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

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"--