b1z, a twenty-six-year-old physics student at Marmara University, was shot dead in his car near his apartment in \u00c3\u0153sk\u00c3\u00bcdar, Istanbul. Five months prior to the attack, Ahmet had filed for police protection in the face of the death threats he had been receiving, yet his request was rejected on unspecified grounds. Three out of the five bullets, fired from an unidentified vehicle, ripped through Ahmet\u2019s chest. The only son of \u201ca wealthy and conservative Kurdish family\u201d from Sanliurfa, who desperately tried to convince him to come back home and get himself \u201ccured,\u201d Ahmet\u2019s heartbreaking murder, dubbed as the first \u201cgay honor killing<\/a>\u201d in Turkey by The Independent, was rendered even more distressing by the fact that Ahmet\u2019s family refused to claim his deceased body and proceed with a proper burial. Ahmet Y\u00c4\u00b1ld\u00c4\u00b1z\u2019s body now rests in a cemetery for the nameless in Istanbul. Meanwhile, the prime suspect for the murder, Ahmet\u2019s father, remains on the run, and the trial drags on in absentia. The protests organized and public statements released by LGBT organizations in Turkey condemned the framing of the murder as a problem of the conservative and traditional Kurds of Turkey, and instead highlighted the structural failure of the state in protecting its citizens from preventable and often deadly violence, particularly when they are women and\/or LGBTQ individuals. Despite these attempts, however, Ahmet\u2019s murder came to stand for the incommensurable divide assumed between the inspiringly (if not wholly) liberal and secular West and the conservative and pious East in Turkey.<\/p>\n

When the LGBTQ community and their allies took over Istiklal Avenue in Taksim by the thousands again last Sunday, the slogan of \u201cAhmet Y\u00c4\u00b1ld\u00c4\u00b1z is here, where are his murderers?\u201d was not forgotten. Neither were Lice and the most recent atrocity of the Turkish state that claimed the life of an eighteen-year-old, as described in the opening of this piece. The LGBTQ individuals\u2019 political stance and concrete actions in Turkey at and beyond Gezi point to a different constellation of sexuality and solidarity that cannot be explained away by reducing them to objects of modular discourses alone. Instead, their cruising onto the political field of Turkey, and their growing solidarity with a variety of political formations, clearly demonstrate ways in which queer politics could be imagined and practiced anew. It was thanks to this practice of queer politics, and the solidarity between the \u201cLGBT Blok\u201d and the women\u2019s movements that workshops on misogynist and homophobic language were organized in Taksim to encourage protestors to think twice before resorting to such language in their slogans criticizing the Erdo\u00c4\u0178an administration.<\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a><\/p>\n

Photo Credit: Eric Politzer<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

The history and the present of (homo)sexuality in the Middle East have produced a plethora of scholarship recently<\/a>. The most controversial example of this scholarship is probably Joseph Massad\u2019s Desiring Arabs<\/em>, which came to define homosexuality as an effect of Western modernity and colonialism, rendered modular through (neo)imperialism. Massad\u2019s aim, as he explains in his recent interview<\/a> with F\u00c3\u00a9lix Boggio \u00c3\u2030wanj\u00c3\u00a9-\u00c3\u2030p\u00c3\u00a9e and Stella Magliani-Belkacem in French and republished by Jadaliyya, \u201cis not to remind us that \u2018sexuality\u2019 is experienced differently in different historical or geographical contexts, and that it has distinct \u2018cultural\u201d interpretations that shape it. Rather, what I insist on is that \u2018sexuality\u2019 itself, as an epistemological and ontological category, is a product of specific Euro-American histories and social formations, that it is a Euro-American \u2018cultural\u2019 category that is not universal or necessarily universalizable<\/em>.\u201d By extension, anyone like Ahmet Y\u00c4\u00b1ld\u00c4\u00b1z who insists on making claims based on sexuality is \u201ccomplicit\u201d with neocolonial sexualization or sexual neocolonization of the Middle East. Massad\u2019s analysis offers us a purist and diffusionist division of the universe into two mutually exclusive realms, whereby only one of these two holds sexuality in all its forms. For Massad, in other words, scientis sexualis<\/em> only emerges once and in one place \u2013 Europe \u2013 and then gets transplanted on the Middle East (and the rest of the non-European world), a place without a history of sexuality of its own, where sexual practices are only defined negatively, as that which is not the object of scientis sexualis. Such an approach assumes, rather than demonstrates, perfect subjugation of the object (sexuality) to the regime (scientis sexualis<\/em>) that aims to govern that object in the \u201cWest.\u201d It also fails to account for the sheer complexity and the productive multiplicity of meaning that emerges against a \u201cMiddle Eastern\u201d genealogy of sexuality: a genealogy that itself gets brutally fractured and successfully rendered \u201cforeign\u201d to the \u201cnatives\u201d of the Middle East themselves in their encounters with scientis sexualis<\/em>, as Afsaneh Najmabadi has skillfully demonstrated in Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity<\/em>.<\/p>\n

In other words, it is only once amrad, mukhannas, k\u00c3\u00b6\u00c3\u00a7ek<\/em>, and zenne<\/em> are systematically displaced from the historically sedimented grammars of sexuality in the Middle East that hamjins baz, kuni, e\u00c5\u0178cinsel, as well as gay, lesbian, homosexual, and queer come to dominate the contemporary uses of a modern grammar of sexuality in the Middle East. My aim here is not to excavate an archeology of these fractured genealogies in order to redeem a sovereign field of gender and sexuality studies in the Middle East. It is rather to suggest that there is a disavowed history of sexuality, sexual practices, and, yes, sexual identities, that precedes the modularity of what Massad conceives as \u201csexuality and what reduces queer solidarity to \u201cGay International.\u201d In other words, this disavowal itself structures the conditions of possibility for sexed subjects to articulate their sexualities, name their practices, and if they so choose, organize their politics. It is precisely due to this historical disavowal, which strips the \u201cnatives\u201d of their \u201cnative\u201d signs of sexuality, that these natives remain susceptible to charges of being degenerate and immoral products of Western modernity by those still armored with their intact \u201cdiscursive traditions.\u201d Therefore, it is of critical importance that we examine what people do on the ground with \u201csigns\u201d of sexuality, or parole<\/em> of sexuality, as opposed to getting caught up in its semantico-referential<\/em> grammar \u00c3\u00a0 la Saussure. The \u201cLGBT Blok\u201d in particular, and the LGBTQ community at large in Turkey more generally, might give us a few clues as to how it is done.<\/p>\n

Emrah Yildiz<\/strong> is a Joint PhD Candidate in Social Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. His research interests include historiography and ethnography of borderlands, anthropology of Islam and pilgrimage, political economy and contraband commerce, as well as studies of gender and sexuality in the Middle East. <\/em><\/p>\n

Republished with permission from: Counterpunch<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 28 June, the inhabitants of Kayac\u00c4\u00b1k village gathered to protest the ongoing construction of a kalekol (a high-tech military post with automated weapon capabilities) in the Lice district of Diyarbakir, located in Turkey\u2019s Kurdistan. Lice district had been repeatedly burned down by \u201canti-terrorism\u201d operations of the Turkish state in the 1990s\u2013operations that claimed hundreds, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-49683","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}