Aslı Zengin, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke University Press, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Aslı Zengin (AZ): My motivation to write this book was both intellectual and political. The book is a trans-feminist research piece. That is, feminist research informed by trans politics and centering on trans perspectives, experiences, and stories. It is a product of my decades-long involvement in feminist and queer movements, as well as my encounters with their limitations when it comes to trans issues. One of the key reasons I wanted to write this book was an attempt to contribute to building more bridges and forming coalitions across queer, trans, and feminist theories and struggles. I also wanted to leave an analytical record or archive of our work together in a variety of political sites in the urban queer, trans, and feminist world of Istanbul, ranging from conferences to meetings and from demonstrations against femicides, urban transformation, and police violence to campaigns for sexual and gender rights.
I wanted to write a book that tells a story of transness as also a site of world-making in the thresholds of dominant socio-cultural life. I wanted to develop a critique of the concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality as the only vectors to understand trans lives, and instead shed light on a wider scope of analysis about hierarchies of life, existence, social organization, and ways of knowing. This location of the “trans everyday” is a transnational site of theory that aims to transgress the ongoing hegemony of North American and Eurocentric accounts in trans studies. Contrary to implicit or explicit scholarly assumptions, locations outside the Euro-North American contexts are not merely the places where theories are tested for their applicability or failure. These are geographies of theoretical production to understand the world beyond local, national, and regional boundaries. Moreover, I wanted to center on trans lives within Middle East studies. Despite the substantial research on gender in the Middle East, a vast majority of this acclaimed work revolves around cis women and the themes of women’s agency, secularism, Islam, the veil, and/or the relationship between state institutions and women. This book places transness at the center of analysis, showing how institutional and social troubles with sex/gender transgression shape state formation; the familial, religious, and national order; and the urban geography in Turkey. I wanted to show how trans people in Turkey theorize their everyday lives with all these social and institutional actors.
I offer a novel concept, violent intimacies, to understand the concurrent work of violence and intimacy in the organization of social and institutional life through the lenses of sex/gender transgression.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
AZ: Violent Intimacies examines how everyday troubles with sex/gender nonconformity in social and institutional life shape the organization of state power, the social production of family and kinship, regimes of sexuality and gender, as well as feminist and LGBTQI activism in Turkey. I foreground in my analysis how trans people respond to this process in their everyday negotiations with state legal and medical authorities, police officers, family members, religious actors, and members of feminist and LGBTQI organizations. Rather than taking sex and sexual difference as given categories, the book addresses them as a social field of constant and emergent contestation.
Urban displacement, social discrimination and exclusion, sexual and gender regimes, blood family and kinship, medico-legal regulation, police surveillance, and religious interpretations constantly produce differential values over life and death for different social groups, intimately shaping the everyday experience of being a trans person. This book is a probe into this complex picture to which I gained access during my ethnographic research with trans people across several sites in Istanbul, ranging from trans people's homes and neighborhoods to the cafes, bars, and streets they frequented, from events such as parties, funerals, conferences, and meetings to political campaigns for sexual and gender rights and against hate crimes. This provided a more comprehensive portrayal of both world-shattering and world-making conditions of the ordinary in trans lives.
One of the main discussions of the book is the everyday creative and constructive tension between violent efforts to constantly define and disambiguate sex/gender transgression, on the one hand, and trans people’s incessant negotiations with these efforts, on the other. As much as trans people are shaped by the cis-heteronormative forces of the state, family, and religion, they also push these actors and act on these frameworks to transform them. To examine this entangled world, I offer a novel concept, violent intimacies, to understand the concurrent work of violence and intimacy in the organization of social and institutional life through the lenses of sex/gender transgression. I argue that violent intimacies as a theoretical concept exposes the connecting tissue or the artery of a cis-heteronormative social order in its intertwinement with neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical order, and authoritarian management of social difference that not only corresponds to sex and gender, but also ethnicity, race, and class.
Another important contribution of the book is around the world-making capacity and practices of trans people. They creatively reform and remake the violent conditions of their living to inhabit the world. For example, they adopt and care for their friends and reclaim their friends’ funerals and monetary needs in the face of familial abandonment and disowning; they invent tactics to cope with state violence which in turn pressure the police to formulate new violent tactics of discrimination and exclusion; and they create themselves as political subjects in organizing and mobilizing around hate crimes, police violence, and state control over gender affirmation processes. I also look at how their local politics is shaped in a transnational context, in interaction with medical discourses of transsexuality, Western LGBTQ terminology, and political and legal discourses of hate crimes and human rights.
While crafting this book, I tried to bring together sets of literature that are not usually in conversation with each other: trans, queer, and feminist studies; transnational studies of sexuality; social theory; political anthropology of state and violence; medical anthropology; interdisciplinary work on intimacy; urban geographical work on sexuality and race; and critical studies of race, racialization, security, and law.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
AZ: I have been working on sexual and transgression and its governance for almost two decades now. My previous work examined the everyday experiences of licensed and unlicensed cis-women sex workers with a range of state actors (including police officers, medical personnel, and legal actors). I argued that the Turkish state, through its use of law and violence, constructs “prostitution” as integral to its ruling practices. These forms and technologies of rule establish the state as an intimate heterosexual masculine body. This research was based on my master’s research back in the Sociology Department at Bogazici University and it was published in Turkish as a book, Iktidarın Mahremiyeti: İstanbul’da Hayat Kadınları, Seks İşçiliği ve Şiddet (Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in Istanbul), in 2011. Both in my previous and current work, I theorize intimate state formation and organization through its governance of violence regarding sexual transgression and sexual/gender difference. My current work builds on and expands this framework of violence by also showing how violence is a generative social currency not only for state formation but also for the cisheteronormative family, sexual/gendered urban geography, and trans world-making.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
AZ: Undergraduate and graduate students; trans, queer, and feminist activists; and scholars of queer and trans studies, anthropology, sociology, social geography, critical law studies, and Middle East studies. I hope readers find the book inspiring in its critiques of normative assumptions about sex, sexuality, and gender, its problematization of universalizing renditions of the relationship between sex, sexuality, and gender, and its theorization of cis-heteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender, and sexuality. I would also like the book to impact new perspectives on studies of statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, political life, and intimacy.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
AZ: My new project is on material, symbolic, and affective ordering of death, mourning, and afterlives in the margins of social and political life in Turkey. The margins I examine are ethnic, religious, sectarian, and economic, as well as gendered and sexual. I am interested in how death marks the ethnic, sexual, gendered, and economic limits of belonging in regimes of family, kinship, religion, and state, and in practices of mourning and grief. More explicitly, I look at forms of death, burials, funerals, and practices of mourning for the social outcast, namely homeless and underclass people, cis and trans victims of femicide, disowned members of blood families, earthquake victims, and unaccompanied refugees. This mortal topography also contains the bodies of political detainees who have been “disappeared” under police interrogation and state violence, along with radical leftists and Kurdish guerrillas deemed “unidentified.” A close focus on this mortal topography of margins allows me to demonstrate the limits of social legibility and belonging in Turkey as an organization of disavowals, erasures, specters, and deaths that are made possible by racial, classed, gendered, and sexualized forms of violence. I approach these deaths and disavowals as not only products of unequal relations of race, gender, sex, and class but also as key elements in the formation of these relations of inequality and power.
Excerpt from the book (from pp. 170-172)
Note: Citation references have been removed
Chapter 6: Funerals and Experiments with Trans Kin
Shoes in various colors were lined up next to one another on the floor: red, blue, brown, black, and yellow. There were approximately ten pairs. Some of them were worn out; some were in good shape. All were high-heeled, either sandals or dress shoes. When Esra poked me in the arm, I was abruptly roused from staring at them. She humorously said, “Which one do you like the most? Just take it!” I smiled and made a face, showing a lack of interest in any of them. While I was gazing at these shoes, left behind by Sibel, I was not trying to decide on the best pair for myself but ruminating on someone who had recently passed away and how those shoes carried her life in them. I was caught up in thinking of Sibel, whose funeral story appeared at the beginning of this book. Shoes that once belonged to her were now sitting on the floor of Istanbul lgbtt [a trans-majority LGBTQ organization] and waiting to embrace new feet and walk with different bodies. This was the traditional practice: when a trans woman died, her lubunya friends would collect objects and belongings from her house and exhibit them for people to choose from according to their need. This redistribution of resources—or the intimate gift economy of the dead—frequently took place within lubunya networks of friendship.
The day before, we had attended Sibel’s funeral with Ceyda, Sibel’s close friend and a trans woman herself. As we walked toward the mosque gate, we saw Sibel’s blood mother and sister accepting people’s condolences. It was a pleasant surprise to see them because, as mentioned previously, many blood families reject their trans children, kick them out of house, and refuse them financial and emotional support. Some families denied their trans children funeral ceremonies and burial rituals at the moment of death.
During my research, death and funerals were a constant point of reference and a sore spot that LGBTI+ people loudly spoke about regarding their blood family relations. They frequently communicated their desire to be buried by their queer/trans family and kin, by their real families (gerçek ailesi). Some lubunyalar even wrote wills to give their friends the rights normally held by families. After other trans deaths, the queer/trans community and friends often tried to reclaim the body and organize the funeral, thereby taking the place of the blood family as the real family. At trans funerals we see the intimate work of care, love, and protection and the claims that LGBTI+ activists and friends of the deceased generate after a sex/gender-transgressive death. They consistently invest in their friendships and comradeships and contest the primacy given to blood families. In the following pages, I continue with Sibel’s funeral story from the introduction and detail the entire process. Then I discuss how trans people learn to care for one another in the aftermath of refusal and abandonment, a praxis of love that trans studies scholar Hil Malatino defines as “trans care.” Trans women’s intimate experiments with the kinship repertoire of home and motherhood are powerful examples of this trans care.
As discussed in the previous chapters, urban displacement, social discrimination and exclusion, sexual violence, medicolegal regulation, and police surveillance constantly shape the trans everyday in multiple spaces of life, including institutions, streets, neighborhoods, and homes. These relations of violence also constitute a social field of creative living within which trans people recast, shape, and invent forms of intimacy to dwell in the world. Experimenting with family and kinship is an important currency of intimacy that relies on a discursive as well as a practical repertoire of care, lubunyabelonging, and bonding. Intimacy allows trans people to creatively, productively, and resolutely remake the violent conditions of the quotidian. Family and kinship become a continuous process of renewal, an intimate survival strategy to cope with everyday violence, an imaginative practice that pushes the boundaries of belonging, and a claim to a place in life and death through queer/trans belonging and bonding.
One of the many ways to define kinship is through substances that consolidate ties between persons; in Turkey blood constitutes the predominant substance of kinship. Blood ties are crucial in giving value and definition to the dominant understanding of the family. They are inscribed in social, legal, and religious frameworks. One notable example is the legal regulation of in vitro fertilization, which strictly prohibits egg, sperm, and embryo donation and surrogacy. It only allows married couples to use their own eggs and sperm. Semen, womb, and breast milk are also significant substances of the body that form kin relations, but none of them approaches the prevalence of blood ties as a metaphor in everyday relations and conversations.
Anthropologist Janet Carsten suggests that we can think of the substance of kinship as “the flow of objects or bodily parts between persons, as well as the capacity to stand for the relations between those persons.” Elaborating on anthropologist Roy Wagner’s conceptualization of “analogical kinship” in the context of non-Western societies, Carsten stresses how objects like shells, or foods like meat, can do the analogical work of the flow of substances between people in order to make kin. Here I would like to push this discussion further and ask, What if we approach this substance as violence? How can we theorize violence as the mediator, the creative substance, of family and kin work among trans people? What does kin and family making look like when its substance becomes routinized conditions of exclusion, abandonment, displacement, and police abuse? How does the quotidian experience of violence shape crossings and entanglements among the family, kinship, and other forms of relatedness, belonging, and caring? I argue that the trans everyday offers us a creative way to negotiate and contest, as well as blur, the intimate boundaries among family, kinship, and friendship and hence theorize the constitutive relationship between violence and intimacy through an embodied process of family and kin work.
