This book talk draws from creative and constructive tensions between violent efforts to define and disambiguate sex/gender transgression, on the one hand, and trans people’s incessant everyday negotiations with these efforts, on the other. As much as trans people are shaped by the cisheteronormative powers of the state, the family and religion, they also act on these powers to transform them. The book argues that everyday troubles with sex/gender transgression in personal, social and institutional life shape trans lives and deaths, as well as state power, family and kinship, regimes of sexuality and gender, urban geography, and feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Turkey. In order to understand this entangled world of the trans everyday, the book offers a novel concept, violent intimacies, and shows how transness in Turkey theoretically makes us rethink the notions of violence and intimacy and the relationship between them. Violent Intimacies exposes the connective tissue of a cisheteronormative social order which is intertwined with neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical order, and authoritarian management of social difference.

About the Speaker- Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis Universities. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul (Iktidarin Mahremiyeti: Istanbul’da Hayat Kadinlari, Seks Isciligi ve Siddet), was published in Turkish. Her new book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World is recently published by Duke University Press in February 2024. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of sex/gender non-conforming lives and deaths; medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; as well as transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.

This event is hosted by Critical Ottoman and Post-Ottoman Studies and co-sponsored by Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.