Violent intimacies: the trans everyday and the making of an urban world

Abstract

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

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Book(print)#12024

Violent intimacies: the trans everyday & the making of an urban world

Zengin, Aslı

Zengin, Aslı

Abstract

"Violent Intimacies explores how trans people in Turkey seek to redefine conventional notions of kinship in order to survive violent efforts to define and repress sex/gender. While trans people are shaped by the cis-heteronormative institutions of state, family, and religion, they also act on these institutions to transform them, a process Aslı Zengin terms the "trans every day." Zengin argues that transness in Turkey has the power to make us rethink notions of violence and intimacy and the relationship between them. In the entangled world of the trans every day, family members, police officers, religious actors, medical and legal personnel, one currency is violence, and the other is intimacy. Through historiography of the Turkish trans community and ethnographic fieldwork with trans activists in Istanbul, the book maps how Turkish trans people ally with other marginalized subjects, how they challenge the spatial hierarchies of the city which enshrine gender and class norms, and how they resist medical control, violence, and surveillance. Through an analysis that is committed to theorizing trans subjectivity beyond the West, Zengin illustrates the capacity of the trans every day to produce moments of collective fugitivity, temporary worlds of suspension and transcendence, and spaces for restoration and recovery"--

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