LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s: Queer Talkback 3030690962, 9783030690960

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LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s Queer Talkback Ali E. Erol

LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s

Ali E. Erol

LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s Queer Talkback

Ali E. Erol School of Communication Boston College Boston, MA, USA

ISBN 978-3-030-69096-0    ISBN 978-3-030-69097-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

To Idris

Preface

Writing my dissertation was a frustrating process. If I were to take a wild and perhaps a risky guess, I would most likely claim that I am not the only one who feels that way about their dissertation. My dissertation was mainly about the ways in which nationalists and those who identified as anti-­ nationalists – it is broadly a conservative vs. liberal distinction in US terms – debated social issues on social media. I picked the most controversial social issues in Turkey – Armenian Genocide, oppression of Kurdish people, and the invasion and subsequent separation of Cyprus. I was tracing the intertextuality in these debates, examining how the lexicon and semantic structure of liberals and conservatives were similar despite their counter positionality. They were using the same rhetorical tropes to argue counter points. They were citing the same nationalist texts to suggest their point was right and the opposing point was wrong. In a sense, they were talking within the same ideological framework, although they were truly convinced of their opposition. It was 2012 and Turkey was not short of social issues. I defended my dissertation in early spring of 2013. About few weeks later, the largest protest movement in the history of Turkey, Gezi Park protests, took place. Because I was actively looking for work in the US, unfortunately I was not able to go back to Turkey to witness the protest movement first hand. However, I spent that year collecting all the data I could about the protests. I tracked the protests live, communicated with the protestors, followed their street by street movements and their clashes with the police. During this time, data I collected had a wide range – it spanned everything from vii

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social media group discussions that supported as well as detested the protests, comments underneath the news posts on news websites, hashtags, blog posts, images, history books, magazines, and pretty much everything I could get my hands on. What struck me about the data I was accumulating was the lack of LGBT voices and presence in the histories of the protests written by the protestors themselves or publications who supported the protests with great enthusiasm. The reason why this stood out particularly was not that identity politics was especially popular during 2010s and missing LGBT voices and concerns meant that a movement faulted in living up to a contemporary standard of being inclusive – although that argument has its own merits and pitfalls. Historical narratives of the protests written by protestors or supporters of the protests that lacked LGBT voices was striking because I knew from personal accounts and from conversations with LGBT activist friends  – who were at the frontlines of the protests since its inception – the protests themselves did not lack any LGBT voices. The discrepancy between the reality on the ground and the narratives that were circulating as accurate histories deemed further exploration. However, the more I explored, the more the pattern fit into a larger pattern of discrimination  – erasure of LGBT voices and concerns even among those who consider themselves anti-authoritarian progressives. Homophobia, transphobia, sexism, heterosexism, and an appeal to generic tenets of patriarchy among the protestors was indeed disappointing; however, it was not at all surprising. This work is a response to that discrepancy, at least in part. In another part, this work is a response to the rising tide of authoritarian politics in Turkey since 2007. Seeking an ideological base for populist authoritarianism is pointless since it juxtaposes many contradictory ideological elements to push for whatever rhetoric is effective to consolidate further power in a given timeframe. In Turkey’s case, this juxtaposition of contradictions took the form of an authoritarian neoliberal state based on nationalist, neo-conservative, and Islamist ideals that wants to be a regional imperial force. Depending on the context, the state was able to use and highlight whichever piece of that assemblage was fitting to maneuver existing social crisis and consolidate more power. Again, it was disappointing yet unsurprising that such consolidation was at the expense of women, LGBT individuals, and anyone they marked as a deviant or an ‘other’. This was a hallmark of such regimes throughout history.

 PREFACE 

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The two aforementioned social forces that operated in unison – despite their apparent opposition at a first glace  – posed, and keep posing, an existential threat for anyone outside of their circle of acceptable citizens. In the face of such erasure, it is vital not only to narrate a counter history of events from the perspective of the marginalized, but also to document the ways in which they have endured, persisted, and existed despite everything. This is the main goal of this work. In doing so, I hope that the framework and practice of talkback I outline in this work will serve as a guide to others who might be in similar situations. I also want to note that, while I have been working on this project for the good part of 2010s, I have finalized this book during 2020, while Sars-Cov-2 was still ravaging the US and just as 200,000 people had died. There are countless discussions I have had with students and colleagues about the mind-bending perception of time and sanity within the context of this global pandemic. The common thread is how the days feel long and slow while the weeks and months pass in a flash. Time simultaneously feels elongated and shrunk. The amount of time we have spent indoors – either by ourselves, with our partners or pets – highlighted the pure emptiness and unnecessity of our performativity of a responsible good economic subject under neoliberal temporality: schedules, deadlines, due dates, and whatever else constituted a marker of productivity. We have experienced firsthand how capitalism relies on continuous motion that consistently seeks to exploit labor time. Disruption of the movement that normalizes such regulation of time – presented as the necessary and (falsely) sufficient condition for individual achievement, which is the ultimate form of self-­ expression according to logic of neoliberal subjectivity – meant that our perception of what is important to us was being challenged all the while we were still expected to operate within its logic. This has been frustrating, for many reasons. Moreover, I am not sure if we have learned the right lessons from this bitter experience. Sadly, but predictably, I have come across colleagues who treated the pandemic time as a space of even further productivity. Now that we are stuck at home, they argued, we could do even more things – check more work off the list, add more lines to our CVs. That is what we are told life is about, after all. I hope this work shows that our agency does not have to be chronically in line with such logics, but if we seek to change the constituents of our context through collaboration and interdependence, we can challenge – dare I say we can talkback – against the shadows such logics cast on our psyches and on our lives. On that

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note, and with infinite gratitude to all my therapists, I hope as a society, we can leave this period behind while learning what I will humbly claim as the right lessons from it. Specifically, our relationship to nature, both the process and product of our labor, each other, and ourselves are not functions of what we can maximally produce from each one of them. Boston, MA, USA

Ali E. Erol

Acknowledgements

This work would have been impossible without the moral and tangible support of my family. I am incredibly grateful for mom and dad for providing me with opportunities, early in life, to pursue my passions and to learn about caring for everyone. My partner in crime, Joris, without whom many things I care about in life would not be possible (including at least some of my sanity). I am very grateful for all the support you have provided through this weird journey (in the wise words of Homer Simpson, “so far”). I am thankful to Idris, who will most likely read this book, if he does at all, in fifteen or so years, and without whom this work would feel emptier. I am forever grateful to Peppercorn (I hope he is resting peacefully in wherever kitty heaven might be) and to Sugar. They have taught me the value of being slower and more deliberate and taking breaks to appreciate the breeze. I also thank Maple. Although she came in to my life at the end of this journey, not only she taught me a lot, she also provided a much needed moral support during whatever 2020 had been. My students and to my teachers have special places in my heart. I got to work with William Leap and William Starosta at the end (height?) of their careers and they have been major influences on my work. I am grateful that I was able to (at least I hope I was able to) learn from their wisdom and knowledge. I would like to acknowledge all the students who have helped me find my voice as a scholar and a teacher. They have helped me, in no small way, better the way in which I communicate my ideas. One of my philosophy professors, when I was studying towards my undergraduate degree, said something along lines of “I will count myself lucky if I was able to teach you the half of what I learned from you” when xi

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I sent him a thank you e-mail as I was graduating. I get it now. With outmost respect and humility, I extend the same gratitude to my students. I am constantly striving to be a better human being, not as a function of a commitment to an ethos as a scholar but to one as a teacher. Thank you for showing me the way. I am indebted to Boston College, our department, department Chair Matt Sienkiewicz, and my colleagues who supported this project, gave feedback, and shared their ideas and concerns. I am thankful for my friends for the support they have provided. Especially to Efe and Evren. I apologize profusely if I am missing your name here. You are in my heart, regardless. I am very thankful to KaosGL and to all LGBT groups, organizations, and individuals in Turkey, who are striving to exist in a space that constantly denies them the mere right to be. LGBT groups and individuals receive horrible treatment at the hands of authoritarian and totalitarian governments and face repression not only at the hands of state’s forces, but also within the society and culture at large. Turkey is just a single example. This work aims to live up to the resilience and hope LGBT groups and individuals display in the face of such blatant erasure. I hope this work does justice to their struggle, even slightly. There are not a lot of constants in life, true. However, I have had the privilege of having some constants through this process that helped me with my overall well-being (which was helpful when I was trying to finish this work): music and video games. Unfortunately, two of the musicians who helped me the most are no longer alive. Leonard Cohen and J. S. Bach. However, Rene Aubry and Juno Reactor are still very much alive at the time of this writing and I thank them for their music that helped me in the writing process. I apologize to music purists who are jarred and offended by the genre transgression they have witnessed here. I would also like to extend my gratitude to developers who made amazing video games like the Civ, Persona, Dragon Age, Fallout, and The Pillars of Eternity series – and indie developers who made games like Faster Than Light, Papers Please, Thea, and Seven Grand Steps. Playing these games have not only been a true joy but also an incredible way to keep sane and balanced. Finally, I cannot thank enough all the workers and volunteers of the National Park Services who kept the parks open and regulated. I would not have been able to do any of this without my regular hikes, if I was feeling disconnected from nature.

Contents

1 Introduction: Theorizing Talkback  1 Talkback as Anti-Normativity   3 Agency and Jouissance   9 Disidentifying & Queer Talkback  15 A Note on Method and Methodology  22 2 Contextualizing Normativity: Political Discourse in Turkey 29 Historical Background  31 Neoliberalism and AKP  34 Statist Discourses  39 Anti-State Normative Discourses  51 3 Queer Talkback on Time 57 Queer Histories  63 Conclusion  83 4 Queer Talkback on Space 89 Neoliberal and Heteronormative Space  95 Queer Discourses on Space  97 Conclusion 110

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5 Queer(ing) the Affective115 Affect and Discourse 120 Hegemonic Sensibilities 121 Queering the Affective 124 Conclusion 129 6 Conclusion133 On Talkback and Talking Back 135 Reclaiming Agency 140 Questions for Queer Scholarship and Activism 156 Works Cited159 Index167

About the Author

Ali E. Erol  is an Assistant Professor of the Practice at Boston College, Department of Communication. His research focuses on the intersection of critical discourse studies, nationalism, anti-nationalism, and queer theory. His works have been published in Sexualities Journal, Journal of Intercultural Communication, Investigaciones Feministas, and Narrative and Conflict.

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Introduction: Theorizing Talkback

The first thing I would like to do in this book is to argue why we need the theoretical framework of ‘talkback’ to understand the different moments of activism that I will present in the following chapters as case studies. Why do we need a new framework at all? Is it not possible to understand talking back as just another way of saying ‘resisting’ to power or authority? Social sciences and humanities are overflowing with different theorizations or notions of resistance. Why add another to the pile? What good would it do? Is it not a mere neologism, would it not lack anything of substance? These are some of the questions that I kept asking myself since I began this research in 2013. Indeed, scholars in social and political philosophy, social sciences, and humanities have been trying to systematize theories and practices of resisting to different forms of oppression in various forms. Perhaps the most influential strand has been rise critical theory that stretches back to Marx and Engels. Since then, we have witnessed the rising influence of Frankfurt School, Postcolonial and Subaltern studies, Critical Race Studies, Feminist, Queer, Crip theories and methodologies— just to give a few examples. All these studies and theories began with the observation that unequal distribution of power in the world along the lines of race, gender, class, desire, ability, country, is a problem—it is a social ill that the hitherto historical conditions have created and must be scrutinized, questioned, examined, resisted, and corrected. These studies © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7_1

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look at different problems from different lenses but the common denominator is the aforementioned problem. And, of course, all these theories and methodologies have been influential on my work. While it is impossible to give an exhaustive list of such scholarship— some of which I refer to throughout the book—I argue that the cases I deal with do not fit into any one of those boxes of existing theoretical frameworks. There are two important reasons for this: (1) the cases I am examining are not moments of a social movement or contentious politics. They are not about a well-organized group of people finding their way into the social and political sphere to have an impact on the society in one way or the other. It is about an oppressed identity group trying to survive under an authoritarian regime. The groups I examine are loosely organized, most of the time they do not communicate with each other, and frequently they rely on supportive actions of individuals who are not formally affiliated with the organizations. Their purpose is not to cause social change, which would ideally be the case, however, the sociopolitical conditions makes that dream impossible. Rather, they are merely trying to survive and not let the context diminish and erase their existence.1 (2) The loose organization of these groups and individuals makes it necessary for them to rely on modes of communication that can bend the rules around time, space, censorship, and state/cultural authority. Consequently, they are overly reliant on social media as well as other online channels of communication to make sure their voices are heard. This is different than, say, handing out flyers, publishing pamphlets in underground printing presses, starting a radio channel, etc.—tools that many movements, and moments of resistance have used well until 2010s. The reliance on online communication makes the verbal analysis of what is being said is as important as tracing the history of acts of resistance against oppression. Moreover, as I argue throughout the book, there is an interconnectedness between time, space, and affect—themes I analyze in each empirical chapter. Talkback refers to challenging the ways in which normative discourses cohere on these three aspects to exert power. In this sense, talkback is not merely talking back, it is not just to resist, or engage in an act that runs against existing power structures. While the sense of anti-­ normativity is indeed an important aspect of talkback, what differentiates talkback is the emphasis on taking time, space, and affect together as an assemblage. This stems from the idea that the status quo as a system does not engage its subjects from a single perspective. We are not just confined in terms of temporality to schedules and deadlines. We are not just

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restricted with our passports, or our zip codes. We are not just coerced to feel pride or shame or guilt or anxiety or joy in the face of national symbols or when we witness transgression of these symbols. All of these things happen simultaneously and they feed each other. Consequently, we need a framework that understands them together and how they work in unison as a tool of governmentality. And we need a framework of activism that responds to this assemblage by offering alternative ways of being in the world. When we use the framework of talkback and pay attention to the when, where, and the affect of discursive agency, we necessarily engage not only with the agent, but also with the context, and the audience. Consequently, talkback is a framework of discursive agency that relies on understanding how this assemblage works to dismantle normative discourses. In this sense, talkback is a framework simultaneously of scholarship and activism and does not perceive one separate from the other. I am constructing this framework from the standpoint of queer theory. For this framework, utilizing queer theory is not only useful, but also necessary. It is not only because my cases are about LGBT groups and individuals at the margins of the society. More accurately, queer theory best captures the concerns of these LGBT groups and individuals by paying attention to intersections of how certain desires are privileged and others are oppressed in a given context, how these dynamics reflect in other areas of social interaction such as language, politics, economy, laws, etc. Additionally, queer theory centers the voices and the concerns of the marginalized. As such, it becomes necessary to use queer theory to formulate the framework of talkback.

Talkback as Anti-Normativity Talkback, as a category, emerged as a result of my previous studies that analyzed various ways in which contrasting ideological groups in Turkey communicated over social media. Of course, anyone who is even mildly familiar with the ways in which communication over social media operates knows that opposing ideas over social media very quickly take the form of petty insults, threats, and other position-related back and forth. However, that was my interest. More specifically, I wanted to trace the discursive elements in these oppositional discourses to their ideological roots. To my surprise, it turned out that what appeared as oppositional discourses shared the same foundational nationalist texts. Consequently, I concluded that such communication was not, in fact, a form of talkback. Rather, different

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sides were talking within the same ideological framework, sharing the same source material, just citing it different ways. As a result, I argued there must be discourses that do not share the same source material, that do not align with the broader ideological concern while appearing oppositional. That framework is the foundational understanding of talkback. At this point, queer theory and the framework of talkback align. Queer activism and theorizing establishes its resistance on the grounds of anti-­ normativity—which take the “forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity.”2 As Stryker notes, such anti-­ normative reflex stemmed from identifying the normalizing as well as marginalizing processes of biopolitical and necropolitical apparatuses of the twentieth century governance.3 In this light, understanding the meanings as well as pathways of resisting these reflexes becomes vital not only to build sustainable means of deconstructing state violence and various social normativities, but also—and perhaps far more importantly—it is a means for survival. This is the main goal of this book: not only how do we understand resistance that enables LGBT individuals to survive, but also how do we understand and explain the conditions and contexts that enable resistances to be sustainable so that they cannot either be assimilated into the fold of power or be destroyed. To accomplish this goal, this book examines the decade of queer talkback in Turkey during 2010s—from Gezi Park protests to jailing of LGBT leaders to two biggest cities indefinitely banning LGBT events to living under a state of emergency. How did LGBT activists in Turkey understand and talked back against these instances of oppression, how did they forge their resistance, and how did they keep existing in a context that constantly did not recognize their existence and imagining a future where oppression did not take place? To do this, I will first theorize agency and the conditions that sustain it, since agency is the basic requirement to talk back to resist and even to desire a different future. Before its association with the protests that took place throughout the summer of 2013 in Turkey, Gezi Park was, and still is, a well-known cruising spot in central Istanbul for gay men and trans women. One such man, who calls himself Hayaterkeği, chronicles his sexual adventures on his blog.4 The name’s transliteration is ‘life-man’. It is a neologism and a word play, imitating the Turkish term hayatkadını, which transliterates into ‘life-­ woman’, a common term in Turkish for a woman who is a sex-worker. The imitation takes on the shame inflicted on sex-workers through well-known

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associative stigmas such as sluts, whores, and loose women. By reclaiming the title in a way that celebrates his apparently very active sex life and perhaps attempts to get rid of shame in a search for self-acceptance. In one of the many experiences he writes about having at Gezi Park before the protests, he goes out to cruise after work but ends up having a striking encounter with a police officer. The story takes place in 2009, and begins with his desire to catch up with Istanbul. At first, the notion that one might be lagging behind one’s own city may seem counterintuitive—even contradictory. How could it be possible, after all, to walk through, to work, to live, love, and breathe in a city and not be caught up with it? However, such desire to catch up with the place a person lives in might be symptomatic of a way of life based on late capitalist principle of efficiency. The “chrononormativity”5 a person is born into in the late capitalist period is expressed with a flood of semiotic markers, such as “schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches [that] organize the value and meaning of time.”6 This organization does not leave space for activities that the chrononormative reality considers inefficient or unproductive. As a consequence of chrononormativity, he was alienated from Istanbul—from its rhythm, its energy, and its sense of being. Much like any symbolic structure, chrononormative structure “envelop[s] the life of [a person] with a network so total that they join together those who are going to engender them “by bone and flesh”…”7 By wanting to leave behind the alienating chrononormative structure of late modernity that revolves around exploited labor, he rebelled against the 9 to 5 mutiny. He went out for a stroll in Taksim, in central Istanbul. Taksim is a large square surrounded by two famous landmarks. If you would stand in the center of Taksim square, facing north, almost directly in front of you, but a bit to the right, you would see the stairs leading up to Gezi Park, a public park rich in greenery that exists directly in contrast to the dull grey of the abundant concrete that surrounds it. And right ̇ behind you would be Istiklal Street stretching out, a pedestrian-only street known for small shops, restaurants, bars, and a vibrant nightlife. Both spaces are usually full of people, any time in a given day, who either are passing through on their way to another place or are spending a portion of their day there just sitting and looking around, perhaps chatting with their friends. Following the flow of Istanbul, he went down to Taksim ̇ walking through Istiklal Street after work to see, in his words, “what has changed since the last inspection.” However, he found everything to be exactly the same as before:

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̇ Istiklal was drunk as always with the smell of pussy. Faggots continued their life by saying “well, get out of the way, sugar.” Tourists clicked their cameras each time the tram came and went by… Beggars kept improving themselves in their art by playing their harmonicas. And the restorations were underway for those places whose restorations would never end.

̇ After his tour in Taksim square and Istiklal Street, he decided to go to the adjacent Gezi Park in order to “hunt,” by which he means to cruise. He was going to seek the “bottoms that morphed into the role of stay-at-­ home men sitting at benches left and right.” First, however, he needed to find a suitable spot to pee “by the trees down the park.” As he was walking down the park, searching for a place to relieve himself, a police car with three officers inside stopped in front of him and cut his way. These kinds of interactions with the police are now commonplace in Turkey. The police can randomly stop anyone at the street and ask for identification, engage in a pat-down, or search their belongings. Like any other authoritarian regime, in Turkey an arm of the state is rarely, if ever, regulated. While police oppression is a problem for most citizens in Turkey, one is more at risk of being randomly asked for identification or searched or be the subject police scrutiny in general if shall one present as or resemble a minority, or if they are in the streets during off hours, as people who cruise usually are. Hayaterkeg ̆i noted that while the police asked for his ID by calling him “youth”, the officer who asked for his ID, according to his observation, was at most a year older than he was at the time. But the next interaction he had with the police was far more striking: Anyhow, two of the officers came out [of the car], one of them came [and] politely said “can I search you?” and after saying “of course, here”, I opened my arms and he started searching me. It is not like I wasn’t aroused when he was touching me all over. While I already have a weakness for even a dog that wears a uniform, how do I not get hard for someone who searches me like this? Just for this reason, I waited for the moment when he was going to really reach to my back pockets from the front, [and when] he bent, I slowly blew in his ear. Probably he was not sure I blew, he threw me a look between looking and not looking and picked on both of my side pockets, and as he put his hands in my side pockets I acted like he pulled me to himself and I rubbed my cheek against his cheek [and] face. My poor guy, he couldn’t say anything, he touched my legs and stuff and he finished.

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The police left shortly after that and the story ended with him being able to pee under a tree. These encounters happened before the protests took place in 2013, which changed what the park stood for in public memory. But before the protests Gezi Park has been not only one of the most well-known places for cruising, but also a safe hangout space for people who are marginalized and ostracized from other spaces—such as the poor, the homeless, beggars, and the jobless—due to being a rather isolated public space. Hayaterkeği wrote that through interactions he had in Gezi Park, he was able to “know himself” and “get rid of his own alienation.” When I further asked him what that meant, he wrote: It was a space where I was myself and I thought that I was not going to harm anyone by being myself. For me, it was another expression of harmlessness of being myself. It was another indicator that me being a faggot is a natural way of life, [and that] I could fuse in life and go. It was a space that showed that I didn’t and won’t need to yell and shout to show myself. There were also heterosexual women, men, family with kids, couples. It was a space that showed that I could be myself and live as myself in the midst of everyone… Because a person understands that they are normal when they meet with people who are like them. At that age, it was unbelievably relieving to see, meet, and to talk with people like me. Most of them were looking for just sex but I didn’t give a fuck. Giving a bit of what they wanted to feel that I was a bit more normal was worth everything. Gezi made me live a transformation. I felt that actually I was not a freak, but a regular human.

Hayaterkeg ̆i describes a story of self-acceptance mediated through his interactions with other people who also spent time in Gezi Park. Similar to some coming-out stories, which are structured as unknowable number of momentary revelations followed by their aftermaths, Hayaterkeği talks about a gradual growth of comfort with his sense of self, whereas previously he saw himself as “a freak.” This growth, for him, was “a transformation,” which moved him from an object to subject—from a position that lacked agency, to one wherein he did not mind an attempt at seducing a police officer. Such transformation requires a deeper understanding of agency and its workings beyond the vulgar interpretation framed as the ability to do things. Rather superficial understandings of agency focus on ideologies that revolve around assumptions of individual freedom, its expression in cultural practices and in laws. However, as practice sociologists since Bourdeiu and Giddens have argued, actions are about neither individuals, nor what

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they can do. Rather, the capacity to act is an individuals’ interaction between enabling and disabling factors in given contexts. Building on this, Ahern8 wrote that agency is the “socioculturally mediated capacity to act” and further suggested that either enabling or disabling capacities of contexts manifest themselves in texts that are the products of those particular contexts. In the case of Hayaterkeği, the transformative mediation that provided him the capacity to act occurred through the context of Gezi Park. Such correlations are not surprising, but rather in line with how queer bodies operate. Especially early queer theory literature, from Warner to Berlant, chronicles the ways which queerness is very much about creation of and sustenance of subjectivities as well as contexts that foster coexistence beyond exclusive binaries or seeming contradictions. This point is the basis of queer theorizing and provides a sense of direction on which queer theorizing have been building since then. What this work pays attention to is an extension of this theorizing—the assemblage of the context that fosters the agency, which enables queering to take place. Queer bodies not only seek and exist in times, spaces, and within structures of feeling that contextualize as well as encourage subversive agencies, but also actively engage in queering normative assemblages of times, spaces, and structures of feeling. In other words, queer can only be and the agency that allows queer-ing can only exist together with assemblages of time, space, affect, counterpublics, and performances that help sustain queer and queering subjectivities. This assemblage enables talkback to exist. When this kind of assemblage lacks an element, one way or another, talkback is coopted into talking within. Queer, as I use in this book, is rather different from gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans, and other nouns that can constitute an identity label. While some people indeed use ‘queer’ to identify themselves as well as an umbrella term for LGBT individuals, in this book I do not use queer to suggest a stable identity position that occupies a number of places within various axes of binaries and normativities.9 Queer discourses and practices seek to question the core assumptions that sustain the existence of state and its apparatuses that rely on binaries and normativities.10 For this reason I keep using queer as an adjective throughout this book, for instance when I refer to queer talkback, queer imagination, queer futurity, or queer fantasy. This stems from the recognition that not every talkback is queer, not every imagination is queer, or not every fantasy is queer. If a talkback dismantles binary structures, I consider that a queer talkback. Similarly, if a fantasizing, if a construction of futurity deconstructs simple oppositions

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and imagines times and places where relationships of superiority are not established, I take that to be queer futurity. Blasius writes, “lesbian and gay existence should be conceived as an ethos rather than as a sexual preference or orientation, as a lifestyle, or primarily in collectivist terms, as a subculture, or even as a community. While lesbian and gay existence may include some elements of these conceptualizations, “ethos” is a more encompassing formulation, better suited for understanding lesbian and gay existence politically.”11 A queer talkback would not mean an existence based on stable identities or on logics of existence offered by heteronormativity. Rather talkback, as a way of being in the world, does a better job at capturing not only the entirety of discourses, acts, and performances, and other aspects of queering, but also the sustenance of those acts. Hayaterkeg ̆i’s sexual escapades in Gezi Park are not random events. Having public sex in Gezi Park, for him, is sustained through his repeated performance in a spatial context that enables his agency to do so. Consequently, in proposing talkback as a frame of analysis, one of my goals is to shift the focus from studying isolated instances of agency or context—such as analyzing only the queer space, queer performance, or audience. While such analyses are important, especially those analyses focus on performances run the danger of decontextualizing agency and locating it in the act or merely in the agent. Queer talkback cautions against such decontextualization and invites an analysis that captures the assemblage of the queer and the queering to exist. In Turkey, Gezi Park is one such context. The space is the park itself. Being a public space without shops or doors means that such space is open at queer times and across classes, although with police regulation. There is also a sustenance of performers and participants. Assemblage of these varying components create a certain structure of feeling that makes LGBT people to feel safe and horny enough to cruise. Assemblage of all of these different factors enable a subversive agency that encouraged Hayaterkeği to try to seduce a police officer.

Agency and Jouissance While queer talkback describes the assemblage of factors that forms the context in which action takes place, agency is more than a mere function of a given context. Ahearn’s definition initiates an important conversation about the factors that enable or disable certain movement to exist. However, the assemblage of the context merely is the enabler—in the

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context of this study, queering becomes at the moments defiance, dissent, or deconstruction of binaries. To get a better picture of what agency is, and to better understand how individuals and groups talkback, I use Lacan’s concept of jouissance. The argument I am pursuing is that the agency that stems from aforementioned assemblage can become an action, that is to say queer can only become through what Lacan describes with jouissance. Going over Lacan is important not only to understand psychoanalytic dimensions of agency, but also the way in which Lacan theorizes jouissance ties agency and futurity. Jouissance, while mostly refers to a drive, in a Freudian sense, to seek pleasure; it goes beyond this simple definition in a significant way. The origin of jouissance, however, stems from a child’s relationship with the primary caregiver, (m)Other, and what Lacan calls the mirror stage. He suggests that a gap finds a place and grows between a child and the (m) Other.12 Before this gap, the child perceives everything to be one, united with the self. However, the gap happens as the relationship develops, as the child realizes there is a chasm between herself and the (m)Other, as well as when the child can recognize herself as a separate “I”, and through this chasm and recognition the child understands that they are a different persons. This realization dawns as the child becomes more and more aware of (m)Other’s association with the symbolic phallus, which is daily life. Differentiating himself from Freud, Lacan did not insist phallus to be real—like a father, but anything in the symbolic that takes the (m)Other away from the child, that takes the place of the said father in Freud’s thinking. The symbolic phallus is the base on which the separation takes place between the (m)Other and the child. This establishes the grounds for the sense of desire that can never be satisfied.13 Any attempt at satisfying the desire will only fail, since desire exists independently of an object that can be consumed or possessed—in fact “desire is directed toward a subject rather than an object; towards another person.”14 Child’s desire to be whole with that person again, to undo the gap of the consciousness of difference is doomed to fail. However, while the satisfaction is impossible, the pursuit of satisfaction, in other words the drive, forms the basis of agency. There is an additional way in which jouissance is vital to understand not only agency itself but also the queer drive towards anti-normativity. When Lacan theorizes jouissance, he often does so in a way that describes jouissance as the pursuit to satisfy the drive of seeking pleasure15 that takes place in conjunction with transgression of what he calls the Law16—the totality

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of customs, social norms, and institutions; structures that sustain the social order. Feminist interpretations of jouissance have emphasized this point, more than its usefulness for understanding agency. For instance, Sandra Gilbert, in her introduction to Cixous and Clement’s seminal The Newly Born Woman, writes that jouissance is “the fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political” that is in opposition to “historically hegemonic Western “nerve-brain” consciousness that would subordinate body to mind, blood to brain, passion to reason.”17 Stemming from this feminist interpretation, if we were to argue for a queer interpretation of jouissance, it would emphasize a similar point. Ultimately, what is queer without the fusion of the erotic and the political, without an anti-normative drive that wants to transgress social norms? Consequently, in queer politics as well as in queer being-in-the-world—the agency behind queering, to put it simply—becomes the persistence of jouissance, with its drive to pursue transgressing the normative. Queer being-in-the-world, as far as this work is concerned, rests on the ways in which queer people interact with space, time, and affect. However, as aforementioned, this interaction is not merely a function of assemblage of various elements in given contexts—these assemblages are either results of or need to interact with agencies that engage in queering. In other words, queering normative times and spaces does not happen by itself, nor it is a mere consequence of the social and cultural normal pushing LGBT individuals to the margins. Queering implies agency in the face of such oppression. Existing in a queer time and space can be the result of such agency, or at least such drive to exist. For that reason, I find it vital to put the literature on queer time and space in conversation with the above discussion on agency. Consequently, when we talk about a queer time and space, we need to talk about desiring to be in a queer time and space in the first place—since the drive to exist in a way that upsets the normal is the bedrock of agency that enables queering. In other words, why do we desire different forms of time, space, and affect in the first place? For the purposes of my argument, the three aspects of being-in-the-­ world—time, space, affect—I discuss are not and cannot be separate from each other and studying them in a vacuum, treating them as independent parcels of existence would strip the analysis from essential contextual information. Because, for one to consider a future, to contemplate another time, one must also contemplate another space—or what the same space looks like in a different time, which would make it a different space—and

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it would also mean to contemplate another set of feelings associated in that future moment and place. Muñoz contemplates on this drive towards moving away from the now, especially towards the future, in his book Cruising Utopia, explaining that rather than the current state of things, the future is the realm of queer existences. In his words: Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. The here and now is a prison house… Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing… Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.18

Futurity, therefore, in Muñoz’s imagination, is not related to heteronormative and neoliberal practices or logics centered on strategic plans to maximize gains and minimize losses for the next five years. Rather, it rests on imagining an emancipatory future based on certain historicism. Utopic thinking, in this sense, is an inseparable part of critical thought. This is the case, however, not only for the sheer sense of joy or fantasizing. On the contrary, queer fantasizing toward a future, or towards the past from the future, rests on an accumulation of certain things queers do not have— ranging from equal treatment in public spaces to right to having a life free of constant surveillance, discipline, and often, murder.19 These civilizing moments and its queer discontents form the basis and the fuel on which queer fantasies are built. The omnipresence of heteronormative, heterosexist, sexist, racist, and ableist state and social structures and discourses constantly try to put individuals in their correct places as silent and obedient subjects—especially at the various intersections of these categories—, which only ends up further propelling queer imagination of times where existing structures are different. Some might suggest, however, this is a basic condition of being human, perhaps, a required ontology of citizenship, if not personhood. As Mari Ruti tactfully puts, “That we are frequently humiliated by the very structures of power that sustain our existence is, in many ways, the foundational tragedy of life.”20 This, at best, would be a bitter irony. But when we look at queer lives—especially of those who are unprivileged by occupying several intersections of identities that the power structures deem expendable, such as trans people of

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color—we do not see this kind of formulation; as in the power structures that sustains queer bodies also humiliates them. Instead, in the case of expandable bodies, the formula is much more straightforward. The power structure that sustains and humiliates the society at large does so at the expense of queer bodies. The structures of power promise marginalization, destruction, and exploitation of queer bodies, and they do deliver. Consequently, the desiring of a queer future cannot be separate from the power relations that create the lack of fairness and social justice in the present in the first place. In other words, a desire for a queer futurity rests on subverting power dynamics, creating spatial and temporal conditions where/when those hierarchies that impose such conditions and ways to feel certain ways in those conditions would not exist. This desire to destabilize the current temporal moment relates back to queer as persisting jouissance—since existing politics of pleasure stay within the established social norms and their overcasts in human as well as social psyche, but desires that would be deemed socially unacceptable aim to exceed those norms and laws. Lauren Berlant, in Desire/Love writes: This is also why the “sexual revolution” placed the emancipation of “desire” or jouissance (the energy of the drives that is in excess to the rational ego, fixed identities, or normative institutions) at the center of many political upheavals—against the bourgeois family, conjugal sexuality, the relation of the state to citizens, exploitation, racism, and imperialism, the place of religion and education in social life, and the place of the body in politics.21

Likewise, then, a queer futurity is the jouissance in relation to the existing politics of pleasure and desire. Since jouissance cannot exist, by definition, alongside pleasures that are comfortable with the violence patriarchal law exerts on queer bodies, a pursuit of “emancipation of desire” free of violence—physical or otherwise—will always exist. Consequently, to pursue jouissance will always exceed the norm, the established standards— queers will always carve and construct spaces, temporalities, counterpublics, structures of feeling that threaten to destabilize the patriarchal law. Judith Butler, in Undoing Gender, makes a similar point from the perspective of fantasizing: The critical promise of fantasy, when and where it exists, is to challenge the contingent limits of what will and will not be called reality. Fantasy is what allows us to imagine ourselves and others otherwise; it establishes the ­possible in excess of the real; it points elsewhere, and when it is embodied, it brings the elsewhere home.22

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Understanding fantasizing as a drive that “establishes the possible in excess of the real” frames jouissance—“excess”—as the agentive factor that pushes the boundaries of existing time and space and the normativity that comes with it. Juana Maria Rodriguez picks up where Butler leaves and discusses, in length, the social consequences of queer fantasizing in her article Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies. For Rodriguez, there is an innate thread between our politically incorrect sexual fantasies and queer imagination—both those acts of fantasizing aim to subvert dominant power dynamics imposed by the Name of the Father. Perhaps asserting to fantasize is to queer would be too large of a generalization, however, Rodriguez argues “in our fantasies and in our sexual play we can make familial shame sexy and state discipline erotic.”23 This further adds to the idea, alongside Muñoz, that fantasy is a realm where queer possibilities are endless and can be infinitely subversive.24 Rodriguez, however, takes this a step further and suggests that a lack of a fantasy would be to limit ourselves to the impossibilities of the here and now, devoid of imagination: To deny our fantasies because they are too complicated, too painful, or too perverse, to erase their presence or censor their articulation in public life, constitutes a particular kind of insidious violence that threatens to undermine our ability to explore the contours of our psychic lives, and the imaginary possibilities of the social worlds in which we exist.25

This would be similar to having a lack that does not move towards a desire, a state where subjects are consumed purely in the subjectivity of the Other. In a similar vein, not to desire a queer future means being complacent to the violence, physical, psychological, and structural, imposed on queer bodies in the here and now. While no queer theory would agree with the heteronormative violence at large, the antisocial thesis in queer theory and the pessimism it generates implicitly complies with such violence precisely because it cuts all the ties we would have to hope for another future or change. Lee Edelman, in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, for instance, challenges the idea of striving for a future, because he observes that the idea of the future is often imposed alongside heteronormative fascist fantasies that revolve around reproductive logics through the image of the child.26 The only solution, he sees, is to stop pursuing a future altogether. Edelman writes:

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[T]he only oppositional status to which our queerness could ever lead would depend on our taking seriously the place of the death drive we’re called on to figure and insisting, against he culture of the Child and the political order it enforces, the we, as Guy Hocquenghem made clear, are “not the signifier of what might become a new form of social organization,” that we do not intend a new politics, a better society, a brighter tomorrow, since all these fantasies reproduce the past, through displacement, in the form of the future.27

Standing in opposition would indeed require taking a stance that would favor the death drive to escape from the disciplinary image of the Child. Taking such oppositional stance, however, further perpetuates the existence of the heteronormative social structures through sustaining the binary of good subjects—subjects that choose the Child, that obey the heteronormative rules of existence—versus bad subjects—subjects that kill the Child, that directly oppose to heteronormativity and whatever it imposes. In whatever way we are trying to be antinormative, that cannot rest on sustaining a binary that feeds the heteronormativity. In other words, as Smith argues in her critique of Edelman, “politics of “opting out” clearly privileges those who are relatively more comfortable under the current situation”28 but for those who are trying to survive erasure, turning away from the future is a privilege they cannot afford.

Disidentifying & Queer Talkback If we were to argue that enforcing a sense of binary between good versus bad subjects ultimately reinforces heteronormative status quo, then how could we conceptualize a non-normative talkback? Here I will elaborate on disidentification as a framework by which we can conceptualize a different way of talkback against oppression that does not rely on being in a subject position. The concept goes back to Michel Pêcheux,29 who argued that there are three possible ways a person can respond to hegemony, to an ideological assumption, or to any instance or a moment in which the power structure manifests itself with its oppressive façade. The first possible response is that of a good subject—what Pêcheux calls “identification.” The good subject identifies with the state power and readily assumes the good subject position. The identified subject voluntarily reproduces the discourses and the practices of the dominant/hegemonic ideology. The second response, on the other hand, is one of the bad subject, in Pêcheux’s terms: “counteridentification.” Those who counteridentify take the opposite, or counter, stance against those who take the

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position of the good subject and against state power. While at first this may seem like a form of resistance and talkback, Pêcheux notes that counteridentification is “the symmetrical inversion of the first”—30which is to say it reproduces the discourses and practices of ideology as much as those who identify, by being against it. This reproduction takes place through sustaining the binary relationship between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in a system where bad is as predictable as much as the good and ends up serving the purposes of proving why the ‘good’ is indeed ‘good.’ Pêcheux calls these responses against the dominant ideology “reduplication”31 because they both reduplicate the subject position, which, as noted above, is the mechanism by which ideology works. The bad subject, the ‘other’ side of the binary, is still a side of the binary. That is the issue Pêcheux points out when he suggests that the counteridentified subject is still a subject and still works to reduplicate the discourses and practices of the dominant ideology. This produces a problem for those who are trying to talk back against the hegemonic structure and against ideological assumptions. The hegemonic structure in place will always try to fit the responses in a subject position—in Althusser’s words; will always try to recruit subjects. It does not care if those recruited subjects are good subjects or bad subjects. Either way, ideology meets its goal of being reproduced. Good subjects reproduce it through obedience and bad subjects reproduce it through being a showcase for disciplining, which further makes the case for obedience. In both cases, the hegemonic structure and the ideological assumptions that sustain it prevail. For that reason, whenever there is a sign or a promise of talkback or dissent, it is the ideological practice of the hegemonic structure to push to create these two subject positions: to identify friends and foes, to offer rewards and punishments, to offer love and acceptance and to threaten with discipline. Either way, the hegemonic structure will try to either assimilate the talkback into being good subjects, or push people until they take the subject position of a bad subject. Then, the subject position of the bad subject is predictable. Not only the disciplining of a bad subject is a worn out and a well-known path, but also through the disciplining that takes place in a public eye, it also serves as an example that tells the story of this is what happens to the disobedient children of the state—thus further securing obedience and pushing people into good subject positions. According to Pêcheux, however, there is a third option when talking back and resisting against the discourses and practices of the dominant ideology, which he names “disidentification.” Disidentified individuals do

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not associate with preset notions of good or bad subject. In Pêcheux’s words, they are disidentified via “taking up of a non-subjective position.” In a non-subjective space, disidentified response breaks the mold of predictability offered by the bad subject—and moves away from sustaining the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ binary. As such, the talkback of the disidentified individual holds the potential to disrupt the work of ideology by not confirming into the binary it offers through subject positions; and by not reproducing the obviousness that is ideology. Disidentification, as Pêcheux uses the term, is a position that aims to subvert the dominant paradigm held together by fragile assumptions. It attempts to achieve this subversion by seemingly complying with hegemony and acting along as if those assumptions were true. However, this provides new opportunities and creative ways through which talkback and dissent can happen. Take, for instance, the story at the start of this chapter; how Hayaterkeği seemed to have complied with the police officer. Althusser might have argued, as aforementioned, that Hayaterkeği was also a subject of ideology and readily gave his identification card and complied with a body and a backpack search. However, Pêcheux’s framework helps us take a second glance at that instance. It is true that he gave his identification card and complied with searches. It is also important keep in mind, however, that the authorities of the police and access the police had over Hayaterkeg ̆i’s body and backpack, as it manifested in that moment, came with various assumptions regarding the power dynamics that would have positioned the police officer as the person with power over Hayaterkeg ̆i, who only could have been an obedient subject reproducing the whole dynamic of how random police checks should have gone. When the police officer tried to search him, however, something else unfolded; Hayaterkeg ̆i tried to seduce the officer. This was not in the script! “Then the subject attempts to seduce the police officer by blowing in his ear and rubbing his cheek against the officer’s” is not one of the assumed events that is expected to take place during a random police stop. Seeming to have complied with the hegemonic script, providing the identification and agreeing to be searched, gave rise to other and creative ways by which Hayaterkeği tried to challenge the power dynamic in the process. Indeed, if Hayaterkeg ̆i took out a knife or a gun or have assaulted the police officer in one way or the other, he would immediately have assumed the counteridentifying subject position and the police knows how to deal with that subject position quite well—they are trained for it. They are not, on the other hand, trained for dealing with a gay man’s attempt in the art of seduction in a

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public park—because that, as a subject position, does not exist. This is what Pêcheux means by disidentification. Someone like Althusser, on the other hand, who argues that ideology aims to be “eternal”,32 might still wonder if that matters at all. At the end of the day, the police got what they wanted. The pattern of “you give your identification to the police when he asks” is, by and large, not broken. Hegemonic structures of the state have survived to see yet another day and continued to operate under the same assumptions. To answer this point, we can say that first, we do not possess a phenomenological account from that officer, or how Hayaterkeg ̆i’s attempt at seduction affected him or his idea of a random search. Second, it is possible to raise the same question for a number of events and activities within the realm of queer activism and activity that subvert the power dynamics without taking counteridentifying subject positions such as pride walks, having sex in public parks, or even the public existence of trans individuals. None of these acts seem to directly threaten the well-being of the hegemonic system. However, there is constant surveillance and regulation against these acts primarily because “non-normative sexualities threaten fantasies of the good life that are anchored to images of racial, religious, class, and national mono-culture.”33 In particular, pride walks, especially in Western Europe and in the USA are regulated by commercialization and being turned into a profitable yet another yearly celebration of something where people spend money—such as the mother’s day. 2015 Pride walk in Istanbul, Turkey, for instance, was regulated by police’s assault with plastic bullets, water cannons and tear gas, which left a large amount of bodies injured. In addition, in Bursa, Turkey, the local LGBT collective had to cancel the first pride walk of the city due to death and assault threats. Having sex in public parks are regulated by ‘public indecency’ laws and consequent arrests. Moreover, being a trans individual in a public space is regulated by constant assaults and murders of trans bodies. Pride walks, sex in public places, or existences of trans individuals do not constitute a direct assault on the state power—the state and its various apparatuses, either repressive or ideological, still disrupt their existence. Regular attempts at either assimilating or disrupting these acts or discourses further suggest that they are, in fact, a threat to the sustenance of hegemony and of dominant ideological assumptions, which depend on binaries. Therefore, any act that challenges that binary—be it challenging the private/public binary by having sex in a public park or the gender binary by being a trans individual—is regulated.

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Such acts and discourses are disidentifications, and they constitute the substance of queer talkback against dominant power structures. But what makes disidentifications queer? In other words, on what basis is it possible to suggest that queer acts and discourses of dissent rely on disidentification? It is safe to state that queer existences rely on disidentifications in order to be queer. Both disidentification and queer converge on the meaning of existing outside of and critiquing or dissenting against the binary structure that sustains hegemonic structures and dominant ideologies. Consequently, counteridentifying or identifying subject positions would not be queer by definition; and queer acts or discourses would not constitute the either subject positions. Muñoz, in his book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, engages in a lengthy and detailed review and analysis of the term and acts of disidentifications. He argues that the link between disidentifications and queer positionalities are much more essential than mere moments of dissent—rather disidentifications are a means of survival. He writes, “[d]isidentification is meant to be descriptive of the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship.”34 Just as he argues disidentifications are more essential than moments of dissent, they are survival strategies. We can also point out that they are not just survival strategies. At times they are conscious— and at other times they are not—acts of disobedience. There is nothing in Hayaterkeği’s story, for example, that requires him to engage in such an act as a need for survival. His attempt at subversion, according to his narrative, was prompted due to an intersection of various power dynamics: a handsome man in a uniform touching him all over and being in a park where he regularly “hunted” for bottoms. Intersection of these power dynamics gave rise to his desire to seduce a person that had power over him, thus reversing the power dynamic. This brings us to another point regarding disidentificatory practices, which Muñoz discusses as such: “[a]s a practice, disidentification does not dispel those ideological contradictory elements rather, like a melancholic subject holding on to a lost object, a disidentifying subject works to hold on to this object and invest it with new life.”35 However, investing with new life is dispelling those ideological contradictory elements. From this perspective, it might seem as if Muñoz might be arguing that attempts to dispel belong in the category of counteridentifying subject positions. However, as he writes earlier in the book, disidentifying “is a strategy that

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tries to transform a cultural logic from within, always laboring to enact permanent structural change.”36 In this sense, disidentifying is dispelling; it is subversive and revolutionary in a way counteridentifying subject positions cannot be since they rely on the binary structures and the sustenance of dominant ideologies and hegemonic structures. Pêcheux writes that disidentification is not a subject position. Muñoz extends on Pêcheux and talks about queer individuals in terms of “subjects whose identities are formed in response to the cultural logics of heteronormativity, white supremacy, and misogyny”37 engaging in “disidentificatory performances.”38 The distinction Muñoz makes between subjects and performances is peculiar in regards to the tension between Althusser and Pêcheux. While Althusser writes all men are subjects,39 Pêcheux offers a way out of being a subject through disidentification. However, he does not reflect on whether disidentifications are permanent positions or momentary escapes from lives otherwise spent as subjects. Muñoz, through his reference to performativity, seems to be favoring the latter perspective. This is also visible in Hayaterkeg ̆i’s story. During the day, one can argue looking at his narrative, he is a good subject that has a 9 to 5 job, pays taxes, and does not rock the boat. However, he engages in disidentificatory performances in those times and contexts that prompts his desire to do so. From this perspective, disidentifications seem as fleeting performances in otherwise mundane and subjectified lives of queer individuals. In order to talk about engaging in disidentificatory performances, the framework of an talkback is useful—instead of navigating the question of subjecthood that disidentification wants to leave behind anyway. As I have explained, queer talkback refers to a totality of being in the world that captures the assemblage of parts and parcels that enable queer agency in various forms. From this perspective, the question of subjecthood becomes less important. It does not matter if we yield to subjecthood in our daily lives when we are barraged by constant propaganda and impositions of neoliberalism and various normativities in almost every aspect of our existences. Likewise, it does not matter if we are individually, or others as individuals, can maintain a constant position in relation to the world that is not a subject position like Pêcheux suggests—such individuality becomes irrelevant in the face of mass consumption of dominant ideology. What matters, when we keep in mind the totalities that enable queer existences and agencies, is becoming a part of such assemblages and aid in the sustenance of whatever makes queer and, in turn, what queer makes. Talking

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about who we are in relation to the world around us in terms of queer talkback does a better job at capturing sustained existences that undermine what Muñoz calls “cultural logics”—instead of constantly trying to find a fixed position of subjecthood, or lack thereof. Consequently, in order to question and challenge the established system itself, the idea of a queer talkback emphasizes sustainable disidentifications, producing disidentificatory discourses, practices, and performativities, which are not momentary, but can persist by relying on counterpublics40 and contexts. As Berlant and Warner suggest, “queer project… support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity”.41 This can take place through questioning, defining and redefining stable identities, which in turn can produce alternative ways of existing outside of assumptions or hegemonies. In a similar vein, Muñoz argues, “disidentificatory performances … circulate in subcultural circuits and strive to envision and activate new social relations. These new social relations would be the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres.”42 As it stands, queer talkback is a framework of discursive agency that challenges the assemblage of time, space, and affect through disidentificatory discourses. Disidentification, here, is a useful way to conceptualize agency; however, it does not capture the totality of queer talkback. Most of queer studies and queer theorizing have been historically situated within literary studies and they have not had the tendency to focus on the lived experience of queer individuals—especially lived experiences of queer people of color.43 This tendency misses many opportunities to explore the various ways through which queer bodies live, love, thrive, and die—to narrate what being-in-the-world means from a queer standpoint with everything that entails.44 This is crucial for many reasons—too many to give an exhaustive list. It is safe to say, however, that exploring what queer experience means is paramount, if nothing else, for bettering the conditions in which queer bodies can exist. Still, some of queer theory does this by exploring queer contexts.45 Other studies contribute by deconstructing heterosexism and how it influences various spheres of life and social structures.46 This work furthers queer theorizing and activism by critically examining queer discourses under oppression—how queer voices establish their existence and their difference. Doing so demonstrates if and how queer discourses critique the statist and normative discourses and attempt to establish a sense of agency. Second, this analysis shows the type of time, place, and affect queer voices imagine for the future. In other

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words, by critiquing their current context, they lay out bases and blueprints for possible queer futurities. This is important to point out because zeitgeist revolves around maintaining a homogenous culture that does not leave much space, if any, for queer bodies and voices to exist.47 The remainder of this book is structured to flesh out how queer discourse in Turkey talkback to state power and existing social norms and imposed normativities. The second chapter contextualizes Turkish sociopolitical context—providing a historical and discursive background as well as the backdrop against which queer talkback exists. Outlining the common characteristics of statist and normative discourses in Turkey, and their development during 2010s will help further contextualize queer talkback in the coming chapters. Third, fourth, and fifth chapters analyze queer constructions of time, space, and affect respectively, in response to state and normativities. Third chapter starts with sketching queer histories of the events and then analyzes how LGBT discourses framed temporalities in their rhetoric. Fourth chapter elaborates on moral geography and argues how queer discourses engage in heterotopic moral geography—extending Foucault’s idea of heterotopia. The fifth chapter engages with the literature on affect. Arguing against some theories in the affective turn, I put Sara Ahmed in Conversation with Raymond Williams to suggest affect is a product of power structures and the ways in which we are taught to feel under certain circumstances are by design. The sixth chapter aims to bring these strains of analysis together and merge them, again, with a discussion on agency and ends with discussing the direction of future research and activism. Through analyzing queer talkback and constructions of being-in-theworld, my aim is not only to show how queer talkback differentiates itself from heteronormative discourses, but is also to reveal ways enlarging its circumference, if you will, to move towards queer futures.

A Note on Method and Methodology This work mainly uses publicly available online data. Starting from 2013, Gezi Park Protests, I have followed various social media accounts, publications of LGBT groups and organizations, as well as blogs and other media through the decade to collect discourses surrounding the three cases I analyze in this book. These cases are Gezi Park Protests, the ban of Pride Parade in Istanbul in 2016, and the ban of all LGBT events in Ankara in 2017. They have generated plenty of debate within LGBT activist circles where they talked about and debated how to exist under such conditions.

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One way to interpret this work would be as an attempt to make sense of these discourses. Indeed, social media and online data is plenty, easy to generate, and to access. However, that is not the main reason why I used online data. I have tried to conduct interviews and get in touch with LGBT organizations and individuals who were literally on the frontlines during the protests. My success in doing so was extremely limited. I was able to conduct a handful of short and unproductive interviews. While they are not explicitly cited through the book, I them as an oral history resource when I narrate a queer history of the events in Chap. 3. Interviews I wanted to use as data and explicitly cite never came to fruition. Many activists I got in touch with at the early stages of this work, who were willing to share their opinions and talk about the protests and lives of LGBT individuals and groups in Turkey, did not want to talk by 2016. While this was a mere challenge on my end, for the LGBT activist, it was a matter of survival—understandably so. While the Turkish state had been authoritarian since late 2000s, after the failed coup-attempt in 2016, it became a de facto totalitarian regime. While I get into more detail in the next chapter, is important for me to note here that a lack of interview data due to reasons of survival and the general aura of reasonable suspicion was the main reason why I had to rely heavily on online data—instead of using it as an auxiliary resource. Online data I have collected is volumes of manifestos, blog posts, tweets, posts, and discussions that span a period of four years. I have begun collecting data starting May 30 2013 and across all the cases I have analyzed, stopped collecting data in 2017. Overall, I have collected posts, discussions, disclaimers, and announcements from twelve Facebook groups, four hashtags, six books, two LGBT activist websites, seventy-two blog posts, three magazines, twenty-four newspaper articles, five speeches, and thirty-four Instagram posts. Though the collection process, I used purposive sampling. I had to select the posts, pages, hashtags, writings, and speeches that fit within the boundaries of my research and of my cases. In terms of methodology, I use critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the aforementioned dataset, and within the framework of critical discourse analysis, I use queer linguistics as a more specific approach. CDA is form of textual analysis that focuses on the relationship between syntactic and semantic structures and structures of power in the society. Particular uses of sentence structure and meaning making patterns reflect “the speakers/writers…general knowledge and ideologies”48 and how those ideologies are a result of the social forces in a given context. In this

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way, discourse is not only a reflection, but also a reproduction of social reality. In other words, discourse is a way in which social structures and the inequalities in distribution of power and authority to maintain and reproduce the conditions that produce these inequalities exist in the first place.49 Consequently, when we analyze a given discourse, whether we conduct that analysis under or over the sentence level, we scrutinize the social practices, ideologies, and contextual conditions that enable that text to exist the way it does. Grammar and meaning structures in a given text is a gateway for us to peek into social mechanisms that shape these texts in particular ways. For that reason, in order to analyze the power relationship between what is said and the social as well as cultural context in which whatever is said, critical discourse analysis gives us useful tools. Before elaborating on what is queer linguistics and what it makes that framework especially fitting for this research, I elaborate on some of these tools of critical discourse analysis and explain how I use them in this work. The tool I use the most is identifying indexical markers and examining the relationship the text constructs between them. An indexical marker is a phrase or a set of phrases that signify either spatiality, personality, or temporality—but they do not need to do this overtly to fulfill this function.50 One example is personal pronouns, which is a kind of personal indexical marker. However, for a phrase to refer to a person, it does not need to be a personal pronoun. In a given speech, various nouns can refer to personhood as metaphors. The same idea applies to spatial and temporal markers as well. In descriptive nationalist texts, natural features can be used rouse nationalist feelings of adoration for a particular country without referring to the country itself. What makes these implied meanings work is the connection the texts have with the audience through the context. A given text will assume that it’s reader will derive certain meanings from certain phrases because both the text as well as the audience live, breathe, and exist in the same context. As such, examining indexical markers helps uncover these assumptions texts make about their audiences, which leads to scrutinizing various meanings that texts take for granted and consequently digging into the ideological foundations that enable texts to exist the way they do. Moreover, a given phrase can metaphorically signify spatiality or personhood simultaneously with different readings of a text. In nationalist texts, for instance, this is most often accomplished by giving agency to what at a first glance seems to be spatial indexical markers. If a hypothetical text suggests “this land rises up against enemies”, for instance, ‘this

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land’ while overtly a spatial marker, can be read as a personal marker due to the function it has as the agent. Then, one can analyze why that function exists the way it does and what sort of goal the text accomplishes by fulfilling that function. In addition, oftentimes texts associate certain markers together. Personal markers that identify a particular group can be associated positively or negatively with specific spatial or temporal markers, for example. Unpacking these relationships between different kinds of markers, why they are framed the way they are, their relationships, locations in a sentence, how they are modified, and the different meanings they might take with different readings is the most common tool I use in this book in order to understand the texts at hand. It is important to ask why a text mobilizes a given metaphor to talk about something, but not any other metaphor—which leads into examining, once again, taken for granted thoughts and assumptions, which is the work of ideological formation. In nationalist texts, for example, the metaphorical work often bears the burden of dehumanizing the image of an enemy by referring to the enemy in terms of animals or insects. When extended, the metaphor suggests these human beings can be hunted down, killed, exterminated, or otherwise purged without risking critical thinking, guilt, or shame. This was the case across massacres and genocides, from Holocaust to Rwandan genocide, when the main propaganda channel referred to the perceived enemies or the deemed other as invading microbes or cockroaches that needed to be exterminated for the country to be clean or healthy. While dehumanizing metaphors are never the sole reasons why such atrocities occur, they are an important piece of the ensemble in any given ideology. Queer linguistics takes such tools of critical discourse analysis and applies them in a queer theoretical framework: “queer linguistics exposes the assumptions that lead researchers to view gender [and sexuality] in terms of a predetermined, static framework”.51 As such, queer linguistics is concerned the with the ways in which given texts either work towards further marginalizing queer populations or how texts produced by queer individuals or groups work against such marginalization and othering by scrutinizing binaries, essentialisms, and unequal distribution of power between various modes of romantic or erotic desire. Since this work is about demonstrating queer discourses that claim agency in the framework of ‘talkback’ against how a totalitarian state as well as the culture at large attempts to erase queer voices and concerns, it is fitting to use the queer linguistic framework to analyze the discursive work the texts do in the following chapters.

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Notes 1. I would argue this kind of condition applies to many moments of resistance we have witnessed throughout the 2010s as a decade throughout the world. 2. Berlant and Warner, Sex in Public, 562. 3. Stryker, Biopolitics, 38. 4. Hayaterkeği, Polis Olsaydım Yakışıklı Veya Güzel Birini Görünce Durup Dururken Üst Araması Yapardım. 5. Freeman, Time Binds, 3. 6. Freeman, Time Binds, 3. 7. Lacan, Ecrits, 279. 8. Ahearn, Language and Agency, 109. 9. Berlant and Warner, What does Queer Theory Teach us About X?, 344. 10. Buckland, Impossible Dance; Berlant and Warner, What does Queer Theory Teach us About X; Berlant and Warner, Sex in Public; Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet. 11. Blasius, An Ethos of Lesbian and Gay Existence, 143–144. 12. Assuming children are only raised with their mothers excludes other family formations. What matters is the first subject that the child sees as the Other, the very first Other outside of the child. This might as well be the mother, or might not be. Depends on the context and the family. 13. Choi, Lacan’s double battlefront in the 1957–58 seminar: Constructing the graph of desire, 257. 14. Gammelgaard, Love, drive and desire in the works of Freud, Lacan and Proust, 971. 15. Lacan. The Ethnics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, 209. 16. Lacan. The Ethnics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII, 177. 17. Gilbert, Introduction, xvii. 18. Munoz, Cruising Utopia, 1. 19. Levitt and Ippolito, Being Transgender, 47. 20. Ruti, Reading Lacan as a Social Critic, 70 21. Berlant, Desire/Love, 47. 22. Butler, Undoing Gender, 29. 23. Rodriguez, Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies, 341. 24. MacKendrick, Counterpleasures, 96. 25. Rodriguez, Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies, 343. 26. Edelman, No Future, 3. 27. Edelman, No Future, 30. 28. Smith, Queer Theory and Native Studies, 48. 29. Pecheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 157.

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30. Pecheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 157. 31. Pecheux, Language, Semantics, and Ideology, 156. 32. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 173. 33. Berlant, Desire/Love, 21. 34. Munoz, Disidentifications, 4. 35. Munoz, Disidentifications, 12. 36. Munoz, Disidentifications, 11. 37. Munoz, Disidentifications, 5. 38. Munoz, Disidentifications, 5. 39. Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, 173. 40. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 424. 41. Berlant and Warner, What does Queer Theory Teach us About X?, 343–349. 42. Munoz, Disidentifications, 5. 43. Lane, In Life, On the Scene, 21; Johnson, “Quare” studies, or (almost) everything I know about queer studies I learned from my grandmother, 2–3; Ferguson, Aberrations in black: toward a queer of color critique. 44. Ahmed, Orientations: Toward a Queer Phenomenology, 543–574. 45. Lane, In Life, On the Scene; Buckland, Impossible Dance; Casey, Belonging; Leap, Homophobia as moral geography. 46. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of what queer theory does. Rather, my aim is to draw focus on the parts of queer theory that I use in my study. For an extensive list on the current state of queer theory, see Gandy, Queer ecology. 47. Berlant, Desire/Love, 21. 48. Van Dijk, Discourse and Power, 69. 49. Fairclough, Critical discourse analysis. 50. Gee, How to do Discourse Analysis. 51. Leap Queer linguistics, sexuality, and discourse analysis, 560.

CHAPTER 2

Contextualizing Normativity: Political Discourse in Turkey

Focus of this chapter is to provide the national mise en scene against which queer activism and talkback developed during 2010s. This national background includes the statist as well as non-statist discourses that embodied normativity during this decade. By statist discourses, I do not mean those discourses that exclusively belong to the state—even though most are. I include any all discourses that circulate statist norms and perspectives on historical and social issues. Non-statist discourses, on the other hand, refer to those discourses that, at least at a first glance, seem to be against the state or oppose state’s perspectives. These non-statist discourses, however, often times end up enforcing foundational assumptions of the Turkish state—such as patriarchy, heterosexism, and nationalism—and for that reason are still clogs in the machinery of normativity. In other words, in Turkey’s case, the binary between supporting the state’s actions versus protesting the state is a false one. They support the same normative structure that exists at the expense of those who are pushed to the margins. Public memory is a regulated sphere of existence. Regulation of public memory is not that different compared to the way in which the state regulates and protects its tangible and intangible assets; its borders, its intuitions, and its basic ideological assumptions that keep it functioning the way it does. Exerting power either through coercion, repression, or through ideological conditioning to impose various official narratives of the state has been a staple practice in most nation-states and definitely for Turkey since the establishment of the Republic in 1923. Along the same © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7_2

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lines, imposition of heteronormativity is merely a different façade of the official ideology—akin to nationalism, patriarchy, militarism—and the way the state’s institutions and agents impose heteronormativity has not been different compared to how it imposed other façades of its official narratives. In the context of the case studies I analyze in this book and through the 2010’s, heteronormative imposition took place either through repression, or through those discourses I have called ‘non-statist discourses’. These discourses have been chants, slogans, protest signs, social media posts—public discourses in general. However, their common point has been their reliance of using patriarchic, sexist, heterosexist, and transphobic language and historicizing. This leads to a heteronormative regulation of public memory, which takes place through ideological conditioning whereby those who think they oppose the state end up erasing LGBT voices and concerns from public memory. Either case, whether through state or through those who are convinced that they are taking a stance against the state, normativity is saturated within the social, political, and cultural life in Turkey. During 2010s, such normativity and erasure of LGBT voices and concerns form the background against which LGBT activism develops. The purpose of this chapter is to trace the intertextuality through various discourses in Turkey. More specifically, fist I outline the ways in which statist discourses rush to identify a self and a generalized other. These dichotomous and polarized discursive positions reach back to some of the foundational texts of the republic, such as the National Anthem, and function as discursive tropes that draw a straight line between the lexicon of war in these texts and the current context. This lexicon depends on identifying subject and object positions and modifying these positions with nationalist narratives such as purity and animosity. Mobilization of these tropes work to legitimize state’s violence on its subjects. To do that, the chapter uses state’s response to Gezi Park protests as an example. Furthermore, again using Gezi Park protests as the example at hand, the chapter shows the ways in which non-queer discourses sustain normative assumptions that form the bedrock of the state, even though they claim to oppose the state’s position. Consequently, with these examples, this chapter depicts the contemporary normative political discourse in Turkey. This serves as the background against which queer discourses existed, endured, and resisted—which I explore in the subsequent chapters.

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Historical Background State and those who reproduce statist discourses command the official constructions of the past. These constructions inform a sense of identity that has clear instructions on how state’s subjects should exist to sustain state’s existence as optimally as possible. State answers moral conundrums for its subjects: what is the permissible—in other words, non-­threatening— border of dissent? How should people feel towards statist symbols such as borders and flags? What is the morality of walking on any piece of land that belongs to the state? What is the moral and appropriate life arc an upstanding citizen should follow? What can people discuss in private versus in public? Answers to these and many other questions are functions of how the state relates the past to the present, what that means for existing on a particular piece of land, and how this being-in-the-world instructs certain feelings that guide people—mostly by shame, the stick, and pride, the carrot—to act in an appropriate manner that ensures state’s well-being. In Turkey’s case, these instructions have their roots in Ottoman Empire. Turkish nationalism “emerged as a linguistic and cultural movement in the 1880s”,1 during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and maneuvered through various international and domestic movements to emerge as a dominant narrative in Turkish social, cultural, and political life.2 As such, Turkish nationalism and its narrative saturated the discourses of social and political movements from fascist leaning to leftist to populist to Islamist.3 Throughout these different forms, Turkish nationalist narrative never stopped being nationalist—demanding homogeneity among its subjects, taking authoritarianism for granted and requiring sacrifice for the sake of the state as a proof of loyalty. While the ways in which Turkish nationalist narrative has saturated different movements, adapted, survived, and prevailed through decades is itself a worthwhile question, it is beyond the scope of this book. Instead, the historical sketch I draw here concerns Turkey’s recent history—especially 1980’s onward. I focus on 1980’s onward is because it is the period when global neoliberalism took a predominant stage in world politics as well as in domestic politics. In Turkey, this happened in two ways: first, adoption of global neoliberalism meant that paving the way for individual freedom, how limited it might be due to the sociopolitical context, which also marks the when LGBT individuals began organizing. Second, the 2010’s is the period in Turkish politics when, much like the world, consequences of neoliberal political economy finally met with resistance. In the world, we

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saw that with the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and other protests that popped up through Brazil, Greece, and Armenia. In Turkey, it manifested as Gezi Park Protests. Consequently, neoliberalism was one of the factors that propelled LGBT activism in Turkey. Moreover, it is the structure in effect constituting the social, cultural, and political background of the 2010’s. Turkey’s involvement with global neoliberalism reaches back to 1950s, but starts in 1983. Turkey did not participate in World War 2; however, it was an active participant in its aftermath. More specifically, Turkey allied with the US and received funding in the form of Marshall Plan in the 50s.4 Marshall Plan was a structural adjustment plan that “transferred some $13 billion to Europe in the years 1948–51”.5 While the amount was not enough to rebuild Europe, the point was to steer the European countries away from the influence of the Soviet Union.6 This was the reason why Turkey was involved within the plan while not having participated in the Second World War. Even though Turkey’s economy suffered because of the war, ideological reasoning was far more important for receiving Marshall Aid, than an economic justification.7 The aid Turkey received from the Marshall Plan, alongside with Greece, was the bedrock of what is called the Truman Doctrine. President Harry S. Truman addressed this very issue in a joint session of congress on March 12, 1947. After outlining the conditions of the economic aid—necessitated by Britain’s lack of funds to support Turkey and Greece—President Truman closes his speech with the following statement: The seeds of totalitarian regimes are nurtured by misery and want. They spread and grow in the evil soil of poverty and strife. They reach their full growth when the hope of a people for a better life has died. We must keep that hope alive. The free peoples of the world look to us for support in maintaining their freedoms. If we falter in our leadership, we may endanger the peace of the world––and we shall surely endanger the welfare of our own nation.8

Consequently, as President Truman argues, the Truman Doctrine is indeed an ideological play in line with the containment strategy that was adopted by the U.S. in the 1940’s.9 This alignment made Turkey adjust its policies line with a fear of communism, communists, and deviants, which was already in line with the existing nationalist ideology;10 solidifying a sense of homogenous unity based on nationalism, all the while controlling

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deviance—whether religious, sexual, or ideological—under the mask of secularism. Much took place since the adoption of the Marshall Plan. The period between the adoption of the Marshall Plan and 1983 was turbulent—to say the least. Surely, due to the Marshall Plan, Turkey adopted merits of capitalism more aggressively than before in a move to create distance between itself and iron curtain at its borders.11 But these policies clashed often with the public, especially with the growing clashes between right and left populist movements that were inspired by similar movements in Europe through the 60’s and the 70’s. Public and political unrest was met with three coupe-d’état by the armed forces in 1960, 1971, and 1980. There was one coup-d’état attempt by a leftist group in 1970 and another attempt by the military in 2016. These resulted in thousands of deaths and executions, and the emergence of Kurdish insurgent group PKK—all of these played a role in how Turkey shaped its domestic policies starting 1983. 1983 is an important date because it marks the year when the last coupe-d’état in Turkish history transferred the political control to civilian rule. “During the 1982–1983 period, Ozal was actively involved in the formation of a new political party, namely the Motherland Party (the ANAP). The ANAP gained a major victory in the elections of November 1983”.12 ANAP was a center-right party and pursued neoliberal policies to shape domestic policies with U.S. hegemony in reaction to rising anti-US populist movements from the left as well as Islamist ideologies.13 Consequently, this shaping did not veer from a basic fear of the left and of the deviant. While this resulted in a stunted growth of left-centered civil society, it also has enabled the emergence of LGBT and feminist organizations as well as voices to gain momentum.14 Partog notes,15 until 2000’s, the LGBT movement in Turkey was not aimed at publicly coming out; however, due to social pressures of ‘sin’ or ‘tradition’ they were spent in safe houses or bars to solidify their identities and participatory base. Only after 2000’s, the LGBT movement in Turkey became visible, paralleling the increased conversation on identity issues in Western Europe and the United States. In 2002, the current AKP government and its prominent leader, Erodgan, with a religious neoconservative twist, picked up the neoliberal torch. Consequently, more than a decade of neoconservative neoliberal ruling later, the social context of Turkey is in line with neoliberal logics of existence and neoliberal subjectivity grounded in Turkish and Muslim nationalist neoconservative ideology.

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Neoliberalism and AKP Before delving into the ways in which AKP mobilizes nationalist discourses against the protest, it is crucial to explain further neoliberalism flourished in the world and how AKP adopted it alongside with its neoconservative authoritarianism since mid-2000’s. To that end, I first explain neoliberalism and its basic merits, and then I expand on AKP’s expansion of neoliberal policies. One can define neoliberalism as an ideology that loosely connects certain merits that rests on several assumptions: free market is the only way to guarantee individual freedom,16 state intervention to the economic life should be minimal17 and to accomplish those ends, public goods should be privatized and private investment should be deregulated. Furthermore, it is in the best interest of the economic engine if the working class is dispossessed to advance the capitalist class interest as well as the accumulation of capital at the hands of the bourgeoisie.18 These solutions were the result of a reactionary movement. While at a first glance, the reaction appears to be against the rise of totalitarianism— Soviets on the one hand and fascism on the other—it had far less obvious targets. Namely, the reaction followed the suit with far right politics at the time that saw rising power of labor unions in the factories as a threat against accumulation of wealth in the US and throughout Europe. When the rise of labor unions coincided with economic and political anxiety during the interwar years and brought about the New Deal in the US and social democracy in the UK, as well as Kenesianism, scholars such as Hayek, Popper, Mises, and Friedman took note.19 Hayek clearly states the priorities and the concerns of neoliberalism in his work Road to Serfdom. He argues that the issue is “rapidly abandoning the… salient characteristics of Western Civilisation as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans”.20 To counter this threat, Hayek founded the now famous Mont Pelerin Society in order to establish a network among politicians, journalists, and scholars that reached both sides of the Atlantic. For Hayek, the purpose of this network was to labor against the possibility that the legacy of the Western Civilization and Christianity might vanish. In 1949, he claimed, “[w]e need intellectual leaders who are willing to work for an ideal, however small may be the prospects of its early realization. They must be men who are willing to stick to principles and to fight for their full realization, however remote”.21 In other words, in its inception neoliberalism was a

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movement that sought to institute an international vanguard of the bourgeoisie, in a manner of speaking, in order to social engineer the neoliberal utopia.22 Neoliberalism had less to do with empowering capitalists so that the wealth could trickle down and reduce poverty and more to do with mobilizing such discourses in defense of what they thought were the essential constituents Western Civilization and Christianity. It took until the 1970s for neoliberalism to become the dominant driving force of international politics. During the 1970’s, there were three back to back crises that was the result not only of increasing wealth gap due to capital accumulation after the Second World War, but also due to the shifting location of industries as well as accumulated capital from cities to suburbs. These three crises were the collapse of Bretton-Woods and the end of gold standard, a recession, and a stock market crash in 1971, 1973, and 1975 respectively. While there was the 68 generation and rise leftist populism in Europe, the social crises in the U.S. far more severe. There were the combined forces of the sexual liberation, civil rights movement, and anti-Vietnam War movements through the late 60s. Combined economic and social crises in the US brought about a rebranded neoliberalism—this time juxtaposing the economic theories and the will to protect the Western Civilization with neo-conservative policies and the bootstrap narrative. Political echoes of these narratives found their voice in Thatcher in Britain and Regan in the US.  The policies they sought undermined social democracy, trade unions, and social safety nets. Similar to what happened in Turkey, these developments in the US and Britain got saturated internationally and neoliberalism began its tenure as a global force. It “provided the basic policy framework for “structural adjustment” in the global south, for “rescuing” the welfare state in the global north, and as a vision for global economy unbound from centrally planned markets, dying industries, or rent-seeking interest groups”.23 It did not take a long time until these policies and narratives were used for imperialist ends—which was the implicit goal of the trans-Atlantic neoliberal network Hayek established in the first place. There were coup-d’états in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile in 1970s, all backed by the US.24 Following Hayek’s example, the US established an international network of economists, which proliferated neoliberal policies wherever they went. Chicago Boys is one of the most cited examples. They were a group of Chilean economists who got educated in the University of Chicago in 1950s. After Pinochet took power in 1973 through the US backed coup, these economists were put in charge of the Chilean economy.25 Through their

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imposition of neoliberal policies, Latin America is still struggling with wealth gap and chronic economic crises.26 Collapse of the iron curtain, however, changed the way in which global neoliberalism advanced. Long gone were the days of clandestine military coups—they were no longer favorable in the international political arena. Since late 80s and 90s, the main tool of imperialism was global trade and structural adjustment policies pushed by IMF and World Bank. Still, the assumptions that underlined these agreements were the same: free market was the Holy Grail, which was the only way any society could hope to attain individual freedoms for their citizens, which could only be pursued by free trade and globalized finance.27 The relentless pursuit of global neoliberalism meant increased accumulation of wealth for the bourgeoisie by means of dispossession from the proletariat. “Just in five years (from 1985 to 1989) over US$350 billion in the form of debt payments were diverted from development projects and programmes in the developing countries (primarily in Latin America) to the head offices of the commercial banks”.28 In Turkey, the name of these narratives was Turgut Ozal and his party, ANAP.  Following the tumultuous decade of the 70s,29 a coup d’état in 1980, and a three year military rule, made people yearn for individual freedoms and a better integration to the global political economy promised by Turgut Ozal’s brand of neoliberalism. After Ozal’s rule that ended in 1993, the authoritarian and neoliberal reforms and policies he put into place—such bypassing checks and balances as well as empowering the elites and the bourgeoisie at the expense of labor30—was just the way things were. AKP entered the Turkish political scene in 2002 and quickly adopted these practices. During their initial years, AKP’s neoliberal rule used the rhetoric of individual freedom guaranteed by the freedom of the market, and consequently their political movement was widely accepted by the Turkish bourgeoisie and elites.31 These claims, at the time, were in line with proposed pro-European Union reforms—which later became an institution against which AKP mobilized its nationalist and conservative rhetoric. During the reform time, however, AKP molded aggressive neoliberal policies with authoritarian Islamist neo-conservative rule to “underline the disciplining character of the market, the significance of self-sufficient active citizen through the three-tier private pension system as well as the importance of faith-based social provisioning organisations, Islamic values, and communal references”.32 To further their political-economic and

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social goals, AKP government not only eroded democratic institutions,33 but also enforced “authoritarian practices, which have partly been embedded in the historical trajectory of Turkish neoliberalism… by utilising authoritarian techniques and constructing an unmediated disciplinary bond between the individual labourer and the state, the latter being increasingly identified first with the party and then with the leader”.34 AKP adopted this rule as an inheritance from previous generation of Islamist politicians. Turkish Republic was established to distance itself from its Ottoman past, where the state religion was Islam and the Sultan was the Caliph. The founding of the Republic involved various reforms from clothing to alphabet to a unified and secular education system to create this distance.35 The Republic and the ideology that drove the establishment of the Republic, Kemalism, did not aim to eliminate Islam. “[O]ne of the six pillars of Kemalism, halkçılık (populism), not only approved “the public” as the “master” of the nation but also accepted their ascribed Islamic identity (the religion of the majority) as one of the constitutive elements of the imagined Turkish nation in the making”.36 Öncü further explains how the new republic aimed to control public religious life, instead of creating a true distance between state and religion through the establishment of Directorate of Religious Affairs (DRA). DRA’s propagated purpose was [T]o provide the citizens with Islamic religious services such as the appointment of preachers, muezzins and imams and the distribution of sermons. The true objective of the DRA, which was to establish control over the Islam practiced in civil society in order to contain any form of opposition against the development of modern capitalism from the quarters of heterodox Islam.37

Therefore, from its inception, the aim of the Turkish state regarding public religious life had been to control the type of Islam the public practiced—at the expense of banning and prosecuting what the state perceived as unorthodox practices. Before 1970s, this process was one of secularization. Only orthodox Islam was to be practiced individually in ways that would not associate, therefore threaten, the political life and processes. However, those who wanted Islam to have presence in education, political discourse, economy, foreign policy, and day-to-day life, began the Islamist movement in the 1970s.38 To this end in 1969 Necmettin Erbakan, an Islamist politician, founded a political party named National Order Party.

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The ideology of this party was dubbed Milli Görüş (National Vision), and it was an ideology based on the values of political Islam fused with ethnocentrism and militarism, which also contains xenophobic undertones towards a reductionist perception of ‘the West’.39 Through the 1990s, this movement lived through its greatest successes. In 1996, it was elected to lead the coalition government. However, in 1997, the military intervened and aimed to reestablish the secularization that it perceived to be under threat. Following the military intervention, which witnessed arrests and harassment of politicians, “a new generation of Islamists began to challenge the old leadership. The former radicals were quick to adopt a free market, ‘moderate Muslim’ position”.40 Among the new generation of Islamists was the Erdoğan, who was elected to power in 2002. While AKP’s molding of authoritarianism, neo-conservatism, and neoliberalism looked like a new synthesis at a first glance, it was merely the continuation of not only the previous generation of Islamist politicians, but also of Turkish politics in general since the inception of the Republic.41 Consequently, based on aforementioned narrative, it is not too farfetched to make a historical argument that AKP is indeed the unleashed expression of Turkish political culture that combines different aspects of various political movements that seeks to strengthen the rule of the state by mobilizing whatever sociocultural narrative and political-economic policy available at their disposal and completely disposing off any façade of principle or ideology. This is the historical backdrop of the Gezi Park protests. Against this backdrop, the state used the war rhetoric I outlined below as a reaction against the protests. The rhetoric reaches back to the founding of the republic and the mobilization of these rhetorical tropes are especially easy and streamlined precisely because AKP is the latest manifestation of Turkish political culture. AKP’s rule is not and cannot be thought separately or in opposition to the Turkish political tradition when its rhetoric as well as social and economic policies are not mere continuations but aggressive extensions of various policies that formed and molded the Turkish republic. In the same vein, AKP cannot be thought separate from the global forces that brought about its existence—Marshall plan, structural adjustment policies, neoliberal globalization, and all other global forces that pushed the political climate in Turkey in a particular direction, which was herded by the continuous conservative lean of the governments since the founding of the republic as well as its desire to ally with the conservative and then neoconservative ideology in order to defend first against

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communism then against the growing wave of liberalism in the world. This ideological alliance was not difficult to exploit or rather capitalize by the AKP government, which ushered a populist movement using the conservative social base as a springboard to implement a de facto totalitarian rule.

Statist Discourses To demonstrate how statist discourses functioned during 2010s in Turkey, I will use then PM Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s reactions to Gezi Park protests that took place in 2013 as an example. Gezi Park protests, dubbed #occupygezi, was the single largest protest movement in the history of Turkish republic and consequently as the Turkish PM at the time, Erdogan had a lot to say about it and his discourse encapsulates how statist discourses function. Briefly, what lead the protests to take place was Istanbul municipality’s decision to pave the way to build a shopping mall on Gezi Park. The architectural choice was that of an old Ottoman army barracks that used be where Gezi Park is today. The plan was to reconstruct the barracks as a shopping mall. While this act had many layers of meaning, the immediate reaction that made it to the public eye through limited press coverage was of a handful of environmentalists protesting. On May 27, they put up tents, sang songs, and engaged in a #occupy type sit in protest to obstruct the bulldozers that were trying to demolish the Gezi Park to start the construction of the mall. The next day, the police attacked the protestors with tear gas, which only helped to draw more attention and protestors to the Park. The turning point was on May 30, when the police marched in force, took over the park, and burned the tents, musical instruments, books, and the other possessions of the protestors who had been keeping watch for the last several days. From that point on, the protests gained much wider attention and grew in size. In a matter of two weeks, the protests became a nation-wide issue with “3,545,000 citizens participating in 4,725 events in all but one of Turkey’s 81 provinces”.42 The protestors did not have a unifying identity or a banner under which they rallied. The participation was not the result of an organized multitude. What drove the protestors to stand together for about three months was their common disapproval of the Turkish Prime Minister (PM) at the time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Halk TV, a channel that became popular during the protests, suggested that people

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were standing up against “the oppressive, arrogant and increasingly authoritarian” rule of the PM.43 The protests lasted until about mid-­ August and slowly died down afterwards. How the statist discourses portray the events that took place during #occupygezi feeds heavily from the past events, since they were already oriented towards the present through the official past. A good example to this is then PM Erdogan’s ‘respect for national will rally’ advertisement. When #occupygezi was taking place, Erdogan conducted five rallies in five different cities to solidify his base and to build a counter discourse and movement. He called these rallies ‘respect for the national will’. Being elected as the ruling party meant, according to PM Erdogan, that he was the national will manifest—and anyone who disagreed automatically disagreed with the national will. In order to establish what is the national in ‘the national will,’ Erdogan makes references to past events and constructs the current struggle against the protestors using the discourses that were generated during the inception of the republic. However, when PM Erdogan came into power in 2002, he was promising change: he was, at best, going to dismantle the old archaic political practices and culture that ruled the country for almost a century and, at worst, he was not going to abide by them. However, a decade later as the leader of Turkey, he used those very same discourses. How did this happen? Erdoğan’s brand of political Islam, although it aimed to challenge the limiting aspect of secular politics, used some of the same rhetorical tropes that were established during the foundation of the Republic, such as the Turkish National Anthem (TNA) and Atatürk’s Address to Youth (AAY). TNA was written in 1921 in midst of War of Independence, a national war effort against invading European forces. AAY was written in 1927, shortly after the Republic was established, to reflect the nation-building efforts. Both TNA and AAY were written to establish national solidarity based on a narrative of constant threat from the “Other,” thus constructing unison and division along homogenized national lines. At the time these texts were written, the ‘self’ referred to a sense of public whose most important identity was perceived to be an integration of Turkishness and Sunni Muslim, while the ‘Other’ was the Christian Europeans. TNA, for instance, is a text that exclusively identifies Sunni-Islam and Turkish ethnicity, as well as a nationalistic ideology as components of self-identity.44 Through referencing these texts, Erdoğan’s political discourse, therefore, emulates the polarizing nature of these texts. Erdogan and the statist

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discourse he personally shapes, orients itself towards the present events from the perspective of these past narratives. To get better acclimated with the rest of the statist discourse, here I analyze the rally ad Erdogan used to publicize the ‘respect for the national will’ rally. This analysis reveals how Erdogan, and the rest of the statist discourse, recontextualizes the past to understand the present. Such analysis also reveals how references to these texts act as tropes that establish the same self vs. other fault-lines between his constituents and the Gezi Park protestors—just as these texts established the same lines between the people and the European invaders during the independence war between 1919–1923. On the background of the poster, there is the Turkish flag, where the crescent and the star looks angled, with the red looking slightly bent in places, casting parallel shadows—implying that the flag is not just any Turkish flag, rather it is a rippling flag. On the foreground, we see Erdoğan’s image, looking at the text. At the very bottom, there is the date and time with the ruling AKParty’s logo on the left. Above the date and time, the text reads, from the top: . Rally for respect to national will (Milli iradeye saygı mitingi) 1 2. To spoil the big game (Büyük oyunu bozmaya) 3. Let’s write history (Haydi tarih yazmaya) The background image, the rippling flag is a reference to the TNA. The symbolism of the rippling flag is in the first line of the first and the last stanzas of the TNA: “Fear not, the crimson banner that proudly ripples in this glorious dawn, shall never fade…” “So ripple and wave like the bright dawning sky, oh thou glorious crescent…”. Through the imagery of the rippling flag, the ad taps into the narratives existing within the TNA, which outlines a dystopic imagery of invasion of the homeland—“fear not”—and ends with a utopic hope towards a better tomorrow—“the bright dawning sky”.45 Drawing from the imagery of the TNA, the visual rhetoric of the rally ad references the same narrative of threat in the face of a countrywide invasion. The TNA and the self/other, attack/defense, friend/foe narratives that the TNA brings provide the narrative background on which the text further references and recontextualizes TNA and AAY. On this background, the text first engages in identification of the self and the other. Just as the TNA signifies an imagined nation at the intersection of Sunni-Muslim, Turkish, and nationalist identities, the rally ad

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constructs a similar imagined self at through the phrase “respect to the national will.” Erdoğan often uses “national will” in his discourse to signify to himself and to his own party. The reference rests on being elected to power, therefore being the manifestation of the “national will.” The ad constructs those who identify with him as those who respect the national will—bridging the gap between Erdoğan and the public. Dialectically, akin to TNA pointing to the European forces as the Other that wish to harm the imagined nation, the ad constructs those who rally against Erdoğan’s rule as rallying against the national will. Consequently, the text constructs the Other as those who disrespect the national will, the protestors. “Let’s write history,” the third line of the text in the ad, feeds from this identification of self and other. “To write history” is an expression in Turkish that means to undertake and complete a monumental task with success. The word “haydi,” while does not have a direct transliteration, can be translated as “let’s.” Just like “let’s” it has a tacit imperative, such as “let’s [go].” The call to action in the tacit imperative collocated with an imposed task of “writing history” can be read as an attempt to establish consent through hailing individuals as subjects in an Althusserian sense.46 In addition, in this discursive context where the background is established through TNA’s narratives, it arguably refers to similar calls to action TNA makes to the imagined public to take up arms and defend the nation. Further ossifying the lingering perception that treats the protests as an echo of the War of Independence, the ad takes a step further than framing those who positively respond to the PM’s rally ad as patriotic as fighting against the Europeans. Such hailing not only justifies the police brutality witnessed during the protests but also explains, at least in part, citizens who grabbed knives, clubs, and machetes to attack the protestors—since such attacks were common when European armies were invading various parts of Turkey in 1920s. The second line of the rally ad, “Büyük oyunu bozmaya” is transliterated as “to spoil the big game.” “Game” in Turkish also means “trick” and refers to conspiracy theories that were generated throughout the protests by the state-supporting media, as well as the 28 minute long video made by the government’s “PR and Media Directorate.” The video, named “big game,” shows protestors throwing rocks to the police and vandalizing public property. It argues that protests cost over 140 million dollars and draws attention to allegations of “interest lobby” and “foreign media” as the main driving force behind the protests. The protests, therefore, are

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not perceived as manifestation of dissent. Rather, they are framed as conspiracies in which foreigners’ attempt to damage Turkey using protests and protestors. In a discursive context where the protests echo the War of Independence and support for the PM is constructed as patriotism, the “big game” becomes a conspiracy marker that refers to previous efforts of the foreigner’s attempt to damage Turkey. The conspiracy, the trick, in this context possibly cites the secret treaties made to partition the Ottoman Empire, such as Sykes-Picot. Here, the ad reaches back to AAY, a text that talks more explicitly about games, colonial efforts, and future enemies: Oh Turkish Youth! Your first duty is to preserve and defend forever the Turkish independence and the Turkish Republic. This is the only foundation of your existence and of your future. This foundation is your most precious treasure. In the future, too, there will be malevolent people at home and abroad who will wish to deprive you of this treasure.

Obscure personal as well as temporal pronouns throughout the text set the stage for recontextualization between the post-war newfound Turkish Republic and protests against PM Erdoğan’s decade of rule. In the fourth and fifth lines, the implicit reference to the past through “too,” and explicit reference to the future set the stage to point out enemies and reach out to allies. Those who answer the hailing of the “duty” to “preserve and defend” are deemed as allies, while the enemy, who provoke such defense, can be within or without the national borders. The narrative of constant threat, victimization, as well as the ambiguous prophecy rhetoric allow for “big game” from PM Erdoğan’s rally ad to tap into the narrative that the AAY uses. “Big game” from the PM Erdoğan’s rally ad, constructs a parallel with the prophecy from the past and events in the present. By suggesting the existence of a “big game,” the ad suggests that the protestors on the street are a part of those “malevolent people’ who “wish to deprive [the people] of [the] treasure.” As such, the ad hails good citizens to duty, to rally around the leader in order “to preserve and defend.” It is on this kind of base and background Erdogan conducted five rallies when Gezi Park protests were taking place. He held the rallies in the capital, Ankara, on 16th of June, then in Istanbul on the 17th, followed by Kayseri on the 22nd, Samsun on the 23rd, and finally in Erzurum on the 24th. The five speeches Erdogan delivered in these rallies follow a similar

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content and structure. Since he used the same rally ad to announce the rallies, the aforementioned ties he established between the past and the present became a frame through which Erdogan constructed his argument and led his audience to perceive his rhetoric. In terms of content and structure, all his five speeches are similar and they follow several temporal templates and patterns. They rely on: (1) invoking the narratives of a past trauma such as the War of Independence in order to make meaning for the present and listing perceived or real attacks and threats that took place in the past against him or his party as chronologically connected with the protests in order to discredit the protestors, and; (2) referring to democracy as a temporally scheduled event to suggest the protestors are not aligned with a democratic schedule and therefore are malicious. The temporality in his narratives needs to refer to the past in order to explain the present, but this explanation, in turn, presents time as a linear structure where the state is involved in an ongoing battle against Turkey waged by unknown and foreign forces. Then, to support this linear temporal argument, Erdogan again reaches back in time to use vocabulary or grammar that was used during wartime of 1920s. For the sake of making the connection and to preserve the linear structure between the discursive resources of the past and the events of the present, Erdogan strategically uses ambiguous grammar and vocabulary that invoke narratives of relentless and unknown enemies. In other words, if Erdogan did not rely on his widespread use of the ambiguous and generalized other, he would not have been able to make the connection between the past and the present to suggest the current struggle is a continuation of the past struggles. Consequently, Erdogan threads a linear and a chrononormative structure of temporality in his speeches, which is useful to position him and therefore the state’s narrative as a righteous justification of state’s violence. The ambiguous parts of speech that connect the past and the present trauma are either temporal deictic markers that blur the temporality because their timeframe is not exactly clear; or they are exophoric deictic personal markers pointing to the source of the trauma of the past and the present as the same personal marker. Exophora refers to parts of speech that indexes entities “outside of the text altogether.”47 Exophora in these cases enforce the sense of a generalized other stripped off any possible identity or definition of self-other than being either the friend or the enemy of the state. For instance, in his speech in Erzurum, Erodgan says:

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[Sevgili kardeşlerim, bundan yaklaşık 100 yıl önce Erzurum düşman ̇ ̇ tarafından işgal edildiğinde adeta Istanbul işgal edilmiş gibi, adeta Izmir işgal edilmiş gibi tüm Türkiye gözyaşlarına boğulmuş, tüm Türkiye’yi çok büyük bir gam kaplamıştı. Ama o günlerde, o kara günlerde sadece Türkiye değil, sadece bu aziz millet değil, tüm dünya Müslümanları göz yaşı dökmüş, dünsyanın her köşesinde Müslümanlar ellerini semaya kaldırıp dualar etmişti… Evet, 100 yıl önce Erzurum’un zor gününde nasıl dünya Müslümanlarının eli semaya kalktıysa, inanın bugün de aynı şekilde tüm dünya Müslümanlarının elleri semaya kalktı. 100 önce nasıl dünyadaki tüm kardeşlerimiz, tüm dostlarımız bizim için seferber olduysa, inanın bugün de dünyadaki tüm dostlarımız, tüm kardeşlerimiz bizim için seferber oldu.]

1. Dear brothers/sisters, around 100  years ago, when Erzurum was invaded by the 2. enemy, entire Turkey drowned in tears, entire Turkey was covered in sadness as if 3. Istanbul was invaded, as if Izmir was invaded. But on those days, on those dark 4. days, not only Turkey, not only this glorious nation, the Muslims of the entire 5. world shed tears, Muslims at all corners of the world raised their hands to the 6. heavens and offered prayers… Yes, just as the Muslims of the world raised their 7. hands to the hevens 100  years ago during Erzurum’s difficult day, believe that 8. today in the same way all the Muslims of the world raised their hands to the 9. heavens. Just as all our brothers/sisters in the world, all our friends mobilized for 10. us 100 years ago, believe that also today all our friends, all our brothers/sisters 11. mobilized for us.

Just as the rally ad sets-up, Erdogan discursively binds the War of Independence that took place at the start of the twentieth century, to what he frames as state’s ongoing struggle against enemies. This temporal equation allows Erdogan to frame those who are protesting as “invading enemies”, since the subject at the start of the second line also serves as a uniting point for “all the Muslims of the world” in lines eight through eleven. This demonstrates how Erdogan uses exophoric deictic personal

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markers to suggest a linear relationship of time between unrelated events. His argument, in a nutshell, is that both the perpetuators and the victims of the past are the perpetuators and victims of the present. Therefore, the logic goes, the events are related. Halliday and Hasan argue that “[e]xophoric reference is not cohesive, since it does not bind the two elements together in a text.”48 However, while Erdogan’s reference to “invading enemies” or “all the Muslims of the world” takes us outside of the text since he does not reference these markers before in his speech, they function as a cohering agent not only between temporal markers, but also as one of the points that hold the general meaning of the text together. I have argued elsewhere49 this type of temporal bridging that goes along with character bridging is part of textual coherence, not cohesion, and its primary function is to sustain the overall meaning structure the text attempts to build. Later in the same speech, Erdogan references the War of Independence, this time using anaphoric personal deixes, markers that refer to previous items in text, to bind the past and the present time as a linear continuity: [Kurtuluş Savaşındaki askerler Türk Bayrağı yakmıyordu, tam tersine kanlarıyla Türk Bayrağı yapıyor, Türk Bayrağı için canını ortaya koyuyor, hatta Yunan Bayrağını bile yerden alacak kadar vakar gösteriyordu. Biz böyle bir ecdadın torunlarıyız.] 1. The soldiers in the War of Independence weren’t burning Turkish Flags, on the 2. contrary, they were making the Turkish Flag with their blood, [they were] putting 3. their lives out there for the Turkish Flag, even [they] showed dignity enough to 4. take the Greek Flag from the ground. We are the descendants of this kind of 5. ancestor.

This paragraph is one of series of paragraphs in which Erdogan contrasts the soldiers during the War of Independence to the protestors and ultimately to himself and to his followers using linear temporality. He constructs the temporality alongside a rift between the two groups of people in order to differentiate between the “we” on the line four and the implied “them” who are “burning Turkish Flags” on line one. The temporal juxtaposition takes place alongside “the descendants of this kind of ancestor” and those who cannot, by dialectical implication, be from the same

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ancestry according to Erdogan. Consequently, the differentiation between us and them is based on racial essentialism using linear time to suggest two divergent paths from which two different type of people came to be today: Us, the good, the moral, the respectful who is descendent from also a good, moral, respectful ancestry; and them, the bad, the corrupt, the disrespectful who did not descent from the same ancestry. This differentiation in morality based on racial essentialism would not be possible without a linear temporal construction that ties the past trauma to current trauma. The War of Independence is not the only rhetorical trope Erdogan uses to linearly connect the past traumas with the protests. He also invokes other events that happened in the history of the Turkish republic and suggests they all have the same malicious source: the ambiguous and foreign other. For instance, in the speech he made in Istanbul, he says: [Sevgili kardeşlerim, bu aziz millet o müdahalecilerden hesabını sandıkta sordu. 28 Şubat’ı merhum Erbakan’dan önce millete karşı yaptılar. Bu millet sabretti ve sandıkta hesabını sordu. Bunlar biliyorsunuz Cumhuriyet mitinglerini, Partimizi kapat davalarını, Danıştay saldırılarını, müdahale senaryolarını bize karşı AK Partiye karşı, demokrasiye karşı, hukuka, milli iradeye karşı tertip ettiler. Bu millet sabretti, sükut etti 22 Temmuz’da, 12 Haziran’da bunun hesabını sordu. Bu millet, hukuka her zaman sahip çıktı. Bu millet demokrasiye her zaman sahip çıktı. Bu millet kendi iradesine, milli iradeye her zaman sahip çıktı.] 1. Dear brothers/sisters, this great nation called those interventionists accountable at 2. the ballot box. They executed the 28th of February against the nation before late 3. Erbakan. This nation was patient and held [those] accountable at the ballot box. 4. You know them, Republic rallies, the lawsuit to close our party, the assault 5. against the State Council, the intervention scenarios they conspired against us, 6. AK Party, against democracy, against law, against the national will. This nation 7. was patient, was calm, held [those] accountable on 22nd of July, 12th of June. This 8. nation always protected the law. This nation always protected democracy. This 9. nation always protected its own will, always protected the national will.

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Erdogan’s linear narrative that spans the history of the Turkish republic from the War of Independence to the protests connects all the bad as well as good things that have happened with particular personal markers. The things that are framed as good are associated with “us” through a common victimhood in the face of the bad. In lines five and six, through parataxical syntax, Erdogan associates “us”, “AK Party”, “democracy”, “law”, and “national will”. However, the source of malice, the other who victimizes the good is again ambiguous. This time, however, the ambiguity sits on another type of linear historical narrative that Erdogan juxtaposes alongside victimization—one of vengeance and vigilantism by the public against the perpetuators. His phrase choice for the execution of said vigilantism—‘holding someone accountable’—might be the one of most important tools he utilizes to sustain the ambiguity, therefore the linear historical connection, through this narrative. In Turkish, the phrase, “hesabını sordunuz” transliterates into “account [that of] held [3rd person plural]”. Therefore, the act does not need an explicit object and the subject can still exist through the conjugation of the “held” which the subject acts upon. In other words, in Turkish, the subject can hold accountable something without revealing what that something is because the phrase still feels complete. This similar to saying “I ate” without revealing what I ate. Except in Turkish one can say “you held [someone] accountable about X” without revealing who that someone is. As such, Erdogan’s narrative of vigilantism of the public manifested through the “ballot box” relies on taking revenge for all the ‘bad’ things that have happened in history in the name of the victim without reflecting on who the perpetuator is—in fact, in depends on avoiding such reflection. Erdogan uses a similar phrase that refers back to a particular phrase in his rally ad: “to spoil the big game”. Similar to ‘holding accountable’ this structure does not need an object and achieves the same goal sustaining the ambiguity, therefore linearity, of the historical narrative. In his speech in Kayseri, he says: [Kardeşlerim, 3 Kasım 2002’de oyunu bozdunuz, siz 27 Nisan’da oyunu bozdunuz, siz 22 Temmuz’da oyunun bozdunuz. Cumhuriyet mitingleriyle kurulan oyunu siz bozdunuz, Ergenekon’la kuruluna oyunu siz bozdunuz, Cumhurbaşkanı seçtirmem partini kapatırım diyenlerin oyununu siz bozdunuz, Danıştay saldırısı oyununu siz bozdunuz, Reyhanlı saldırısı oyununu siz bozdunuz, Reyhanlı’da 53 vatandaşım kardeşim öldürüldü bu. Ana Muhalefetin Başkanı ne konuştu, ne dedi? Türkiye’deki STK’lar bu. 53

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vatandaşımın ölümünden dolayı acaba ne kadar üzüldüler, ne kadar ağladılar, hiç sesleri çıktı mı, çıktı mı?] 1. Brothers/sisters, [you] spoiled the game in 3 November 2002, you spoiled the 2. game on 27 April, you spoiled the game on 22 July, you spoiled the game 3. conspired by the Republic rallies, you spoiled the game conspired by Ergenekon, 4. you spoiled the game of those who said I won’t elect a president [and] I will close 5. your party. In Reyhanli 53 of my citizens my brothers/sisters died, what did the 6. main opposition leader say? How much did NGO’s in Turkey mourn the death of 7. my 53 citizens, how much they cried, did they ever make a noise, did they?

The dates Erdogan lists as the public spoiling the game are the election dates when AK Party was elected as the ruling party. Right out of the bat, therefore, Erdogan associates the national sense of vengeance and vigilantism as voting AK Party, and himself, in power. The historical narrative, therefore, continues to patch a line from the War of Independence to the protests through sustaining the self-other dichotomy using concrete and unambiguous markers for the self and ambiguous and absent markers for the other. Erdoğan achieves this, again, through constructing the subjecthood of the citizens reliant on taking vengeance against the other—who avoids identification through the use of “spoiled game”. The implied other, those who conspire the game, are not necessary to be mentioned or identified as long as the threat of the other is real in the discourse that constructs the self not only opposed to but also necessarily against and actively working for the demise of this other. Erdogan uses the same rhetorical strategy to finalize the historical narrative that connects the self vs. other imagery of the War of Independence to the protests and protestors. In his Ankara rally, he says: [Ah kardeşlerim pek az samimi insan dışında bunların hiç birinin meselesi ağaç değildi, çevre değildi. Bunların meselesi büyük Türkiye ile hesaplaşmaydı. Bunların meselesi güçlenen Türkiye’nin önünü kesmekti, bunların meselesi kendi ülkelerinin büyümesini, güçlenmesini, itibar kazanmasını istemiyorlardı buna karşıydılar.]

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1. Oh brothers/sisters, other than very few sincere people [humans], none of those 2. had the issue of the trees, of the environment. Their issue was to settle scores with 3. great Turkey. Their issue was to cut in front of strengthening Turkey, their issue 4. was[,] they didn’t want they were against their country’s growth, strength, and 5. gaining more respect.

The connection Erdogan draws between the protestors and all the other ‘enemies of the state’ he cites in the historical narrative he constructs so far, happens in two mutually enforcing ways. First one is by sustaining the general and ambiguous other imagery using only third person plural markers to refer to the protestors. The second is through binding the third person plural of this context with the third person plural markers he used in other contexts through rhetorical tropes such as “settling scores” or suggesting that they are against great and strong Turkey. Therefore, the ‘they’ in this context becomes a continuation of the ‘they’ in other contexts he traced through his every speech. Consequently, the historical narrative Erdogan sketches frames protests and protestors from a particular lens. Arguing the protests as a continuation of War of Independence and protestors as tools at the hands of an unknown and unidentified enemy is not only the primary tool that makes this particular narrative possible, but also it is also the primary tool that justified the police brutality as well as the police murders during the protests. Moreover, the historical epistemology Erdogan narrates through his rallies are circulated in state-sponsored media in large volumes. As such, Erdogan and the statist media merely regurgitates Erdogan’s discourse as an established truth-claim on the historical narrative of Gezi Park protests. The entire rhetorical base of this truth-claim relies on self-other dichotomy established against an unknown other. The normal, in this historical epistemology, is the linear temporal sequence that carries the self-other dichotomy and the threat perception through time all the way from War of Independence to the protests. Therefore, detaching the protests from the War of Independence and reading the events in their own contexts becomes an impossible task—and doing so immediately claims an oppositional position against the official state narrative. This demonstrates how

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statist discourses function and how they setup the grounds for political discourse in Turkey. The basic reflex is to identify self and foes to construct mutually exclusive categories that justify marginalization, violence, or both.

Anti-State Normative Discourses Statist discourses are not the only sources that circulate and sustain normativity in Turkish political discourse. Some who positioned themselves against the state and claimed that they are talking back to state’s exertion of power and oppression ended up talking within the same ideological framework. Again using the discourses during #occupygezi, I will demonstrate how this alignment happened and show the discursive mechanisms by which mainstream protest discourses contributed to the normative political discourse in Turkey. It is important to note, it was not the case that all mainstream protest discourses contributed to the further marginalization of LGBT voices and concerns. While some of the groups and organizations that emerged during the protests refrained from using ostracizing discourses, some were not shy about centering their talk on ideological frameworks that establish the bedrock of state formation: patriarchy, sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia—in other words, the very biopolitical discursive roots that is essential for the state to exist. In addition, there are documented cases where LGBT activists felt alienated during the protests from protest spaces or protesting alongside masses because their discourse aligned with the state power they were claiming to protest.50 This alignment happened in two ways: first, there was the use of blatant oppressive language by the protestors; and second there was an erasure of LGBT voices, existences, and concerns. The use of patriarchic, sexist, heterosexist, transphobic language took place on the streets, during marches, where protestors used such slangs and chants. The sites of erasure, on the other hand, took place in pro-protest publications that attempted to encompass the entirety of the protestors. Both with the use of violent language and erasure, anti-state discourses contribute to the normativity of the contemporary political discourse in Turkey. With the statist discourses, they form the social and cultural context that which LGBT individuals had to resist for their existence and survival. Take, for instance, “Gezi Guide for Çapulcu” (Çapulcunun Gezi Rehberi), a popular book that displays the slogans, banners, and graffiti

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that was used during the protests. Çapulcu, roughly could be translated as ‘looter’, was a term first used by then PM Erdogan to signify and belittle protestors. The term was then picked up by the protestors as a tool for positive self-signification and self-identification to denote a person who supported or took part in the protests. By the time I got a hold of the book in August 2013—that is when the protests stopped—it already made its sixth edition. While the book is a collection of images, there is a one page preface where the editor of the book writes how he perceived the protests as well the following collection of images. It is also important to note that the cover of the book does not have an author or editor information and the preface does not have a name underneath it. The images are left to speak for themselves as they are charged with representing the entirety of the protests. Only the publication information page, right after the cover displays the name of the person who gathered these images into a book. While this runs counter to the usual traditions of publishing a book, it adds to the sense of collective agency that the book is trying to communicate. Consequently, the book as well as the prefece, seems like the manifestation of a collective will. The prefece echoes this sentiment: [Önce birkaç ağaç, sonra bir park, ardından bir şehir ve son olarak bütünüyle kocaman bir ülke… Çapulcunun Gezi Rehberi, Türkiyenin öyküsüdür bir bakıma. Occupygezi (direngezi), sadece birkaç ağacın öyküsü değildi aslında. ̇ Ağaçlar bu. direnişin hem önderi hem de sembolü oldu. “Insana Rağmen” hiç bir düşüncenin ve “Dayatmacı Yaşam Biçimi”nin karşılık bulamayacağını gördük hep beraber. Ve yine hepimiz şuna şahit olduk; hayal dahi edilemeyecek kadar zıt kutuplar, fikirler ve elbette insanlar, bir amaç için “tek yürek” oldu. Iş̇ te bu. kitapta yer alanlar, kendini tek bir amaç için sokağa atan yüzbünlerin hikayesi.] 1. First a few trees, then a park, then a city and finally a huge country with its entirety… 2. Gezi Guide of Çapulcu is in fact the story of Turkey. 3. Occupygezi, was not actually just a story of a few trees. Trees became both the 4. symbol and the leader of this resistance. We all saw that thoughts “Against Human”

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5. and “Imposing Way of Life” could not find a reward. And again we all witnessed; 6. unbelievably opposing poles, ideas, and people became “one heart” for a purpose. 7. What is in this book is the story of those hundreds and thousands who threw 8. themselves to the street for a single purpose.

While the preface does not feature explicitly violent speech, it follows almost an identical syntactic pattern with Erodgan’s speeches. Examining the connection between personal and spatial deictic markers reveal a constant effort to connect people who took part in the protests with Turkey and with a particular kind of moral stance. Following personal deictic markers, we can note how the particular is identified with the general. On lines 1, 2, 6, 7 and 8, there is a constant syntactic equivalency between ‘the few’ and ‘the many’. From few trees to a huge country on line 1, equating the story of the graffiti and the banners to Turkey’s story on line 2, suggesting people becoming “one heart” on line 6, and arguing the unification of protestors on lines 7 and 8. Such affect of unity, togetherness, and being one is tied to a particular moral stance explained on lines 4 through 6. While the quoted phrases—“Against Human” and “Imposing Way of Life”—refer to the authoritarian rule of Erdogan, situating the self (“we all saw” on line 4 identifies first person plural with the mentioned unified affect) against these phrases (“could not find a reward” on line 5) establish a certain moral stance in a dialectical relationship as being ‘for human’ and ‘against imposing a way of life’. Consequently, the text attempts to position itself as anti-statist. However, the unifying discourse, arguing the protests stand for Turkey, and protestors becoming “one heart” is the same rhetorical tactic Erdogan used while trying to rally his base against the protests. The text attempts to solidify the unifying discourse further with suggesting that the unification had a single purpose on lines 6 and 8, without mentioning or explaining what that purpose is and therefore relying ambiguous markers, just like Erdogan, as a discursive strategy. As such, while the discourse positions itself against the state, its structure and rhetorical strategies align with statist discourses. In this alignment, the discourse not only disregards nuance as to who protests and takes part in erasure through that disregard, but also pits one unification through ambiguity against another, not challenging the statist discourses but, in fact, sustaining the very structures that construct it.

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This book is not unique in adopting statist language to oppose the state. The publications I examined for this research—all publications I could find about the protests, total of five popular and image based publications—all utilize the same syntactic and semantic structures to make their points. To give further examples would be merely redundant. However, there is another vital issue. Across these five publications, 783 pages, the only picture about LGBT protestors was in Penguen Çapulcu Arşivi, a single comic on 2013 Pride Parade that says, “This year’s pride parade was influenced by Gezi Park Protests”. While I will expand on the queer history of the protests in next chapter, this kind of erasure positions the protests and the protestors on heteronormative grounds and further contributes to alienation of LGBT voices and concerns from public spaces, discussions, and memory.

Notes 1. Yeğen, Turkish nationalism and the Kurdish question, 120. 2. Yeğen, Turkish nationalism and the Kurdish question, 120. 3. Bora and Can Devlet Ocak Dergah; Ari, Turkiye’de sol milliyetcilik; Aydin, Sosyalizm ve milliyetcilik; Bora, Turkiye’de milliyetcilik ve azinliklar; Insa doneminde Turk milli kimligi; Turk Saginin Uc¸ Hali. 4. Erol, Coherence Co-constructed; Lewis, The emergence of modern Turkey. 5. De Long and Eichengreen, The Marshall Plan. 6. De Long and Eichengreen, The Marshall Plan. 7. Üstün, Turkey and the Marshall Plan. 8. President Harry S. Truman’s Address before a Joint Session of Congress. 9. Merrill, The Truman Doctrine, 1. 10. Partog, Queer Teorisi Baglaminda Turkiye LGBTT Mucadelesinin Siyasi Cizgisi, 172. 11. Isik, The penetration of capitalism into housing production. 12. Öniş, Turgut Özal and his Economic Legacy, 115. 13. Karatasli, The Origins of Turkey’s “Heterodox” Transition to Neoliberalism. 14. Partog, Queer Teorisi Baglaminda Turkiye LGBTT Mucadelesinin Siyasi Cizgisi, 172. 15. Partog, Queer Teorisi Baglaminda Turkiye LGBTT Mucadelesinin Siyasi Cizgisi, 172. 16. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 17. Dreiling and Darves, Agents of Neoliberal Globalization. 18. Jones, Masters of the Universe; Mudge, What is neo-liberalism? 19. Jones, Masters of the Universe. 20. Hayek, Road to Serfdom.

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21. Hayek, Road to Serfdom. 22. Popper, Open Society and Its Enemies. 23. Dreiling and Darves, Agents of Neoliberal Globalization. 24. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 25. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 26. Ganti, Neoliberalism, 90. 27. Shaikh, The economic mythology of neoliberalism. 28. Veltmeyer and Petras, Foreign Aid, Neoliberalism and US Imperialism. 29. Eken, Turkiye’nin 1970li yillari. 30. Onis, 2004, Turgut Ozal and his economic legacy, 115. 31. Boratav, The Turkish Bourgeoisie under Neoliberalism, 5 . 32. Kaya, Islamisation of Turkey under the AKP Rule, 50. 33. Tansel, Authoritarian neoliberalism and democratic backsliding in Turkey, 200. 34. Bozkurt-Güngen, Labour and Authoritarian Neoliberalism, 220. 35. Lewis, Bernard. (1968). The emergence of modern Turkey. London: Oxford University Press. 36. Öncü, Turkish Capitalist Modernity and the Gezi Revolt, 162. 37. Öncü, Turkish Capitalist Modernity and the Gezi Revolt, 162. 38. Tuğal, Gülenism: The middle way or official ideology?, 52. 39. Atacan, Explaining religious politics at crossroads, 47. 40. Tuğal, Gülenism: The middle way or official ideology?, 54. 41. Kaygusuz, Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Regime Security in Turkey, 282. 42. Özel, A Moment of Elation. 43. Öncü, Turkish Capitalist Modernity and the Gezi Revolt. 44. Erol, The internarrative state. 45. Erol, The internarrative state. 46. Althusser, Lenin, Philosophy, and Other Essays. 47. Halliday and Hasan, Cohesion in English, 18. 48. Halliday and Hasan, Cohesion in English, 18. 49. Erol, Coherece Co-Constructed. 50. Erol, Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi.

CHAPTER 3

Queer Talkback on Time

Queer talkback on time is like the Roman God, Janus—simultaneously looking to the past and to the future. Queer talkback, queer theory and activism in general, stems from imagining a different future—at least a one where LGBT and other marginalized individuals are not oppressed by social, economic, legal, and cultural means. For that, queer talkback needs to reconstruct what happened in the past from its own perspective, taking the queer standpoint as a central concern in the flow of history and consequently preventing normative historiographies from erasing queer voices and concerns from a historical narrative. Therefore, chapter first theorizes what queer talkback means on the axis of time, then moves on to narrate the queer history of 2010s Turkey, and then expand on the ways in which queer historiographies as well as constructions of time in queer publications are subversive. The events that I am examining in this and the following two chapters are Gezi Park Protests in 2013; Pride Parade ban in 2016; and indefinite ban of all LGBT events in Ankara in 2017. Queer talkback, to have agency against normative discourses, needs to imagine a future that informs the critique of the present and reinterpretation of the past. Here, once again I want to bring Edelman’s point of denying the future as a form of resistance. What Edelman writes, choosing the death drive instead of a future would indeed be choosing the end, not because that is in any way a subversive act, but would be the end of queer imagination, futurity, and sustenance of counterpublics. Edelman’s position is counterintuitive to queer talkback also because the existence of his © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7_3

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line of thinking relies on the existence of a binary that No Future generates, between the death drive and submitting the future to heteronormative impositions vis-à-vis the child; between being proper queers who take such negative stance, and being hopeful and naïve—unable to face the harsh truth of being in the world as queers. Disidentificatory practices, the kind of being-in-the-world that queer talkback aims to capture, however, arise from the unease that the securities these sorts of binaries bring forth. The drive for futurity, however, by no means undermines the critique of the here and the now. As Munoz notes in Cruising Utopia, the desire for a utopic future stems from taking a critical stance towards the present—the two cannot be separate. However, what matters is what we do with that critique and the desire for a future the critique generates. Do we abandon all hope and scorch the earth as Edelman’s work suggests? Alternatively, do we use what we have to imagine the possibilities of a better future? In the latter scenario, taking the risk and the responsibility of defining what better means is a much preferable outcome to following in Edelman’s footsteps and leaving everything to the hands of normativities that put us in this position in the first place. Consequently, a desire for a queer futurity manifests itself in the link between the blurred lines of sexual and nonsexual fantasizing, where both act as social critiques, opens up other ways to conceptualize queer temporalities that differ from binary oppositions. Halberstam’s notion of queer time is useful in this instance, where she traces queer experiences of time almost like another experience, an alternative consciousness that is subversive just by existing. In her book In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives, she traces the origins of queer temporalities to the skewed notions of time experienced as a result of the AIDS epidemic: Queer time perhaps emerges most spectacularly, at the end of the twentieth century, from within those gay communities whose horizons of possibility have been severely diminished by the AIDS epidemic… The constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment and … squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand.1 We still do very much have an AIDS epidemic, surely not at the rate that was, but now it affects especially poorer Black and Latino gay communities disproportionately more so than middle-class white gay circles. What else effects queer temporalities at the moment is the constant harassment by heteronormativity, either pressurizing queer bodies not to exist in

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the public space, or to coerce them to exist as good lesbians and gays and beautiful transgender people who, for the most part, we should not be able tell apart from cisgender. Good subjects should get married, join the army, adopt children, pay taxes, should not be promiscuous, and so on. Just as the AIDS epidemic skews the sense of time for those who are living in it, pressures of heteronormativity and heterosexism skew the time for queers who are living under its reign. This can stand another case in point to show how the lack fuels the desire for a queer futurity. However, as we fantasize about a queer futurity, we do not fantasize alone. Both sexually and socially, we tend to fantasize about others who share our fantasies—we fantasize with people. Halberstam raises this point through her discussion of subcultures. Halberstam writes that subcultures “suggest transient, extrafamilial, and oppositional modes of affiliation”—2similar to Warner’s conceptualization of counterpublics. Whether we want to call it community, subculture, counterpublic, they move with a sense of talkback to form the bond and move in a direction that disturbs and disrupts the work of the normal, the patriarchal law. In a similar way, Halberstam discusses Butler’s point on rituals: “And building on the work by Hall and others in the classic volume on subcultures Resistance through Rituals, Butler puts the concept of “ritual” into motion as a practice that can either reinforce or disrupt cultural norms.”3 To keep up the togetherness, the multitude, and the counterpublics with these mechanisms of lack and desire, consequently, requires a sense of directionality—which, in turn, requires a constant interaction of participants and contexts. This is one of the main points behind the idea of queer talkback, is that queer lives are not only about those queers who perform, not only about those who watch, and not only about those spaces in which these events can or cannot take place. Rather, queer lives and the threat to the patriarchal law those lives pose, exist with togetherness that sustains disidentificatory practices and survives despite all levels of persistent violence. This totality, this drive that brings together the performer, the audience, the space, the critique, is what I have been trying to convey with the idea of queer talkback. And queer talkback can exist, partially, by depending on another conceptualization of time. Halberstam writes, “Queer subcultures produce alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logics that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience-­ namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death.”4 By sustaining the contexts that produce these alternative temporalities and the ­subcultures/

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counterpublics that exist in these spaces, the fantasy of queer futurity dismantles heteronormative structures. Future, from the perspective of a queer talkback, is not a fantasyland filled with empty promises. It is indeed paradoxical and complex; however, that is what it means to work both on the lines and against heteronormative social structures. The need to develop such disidentificatory practices is visible when comparing the historiographies of events from queer and non-queer perspectives. As the next chapter on time demonstrates, non-­ queer historiographies of Gezi Park protests not only do not engage with the queer history of the Park, but also do not even consider the existence of queer identities in the protests. This practice of erasure of queer stories and voices is a common outcome of heteronormative structuration and prioritizing of temporal events. A disidentificatory practice that works against these historiographies, for instance, is publishing a magazine that voices queer concerns and re-writes the historiography from a queer stance. Still writing history, not denying the usefulness of historicizing, enables queer stances to have a platform through which queer historicizing can take place. Queer historiography attempts to interpret the flow of time and the relationship between the entities in the past—such as people, places, and emotions—in a way that not only deconstructs the arrangement and narrativization of the past (or the possible future) in a way that privileges heteronormative desire, but also reconstructs the arrangement and retelling of time in a way that seeks to prioritize the concerns and desires of those who are pushed to the margins by the privileging of heteronormative desires. Some queer historians, such as David Halperin in his work How to Do the History of Homosexuality, attempts to achieve this by tracing a history and paying attention to moments that are usually pushed to the margins by mainstream historicizing.5 Other queer historians argue that queer history should reflect what is queer about history as much as queer issues in history—which leads to works that go against traditional forms of historicizing such as using teleological or sequential narratives. Valerie Traub, in her work The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies,6 writes that this kind of queer historicizing draws from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s fifth axiom in Epistemology of the Closet, in which she writes: “[t]he historical search for a Great Paradigm Shift may obscure the present conditions of sexual identity.”7 Traub further notes that recent works of queer historians such as Freccero, Goldberg, and Madhavi follow Sedgwick and attempt to historicize without teleology.8 In a similar vein, for instance, Elizabeth

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Freeman, in her work Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories, observes that privileging of time based on heteronormative desire takes place through sequential documentation of what happened in the past or what can happen in the future. To counter this, she writes “Instead, I track the ways that nonsequential forms of time (in the poem, unconciousness, haunting, reverie, and the afterlife) can also fold subjects into structures of belonging and duration that may be invisible to the historicist eye.”9 She queers time, therefore, by voicing those temporal arrangements that are unprivileged by heteronormative desires. Freeman’s point is similar to the one I make in the next chapter about the ways in which history is narrated. What drives the focus of historicizing on big moments, “Great Paradigm Shifts” in Sedgwick’s words, is the heteronormative desires and the sequential narratives those desires shape. These narratives become historical knowledges that are gendered as well as sexualized. The production of historical knowledge, therefore, ends up othering queer voices. This is not exactly news to anyone who read Foucault. However, these historicizings also accomplish something else: they create discursive conditions and set precedents to further constructions of historical knowledge that further other queer voices. This results in a cumulative effect of erasure of queer identities, voices, and concerns— existences—from history. Such erasure, because it regulates knowledge production, is epistemological violence. Against such violence, I agree with Traub on the need to seek an approach that aims to deconstruct heteronormative historicizing and constructing queer historicism simultaneously.10 Attempting to construct a queer history of 2010’s as a decade, however, is a challenge in itself. As this book aims to show, providing a linear, clean, and sanitized historical narrative with heroes and villains results in constructing and privileging some knowledges at the expense of others. Precisely because it is impossible to gather all information available to sketch a comprehensive historical narrative of a particular spatiotemporal context, event, or series of events, dominant historical narratives end up marginalizing and casting out expendable truth-claims—which, unsurprisingly, are usually the truth-claims of peoples that the privileged narratives and truth claims deem expendable. Historical narratives, therefore, emphasize grand scheme of things, moments of twists and turns in the otherwise steady flow of nations and peoples; wars, famines, agreements, laws, revolts. Such grand schemes of things are also the scenes of epistemic violence—the ways in which produced knowledges ends up erasing the

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existence, contribution, and identity of groups that they leave in the margins and in the footnotes. Sedgwick also alludes to the dangers of equating history with grand scheme of things in Epistemology of the Closet. Focusing on what she calls “great paradigm shifts”11 not only blurs and erases historical narratives of those who are cast aside by those paradigm shifts, but also assigns essentialisms to people based on a heteronormative perspective of what happened before and after a shift and how these events relate to the people. In the face of such epistemic violence, what does it mean to write ‘a queer history’? Goldberg and Menon, for instance, suggest that “queering history” means to deconstruct existing understandings of history—it means to engage in “un-historicism… [which] would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero, with all its connotations of sameness, similarity, proximity, and anachronism.”12 In this sense, for Goldberg and Menon, queering history means to center the experiences of “the nonhetero”—those who are marginalized by the epistemic violence of chrononormative historicisms—and engage with narratives that deconstruct dominant, known or existing narratives of what happened. On the other hand, while Love acknowledges that queering history “opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning”, she also notes that “[a]lthough many queer critics take exception to the idea of a linear, triumphalist view of history, we are in practice deeply committed to the notion of progress; despite our reservations, we just cannot stop dreaming of a better life for queer people”.13 This study also exists in that space where un-historicism meets with relying on narratives of a utopic future stemming from past that is fraught with layers of violence. Within this tension, the ‘queer history’ I present in this chapter relies on a sense of balance that Traub expands on her understanding of unhistoricism. She writes “[r]esisting unwarranted teleologies while accounting for resonances and change will bring us closer to achieving the difficult and delicate balance of apprehending historical sameness and difference, continuism and alterity, that the past, as past, presents to us.”14 In this sense, what I aim to do in this chapter is to engage in unhistoricism in a way that does not depart from utopic thinking. Centering on queer experiences and queer constructions of the events, this chapter disrupts existing dominant heteronormative historical narratives of the statist as well as anti-state normative discourses. In addition, after constructing queer history of the events, this chapter analyzes how queer activists have talked back to the oppressive moment they were facing.

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Queer Histories Gezi Park Protests, 2013 The queer history of the protests does not start with the protests. It starts in the 80s when Gezi Park became a known cruising spot. Queer history of the protests start at that time because it would be reductionist to offer a queer history of the protests without contextualizing the existence of that history within the larger historical timeline of the relationship between LGBT individuals and Gezi Park. In order to narrate a queer history of the Gezi Park protests, I have interviewed LGBT activists who participated in the protests since its inception and analyzed visual as well as written material. The history I sketch out below is the result of these interviews and analyses. To talk about a queer history of Gezi Park protests, we need to ask why there is a relationship between Gezi Park and LGBT people at all, and when did this relationship begin? Before getting into that, it is important to note the public cruising is not the realm of all LGBT individuals. In the context of Turkey, people who do cruise are either gay or bisexual men or transwomen—and the reason for cruising might be just sex for pleasure but it also might be sex work. As such, when we talk about cruising and the importance of Gezi Park LGBT individuals, we are not talking about lesbians or bisexual women, whose sexuality are often erased in the context of LGBT issues, especially when it revolves around public spaces. Throughout different times, those who were marginalized due to their sexuality and their gender expression found different hangout spots— often secluded—due to fear of persecution and hate crimes. This practice is today known as cruising. During 60s and 70s, in Turkey this need was being filled by hamams, or Turkish baths. These spaces were the defining characteristic of a gay men’s experience for meeting for casual sex or sex work. Starting from mid-80s and up until about Gezi Park protests, the place to cruise in Istanbul was Gezi Park. While different cities have similar parks that serve the same cruising function, in a large metropolis such as Istanbul, Gezi park became an iconic spot for a couple of reasons. First, although it was in the middle of the city, it was secluded. Gezi Park is next to Taksim square and Istiklal Street—arguably two of the most famous landmarks and tourist spots in Istanbul. Being adjacent to these spots meant that Gezi Park was easy to get to, but also did not get the tourist and the wanderer foot traffic those two other spots received. Moreover,

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with its greenery, absence of any commercial enterprise, and open space, it was a place where people could escape from the crowd if they so wished. In addition, Taksim square is very close to neighborhoods such as Tarlabasi and Dolapdere. These neighborhoods have been traditionally low-income areas that hosted anyone from blue-collar workers to Gypsies. This made Gezi Park a space where “interclass contact”15 would be not the exception, but the norm. Consequently, it became a safe pocket for those who either felt out of place or threatened within the confines of more popular, populated, and richer parts of the city. For LGBT individuals, this had further significance. For most especially younger gay men, it was the first place where they could meet those who were one of them, find some sort of solace and meaning in who they are, and connect with others who felt equally out of place, equally odd, equally queer. In this sense of the word, cruising not only meant trying to find someone for sex, it also meant forming connections with people based on a sense of solidarity due to a shared alienation and not knowing where else to go. The second reason why Gezi Park became associated with cruising is gentrification and changing urban landscape. Since mid-90s, Istanbul municipality pursued a conscious effort to gentrify urban spaces, especially the city center. That meant to abolish pockets of people who made spaces for themselves in the city. These ghettos hosted, for instance, trans sex-­ workers or low income families or single mothers who had a difficult time finding housing in other and more well-off parts of the city. As a result of the gentrification process, what is left in central Istanbul as it pertains to LGBT sub-culture were a number of gay bars that began opening in late 1990s and early 2000s. One of these gay bars, Tekyön, was especially important in shaping the significance of Gezi Park as a cruising spot. Tekyön, opened in early 2000s, not only was the largest gay bar of the entire Middle East region, able to host couple of thousand people at a given night, but also did not require an entry fee. Unlike other gay bars, this made Tekyön accessible across socioeconomic class lines. However, the last call was at 3 am. This had a vital implication as it pertains to Gezi Park. As 3 am drew near, one’s chances of finding a partner to spend the night with were dwindling. However, this raised larger concerns for those who were chased away from their city-center ghettos to farther and cheaper places. Namely, transportation. At 3 am, there were not any public transportation services that could take people back to their homes, the cabs would cost a fortune, and therefore such people were out of luck. Unless, of course, they could find someone at the bar by the end of the night. If

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Tekyön did not work out, however, the next stop was Gezi Park. It was a common part of gay nightlife scene to get out of Tekyön after the last call and cruise at Gezi Park to find someone in order to spend the night with. For the most part, cruising at Gezi Park meant surviving the night. Because of these two reasons, Gezi Park was akin to a second home for a lot of gay men and transwomen. Their participation at the Gezi Park protests were far more personal than, or in addition to, a care regarding the environment or gentrification on the lines of neoliberalism—it was a matter of defending one’s home. With this impetus, LGBT activists stood together with environmentalists and others who were camping at the Gezi Park since the inception of the protests to block construction machines from demolishing the park. On May 30th, about 3 days after the protests began, the police attacked the park, kicking its dwellers and occupiers out and burning all the tents, musical instruments, and books. This sparked larger protests and resulted in large number of protestors taking over Gezi Park and turning it into a space of occupation. When the protests broke out on the 31st as a response to police brutality, there were different positions or roles that people could take. Some were in the frontlines, resisting the police forces, some became medics and carried around first aid kids, some were documenting the events. LGBT activists and individuals took part in every aspect of the protests. This taking part consisted not only of resisting against police forces, but also of educating fellow protestors about LGBT issues, identities, and concerns. For instance, during a standoff between protestors and the police, some protestors began chanting “faggot police”. An LGBT protestor who was there at the time disrupted this practice by saying “Excuse me, but you are resisting with faggots. Don’t call them faggots, call them something else, find something else to say.” The silence that followed repeated itself in many other instance in and out of the Gezi Park during the protests. Indeed, for LGBT activists and individuals, the occupied park became a space where they had to resist both to the state and to the violent language of the protestors themselves. However, LGBT activists turned this into an opportunity to educate the protestors who were using a violent language. Another instance took place when protestors began chanting “son of a bitch” against PM Erdogan after the occupation of the park. Sex workers who were in the area prepared a banner that read: “Erdogan is not one of us”, which again disrupted the violent language and served as a moment of education for those protestors who did not know better.

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These individual efforts turned into an organized effort of disruption, education, and community service with the formation of LGBT BLOK—a spontaneous formation of LGBT organizing that took place in the park by coming together of LGBT individuals and groups. LGBT BLOK organized workshops alongside with feminist organizations against violent language, gave out free food, cleaned out the park, and handed out brochures to inform protestors about LGBT issues. After occupation in the park, LGBT BLOK took part in public forums that brought together people from all walks of the protests. The protests became a turning point for LGBT activism in Turkey. After the protests, not only non-LGBT individuals became less afraid of being associated with and supporting LGBT rights, the pride walks had a larger turn out and tens of new LGBT organizations opened in different cities in Turkey—even in those cities considered as conservative. However, the Gezi Park itself lost its previous appeal for LGBT individuals. Cruising decreased and it did not hold the same sense of security and privacy as it did before the protests. While LGBT activists were at the forefronts during the protests, their activism continued after the protests ended. In the second chapter, I have mentioned the ways in which anti-state protestors ended up erasing LGBT voices and concerns when they have published books, magazines, and websites that depicted the protests. LGBT organizations also released publications during and after the protests that centered on their concerns and experiences. These publications ranged from an entire magazine dedicated to the protests to blog posts, to social media posts. In all these venues, queer discourses contemplated on the past, the present and how they see the future will turn out. Pride Parade Ban, 2016: Organizing Through Dispersing Pride parades in Turkey have a contentious history. Scholars and activists often criticize pride parades in Western Europe and North America due to infiltration of neoliberal ethos through sponsorships of companies that disregard human rights in other places and its emphasis on consumption as well as its tendency to be a white male dominated space that alienates queer people of color.16 However, pride parades in Turkey are a matter of visibility and survival. The first pride parade took place in 2003 with merely 30 participants in Istanbul. The pride parade grew steadily over the years and in 2011, with the participation of ten thousand people, it became

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the largest pride parade in Eastern Europe and Turkey. In 2013, due to its overlapping timing with Gezi Park Protests, it drew about hundred thousand participants. However, in 2014, the participation went back down to ten thousand. In 2015, there was a different picture. Istanbul municipality banned the pride parade, saying that it overlaps with Ramadan—a religious holiday. While some LGBT activists took it to the streets, disregarding the ban, the police assaulted the activists using water cannons, tear gas, plastic bullets, and homophobic slurs. In 2016, the police assault repeated during the Trans parade and once again, Istanbul municipality did not allow pride parade to take place. As a reaction to the ban in 2016, Pride Week Committee, those who organize the pride walk in Istanbul, made a statement. What marked their statement was a call to disperse: [Hatırlarsanız, Emniyet güçleri Trans Onur Yürüyüşü’nde basın açıklamasını okumaya ve bir arada durmaya çalışan insanlara “Lütfen dağılın ve hayatın normal akışına dönmesine izin verin,” diye seslenmişti…. Bize dayatılan hayatı reddediyoruz. Şiddeti ve baskıyı normalleştiren, bizi yok sayan bir hayat değil, kendi seçtiğimiz, onurla varolduğumuz hayatı yaşamaya devam ediyoruz ve Hayatı ‘normal’ akışına döndürerek:DAĞ ILIYORUZ, DAĞ ILIYORUZ, DAĞ ILIYORUZ…”] 1. “If you remember, during the Trans pride walk when people were trying to stand together 2. in solidarity and were trying to read a press statement, police forces said: “please disperse 3. and let life continue in its normal flow.” 4. We refuse the life that is imposed on us. We continue to live the life that we chose, in 5. which we exist with dignity instead of a life that normalizes violence and oppression and 6. treats us as nonexistent. Letting the life continue in its ‘normal’ flow, [we are]: 7. DISPERSING, DISPERSING, DISPERSING”

A “normal flow of life” in police’s call to disperse the Trans pride walk refers to state’s reliance on chrononormative structures for existence. Normal flow: flow of car and pedestrian traffic; getting to jobs, appointments, meetings; meeting deadlines and schedules—“normal flow” wants

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to ensure the capitalist logics of productivity that sustains mechanisms of profit and exploitation. Moreover, such logics always exist at the expense of marginalized people and populations. Police harassment and attempt to silence Trans women in favor of chrononormative and capitalist logics during the Trans pride walk is merely an extension of state’s erasure of Trans and other marginalized voices and people’s to sustain its own existence. For the state, existence is a zero-sum game. Pride Week Committee’s call to disperse was a direct response to police harassment. It also exemplifies another way in which how disidentification shapes queer talkback. Through their statement, the Pride Week Committee neither displays submissive obedience to police’s call to disperse, nor gives them a clear and defiant target to attack by executing the walk regardless. Instead, by saying “we are obeying this call” (line 4), they sacrifice an organized pride march to favor ‘dispersion’ that saturates their visibility and existence throughout Beyoglu—the neighborhood where pride parade usually takes place. In their call to disperse, they also interrogate what normality means. By saying ““To let life continue in its ‘normal’ flow”, we are reuniting with each other in every road, every street of Beyoglu”, they define normality not only as not blocking the traffic or disrupting the chrononormative flow of life, but also precisely as the disruption that will be caused by their organized dispersion. Consequently, they center the ‘normal’ on their existences and concerns. Normality, in this sense, becomes the answer to questions that the text poses from lines 10 through 14—normality as utopic thinking is consequently realized for a few hours through this dispersion. To organize the Pride Day in 2016, the ‘Pride Committee’, about 60–70 volunteer LGBT activists, began working in November 2015. First round of meetings were about the ban of the walk in 2015 and about security issues. Despite the threat of openly organizing a banned walk as out LGBT individuals, they conducted their meetings with open calls. Due to factors such as the increased visibility after Gezi Park Protests and the hyper-mediatized images of clash between the police and LGBT activists during 2015, there was an increased interest and participation in the organizing efforts for the 2016 Pride Day. LGBT individuals who did not take up activism, as well as people who do not identify as LGBT individuals became part of the organizing committee. In the months leading up to the Pride Day, issues such as bomb threats and organized conservative civilians beating up LGBT activists alongside

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the police force became an important issue in the meetings. One meeting in particular became a key point. In this meeting, present organizers openly talked about their fears and what could go wrong. This meeting solidified the bond and comradery between the activists in the organizing committee made them feel more determined to take action despite their fears and the threats they faced. On 26th of June, LGBT activists have dispersed. The streets were filled with police officers—against any kind of protest despite the ban. While this made some of the LGBT activists feel secure against any kind of attack, it made most of them fear for their lives as they walked the streets of Beyoglu—Istanbul’s district where Pride Parade usually takes place. Dispersing meant to saturate the daily life of central Istanbul with LGBT visibility. Instead of a centralized parade, activists participated in the “normal flow of life” with their parade clothes, wigs, banners, signs, heels, and face-paints. They walked in groups of two or three—or even as individuals—being visible in various corners of Beyoglu and Istiklal Street. They read press statements from any place they could find—balconies, rooftops, metro stations. While some people got arrested and injured when the police detained those who looked ‘suspicious’ or those who were trying to read press statements in public spaces, overall LGBT activists and individuals who participated in the dispersion were able to disrupt state’s mechanism of controlling the public space with bans and saturation of police officers. Indefinite Ban on all LGBT Events in Ankara, 2017 On November 19 2017, Ankara governorship released a statement “indefinitely banning all events organized by LGBTI non-governmental organizations” based on claims of protecting “public morality and health”, “rights of others”, and “social sensibilities.” The claims in the press release of the Ankara governorship emphasized that LGBT events can cause resentment and animosity in one section of the public against other due to social differences and this can create a security threat for the public. In their press release, Ankara governorship consistently defined public as those who might get offended by LGBT events—consequently as those who are homophobic or transphobic or, in other words, those who ascribe to statist morality of who and what a proper citizen should be. As a response to the ban, two Ankara based LGBT organizations, KAOS GL and Pembe Hayat (Pink Life) released a joint press statement

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in which they claimed that Ankara governorship’s decision is based on discrimination and it is against freedom of speech, freedom to organize, and freedom of expression. After the ban, however, KAOS GL released a series of statements called “what can I do on banned days?” through their social media accounts. In these statements, they suggested ways of conducting activism within the boundaries of the imposed ban. Moreover, KAOS GL filed legal complaints against Ankara Municipality to the European Court of Human Rights. However, since this ban is very recent at the time of writing this book, there is no resolution or a closure to the issue. Queer Temporalities In these LGBT discourses that emerged during and after the protests, the pride parade ban, and the indefinite ban on LGBT events, the temporalities of the past and present were connected through suffering—and rarely through agency. Outside of sporadic occasions when both were constructed as spaces of agency, past was described as a temporal plain where LGBT individuals have always suffered while the present was defined as a mere continuation of the past suffering—usually in a greater extent. However, there were differing opinions what the future would look like. While the vast majority of mentions of future talked about it in utopic terms, some LGBT activists imagined the future as an arena of struggle between those who wish to cause harm to LGBT individuals and those who support LGBT individuals. On June 8 2013, when the Gezi Park Protests were just starting to gain momentum, LGBT Blok, an LGBT collective that came together during the protests, made a press release on their Facebook page. This press release was a broad call to action to those who supported the protests in general and was not written to be a specific appeal merely to the LGBT individuals. In their words, it was for “you, respectable unity of Gezi Park Resistance and to the humanity that came together in all cities across Anatolia against state oppression”. In order to make their call more persuasive, and perhaps to gain more sympathy with those who did not identify as an LGBT individual, LGBT Blok started this press release with a section on what being an LGBT individual meant in Turkey. [Bizler bu coğrafyada varoluşu için birçok mücadele vermiş ve hala vermekte olan insanlarız.

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Dişimizi tırnağımıza takıp, ekmeği için canını öne atan insanlarız. Sokakta yürüme hakkı elinden alınan, gündüzlerden uzaklaştırılan, gecelere mahkum edilen insanlarız. Eğitim hakkı olmayan, barınmak, yaşamak, güvenli bir şekilde nefes alma hakkı başkalarının ellerine bırakılmış; Erkeklik şiddetinin, küfürün, ayrımcılığın, ötekileştirmenin bir yaşam şekli biçildiği insanlarız.]

1. We are people who went through and still go through many struggles for their 2. existence in this land 3. We are people who work our fingers to the bone and throw our lives to the 4. forefront for our bread 5. We are the people whose right to walk on the streets were taken away from them, 6. who were outcast from the day, and who were imprisoned in the night 7. Don’t have a right to education, right to housing, living, and securely breathing 8. left to other’s hands 9. We are the people who have been given a lifestyle of patriarchal violence, curses, 10. discrimination, othering

The rhetorical strategy of this opening passage is twofold. First two sentences, from line 1 to line 4, work as a means to establish a common ground between LGBT Blok—that is, LGBT activists and individuals— and the rest of the population who might be apprehensive to associate with LGBT activists or who might not know enough to have an opinion. The common ground is class struggle: going through many struggles to exist and working fingers to the bone for bread are general statements most marginalized groups, as well as most people who struggle for their income, can associate with. The second part, from line 5–10, is more specific to LGBT individuals and struggles related to existing in public spaces and attaining equal rights as well as liberation from violence. In both strategies, the framing of time and temporality play a key role in situating their identity and sense of self. The class struggle that intends to connect the LGBT individuals with the rest of the protestors as well as the particular violence LGBT individuals experience are defined by their temporality— the text constructs the past as a space where the violence of the present

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stems from. Being an LGBT individual, in this context, is associated with receiving this violence through time—or living in a place where these acts of violence were a part of social, cultural, and political norms. The narrative of eternal suffering emerges because the temporal tense in the text does not contextualize the suffering in any fashion. The text leaves past tense as the past tense and does not clarify when the suffering began—as such, the association between ‘the past’ and ‘suffering’ stretches out forever. The sense of suffering that takes over the entire past is not true. Ze’evi’s work Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500–1900¸outlines how various sexual desires found voice and practice in during Ottoman Empire. Ze’evi notes, for instance, beauty of beardless boys or homoerotic desire were commonplace up until the seventeenth century.17 Moreover, as I noted in the first chapter, there was a resurgence of LGBT activism after 1980’s. In addition, associating the past only with a limitless temporal sense of suffering is not just accurate to any other experience a person or a group of individuals might have had in that said past. Consequently, the function of such discourse is not to reflect the whole truth, but to create a narrative that has a certain effect on the audience—in this case, the desired effect is sympathy, anger towards injustice, and receptiveness to the following call to action. Part of such narrative is to argue that violence towards LGBT individuals is on the rise across time—without specifying the temporal measure. This kind of linear progression of violence discourse serves as a continuation of portraying the past merely as a location of suffering. For instance, the Facebook page of Istanbul LGBTT Solidarity Organization, which prolifically wrote posts and announcements during #occupygezi, organized a protest event for June 23rd, and announced it on their Facebook page on June 10th: [Eşcinsel, biseksüel ve trans bireylere yönelik saldırlar her geçen gün artıyor. Dün Eryaman’da, Ülker Sokak’ta uygulanan sürgün politikası bugün Avcılar Meis Sitesi’nde devam ediyor. Ahmet YILDIZ davasında yıllardır herhangi bir gelişme yaşanmazken katili hala aramızda dolaşmakta.Sinemalara ve hamamlara yapılan baskınlarla eşcinsel olmak suçla eş değer tutuluyor. Siyasal erk yasal düzenlemede çağrılara kulak tıkayarak yaşanan tüm baskı, zulüm ve zorbalığa devam edin mesajı veriyor. Kentsel dönüşüm safsatası ile trans bireylerin güvenli olarak çalıştıkları sokaklar birer birer kapatılmaya devam ediyor…]

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1. Attacks against gay, bisexual, and trans individuals rise every day. The deportation 2. policy that was in effect yesterday in Eryaman and Ulker Street, today is being 3. implement in Avcilar Meis Sitesi. While there is no progress with Ahmet YILDIZ 4. lawsuit for years, his murderer is still outside among us. 5. With the raids to movie theaters and Turkish baths, being gay is equated to being a 6. criminal. Political power shuts its ears to calls for legal change and gives the message 7. to continue with all the lived oppression, bullying, and cruelty. With the gentrification 8. nonsense, all the safe streets where trans individuals have worked are being closed 9. down one by one.

The paragraph goes on to list various policies, social and cultural issues that make life difficult for LGBT individuals, and ends with a call to action to meet for protest to end all the aforementioned injustices. Again, while the injustices supported by the state and the wider culture and society against LGBT individuals are real and important, texts that construct temporalities as plains of increasing suffering and nothing else aim to serve specific rhetorical functions by the way of removing agency from LGBT individuals and claiming agency belongs only to those who do the oppressing. Ironically, such rhetorical strategy that positions LGBT individuals as victims without agency aim to garner anger from its audience in order to pursue social change by way of inciting agency in the form of protest. Above, the temporal markers that are saturated throughout the text— “every day” in line 1, “yesterday…today” in line 2, “still” in line 4, “continue” in line 7, “one by one” in line 9—index seamless continuity between the constructions of the past and the present. The message of the text, ‘received violence is getting increasingly worse’ depends on rhetorically spreading effects of oppression over time and subtracting any trace of activism or agency by LGBT individuals in the process. What makes such rhetoric persuasive is indeed not only the existing and increasing violence against LGBT people, but also the increased coverage of existing violence against LGBT individuals through human rights as well as LGBT activist groups. A 2014 report titled “Human Rights Violations of LGBT individuals in Turkey”—prepared by two Turkish and

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one international LGBT activist groups and supported by nine Turkish LGBT activist groups, submitted to United Nations Universal Periodic Review (UPR)—has stark conclusions in this regard. The report investigates human rights violations against LGBT individuals under two broad thematic umbrellas: “lack of domestic legal protection for LGBT individuals in Turkey” and “state involvement in discrimination against LGBT individuals”. Under these two broad titles, the report examines everything from hate crimes to hate speech by state officials to violations of free speech to failure to include sexual orientation and gender identity in new legislation. Report also concludes, “Violence and discrimination against LGBT persons in Turkey has continued steadily since the Republic’s first-­ cycle UPR review”,18 which was in 2010. In addition, daily coverage of these issues find voice through independent outlets, such as websites of LGBT activist groups and are widely circulated among those who follow such groups on social media. Consequently, there is indeed increased attention to the voices, concerns, and issues of LGBT individuals in Turkey among activists and anyone else who follows. Indeed, existing physical, psychological, social, and cultural violence against LGBT individuals and human rights is an important and substantial concern in Turkey. However, some temporal constructions downplay or outright eliminate the agency of LGBT individuals by way of painting them only as victims. In such narrative, the rest of the society and the state are the villains, and a broad construction of the west through EU and UN human rights organizations become heroes that will save the day. This discourse have a few consequences: (1) it strips agency from LGBT individuals and groups; (2) simultaneously it suggests all the agency rests with either the state or international organizations; (3) uses the predictable emotional response to such melodramatic construction to garner attention and response from its base as well as international organization. On the other hand, constructing the past and the present solely as realms of suffering and therefore accepted victimhood are not the only temporal constructions. Agency plays an important role in some of these constructions. More specifically, texts also construct the past as a space of agency—vis-à-vis struggling against the state and the society—and the present as the continuation of that agency, sometimes with specific instructions of how to engage in activism. In terms of rhetorical structure, this is similar to the previous construction of temporality where agency did not exist, present was merely a consequence of the past, and LGBT groups and individuals had no say in the process. In this case, however, within the

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discourse of continuity, agency, struggle, organizing, and engaging in activist work against state oppression take a central role. For instance, when pride parade was banned in 2016 and LGBT activist groups organized with the idea of dispersing, constructing temporalities as spaces of agency was especially prominent. Istanbul LGBTI+ Pride Week Committee, the collective that organizes the pride parades, released a press statement (I presented a small portion above) in response to the ban, which frames the past, the present, and the future in a particular manner in regards to agency: [“Bilindiği gibi, geçen sene polisin saldırdığı LGBTI+̇ Onur Yürüyüşü, 14. ̇ Senesinde de Istanbul valiliği tarafından yasaklandı. Benzer bir şekilde, bir hafta önce yapılan Trans Onur Yürüyüşü de açıklanan yasak üzerine polis tarafından engellendi. Bu gelişmeler üzerine, 14. LGBTI+̇ Onur Haftası Komitesi olarak, 26 Haziran günü saat 17.00’da Tünel Meydanı’nda bir basın açıklaması yaṗ mak üzere Istanbul Valiliği’ne bildirimde bulunduk ancak “uygun görülmediği” yanıtını aldık. Valilik, yasak gerekçesi olarak gösterdiği tehditlere karşı bizleri korumak yerine, Anayasa’da demokratik bir hak olarak yer alan “Gösteri ve Toplantı Yürüyüşleri Kanunu”nu ihlal etmeyi tercih etti. 14. Onur Yürüyüşü’nü gerçekleştiremeyeceğimizi üzüntüyle duyuruyoruz. Ancak bizim kendimize duyduğumuz güven, ufkumuz ve hayallerimiz ̇ bir yürüyüşten, Istiklal Caddesi’nden, bu. şehirden ve bu. ülkeden çok daha geniştir. Varoluş mücadelemiz dünü, bugünü ve geleceği aşar çünkü biz hep buradaydık, buradayız, ve burada olacağız. Hatırlarsanız Emniyet güçleri Trans Onur Yürüyüşü’nde basın açıklaması okumaya ve bir arada durmaya çalışan insanlara “Lütfen dağılın ve hayatın normal akışına dönmesine izin verin” diye seslenmişti. ̇ Biz de bu çağrıya riayet ediyoruz: 26 Haziran Pazar günü, Istiklal Caddesi’nin her köşesine dağılıyoruz. “Hayatı normal akışına döndürmek” için Pazar günü Beyoğlu’nun her sokağında, her caddesinde birbirimize kavuşuyoruz. 12 yıl boyunca büyük bir coşkuyla gerçekleştirdiğimiz Onur Yürüyüşleri varoluşumuzu, onurlu bir yaşam sürme ısrarımızı ve her geçen yıl büyüyen mücadelemizi kutladığımız bir alandır. Sadece LGBTI+̇ bireylerin değil, herkesin hayatına etki eder. Onur Yürüyüşü, insanlığa bir hayal kurdurur: Bu dünya başka türlü olsaydı, nasıl insanlar olurduk? Ne giyer, ne arzular, ne eyler, ne söylerdik? Bu kentin sokakları neye benzerdi? Aşkla örgütlenseydik, bizi birbirimizden ne koparabilirdi? Bedenimiz, emeğimiz ve geleceğimiz bizim elimizde olsaydı nasıl olurdu? Yürüyüşümüzü gerçekleştiremesek de, ̇ aklımızda bu. hayallerle Istiklal’in sokaklarını doldurmaktan vazgeçmiyoruz.

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Bize dayatılan hayatı reddediyoruz. Şiddeti ve baskıyı normalleştiren, bizi yok sayan bir hayat değil, kendi seçtiğimiz, onurla varolduğumuz hayatı yaşamaya devam ediyoruz ve hayatı ‘normal’ akışına döndürerek: DAĞ ILIYORUZ, DAĞ ILIYORUZ, DAĞ ILIYORUZ.”]

1. As known, LGBTI+ Pride Walk, [which] the police attacked last year, is banned by 2. Istanbul Municipality in its 14th year. Similarly, after the announced ban, Trans Pride 3. Walk [which was] conducted a week ago was obstructed by the police. 4. As a result of these developments, as the 14th Pride Week Committee, we gave a 5. notice to Istanbul Municipality to make a press statement on June 26th at 17:00 on 6. Tunnel Square, but we received the answer that it “was not found appropriate”. 7. Instead of protecting us against the threats [which] they pointed as justifications for 8. the ban, Municipality chose to violate the constitutional democratic right to “hold 9. meetings and demonstration marches”. 10. We sadly announce that we will not be able to realize the 14th Pride Walk. However, 11. the confidence we have in ourselves, our horizon, and dreams is much broader than a 12. walk, than Istiklal Street, than this city and this country. Our struggle for existence 13. transcends yesterday, today, and tomorrow because we were here, we are here, and 14. we will be here. 15. If you [pl.] recall, security forces called out to the people who were trying to stand 16. together and read a press release during Trans Pride Walk [by saying]: “please 17. disperse and let life return to its normal flow”. 18. We are obeying this call: [on] Sunday June 26th, we are dispersing to every corner of 19. Istiklal street. In order to “let life return to its normal flow”, we are reuniting with 20. each other on every street, every road of Beyoglu. 21. Pride Walks, which we are realizing with great joy for 12  years, is a space where we

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22. celebrate our existence, our persistence to live an honorable life, and our struggle that 23. grows every year. It does not just effect the life of LGBTI+ individuals but of 24. everyone. Pride walk makes humanity dream: If this world was different, how would 25. we be? What would we wear, desire, do, sing [say]? What would the streets of this 26. city look like? If we organized with love, what could separate us from each other? 27. How would it be if our bodies, our labor, and our future were in our hands? Even 28. though we can’t realize our walk, we are not giving up on filling the streets of Istiklal 29. with these dreams. 30. We refuse the life that is imposed upon us. Instead of a life that normalizes violence 31. and oppression and ignores us, we continue to live the life that we choose, that we 32. exist with pride, and as we let the life return to its “normal” flow, we are: 33. DISPERSING. DISPERSING. DISPERSING.

This statement by the Pride Walk Committee not only ties the pas to the present and to the future on the axis of agency, but also underlines what forms that agency and the ways in which different temporalities becomes inseparable from how, why, and what LGBT activists describe themselves and their activism in such temporalities. If we pay attention to how the text constructs a sense of self, we see that it actively resists being a victim of oppression—especially in relation to the state as an agent. In the face of state oppression—described from lines 1–6—the sense of self the text constructs does not respond with reiterating how they are oppressed or how state and social oppression is an accepted part of life for LGBT individuals. Instead, the text goes on to list series of responses LGBT individuals and organizations engaged in to shape how the future shapes up. The text directly ties the activism that takes place in the here and the now with a broad sense of time and frames it as an ongoing struggle. From lines 12–14 (“Our struggle for existence transcends yesterday, today, and tomorrow because we were here, we are here, and we will be here”), temporality, self, and agency are tied together to construct the self not as a constant victim—that is, in the object position, the receiver of

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oppression—but instead as a constant agent—as a subject that asserts existence through time. This is also apparent in how the text reframes ‘dispersing’ as ‘reuniting’ on line 19. Such reframing highlights not what happens as a consequence of state oppression, but the response LGBT activists conjure against it. As such, the text engages with the state oppression that aims to put LGBT individuals in the object position and their refusal of objectification manifests itself as reclaimed agency. The text openly states that exact reframing from lines 30–33. “Life imposed on us” on line 30 refers to state’s efforts to take agency away from LGBT individuals and put them in the object position. However, the text brings that up only in order to emphasize their refusal, therefore their agency—as the act of refusal itself is a point of agency. In the same vein, every instance the text describes a form of state oppression from lines 30–31, they are used as a springboard to reiterate and reclaim their agency. It is important to note that not only agency in these lines exist in the present tense—that is, continuous on a temporal spectrum—but also they are accompanied by temporal markers such as “continue” and “exist” which further tie the activism that exists in the here and the now to present and the future. Moreover, from lines 21–29, the text constructs a vision of a future based on their activism, in other words, their agency. However, the opening line for constructions of futurity, once again, lies on past and current activism as the text describes on line 21–23. Interestingly, as the text expands on past activism on line 21 (“12 years” refers to the past 12 years when pride walks took place) it uses present tense. While such use in commonplace in Turkish and it might seem like combining a past temporal marker with present tense verbs is not worthy of attention, within the discourse of this text, it is another instance where the text ties agency through time and emphasizes subjecthood of the self. This tie is vital for the remaining of the construction of futurity, since the present tense serves as a bridge that tie the past 12 years to the sense of futurity that could only be possible with centering a sense of reclaimed agency. The text constructs futurity as a series of questions that imagines a different version of what being-in-the-world might have been under other circumstances. It is rather easy to dismiss these questions not as visions of the future, but rather as thought experiments about what the past or the present might have been—since the tense in which they are written is a past tense. However, that would be a superficial reading of the text and would dismiss the relationship between agency and temporality that the text had been constructing up until that point. In other words, when we

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keep in mind how the text frames agency and how it relates the sense of self to an agent throughout the text, we see that such imaginations is, in fact, imaginations of a future—a future that the activist are trying to build or achieve with their activism. This is evident through the lines 28 and 29 (“we are not giving up on filling the streets of Istiklal with these dreams”), where the text fuses the aforementioned dreams with the reclaimed of agency it has been constructing. Consequently, in such moments where LGBT discourses do not merely echo victimhood, do not reiterate state’s narrative that strips them of agency, but instead claim or reclaim a sense of agency, it saturates constructions of past, present, and the future. Another example of framing the present moment as a moment of reclaimed agency took place after Ankara Municipality indefinitely banned all LGBT events on November 19, 2017. Following the ban, LGBT organizations in Ankara made statements that deemed the ban illegal and unacceptable. However, the reaction did not stop there. In this case, state oppression aimed to limit or eliminate the agency of LGBT organization in the city. Once again, instead of echoing such discourse, KAOS GL launched a campaign titled #yasakligunlerde, which transliterates into “during banned days”. Once again, the campaign aimed to subvert Ankara Municipality’s oppression that aimed to limit the actions of LGBT organizations by the virtue of reclaiming agency. Even the title itself carries the link between temporality and agency. Instead of titling their campaign just “banned days”, they added a temporal marker, “during”. The hashtag is meant to be shared and exist as a space where activists report what they can do “during banned days”. KAOS GL released a series of images on their social media accounts, 12 images to be exact, listing 12 different actions LGBT individuals and activists can engage in, even though they cannot organize to make any events. These action suggestions range from sharing human rights reports on social media to organizing in work places for the recognition of LGBT rights to being visible on the street. It is important to note that the discourses that play into statist narratives, which echo a lack of agency for LGBT individuals and reiterate a victim position, do not engage in futurity. While it is true that statist narratives also push conspiracy theories about protestors being the harbingers of the end of the nation, as I have discussed in Chap. 2, this lack of coherence is not about a meditation on futurity. Rather this designation of faux-­ agency serves to further victim position of the state in order to justify statist violence—physically, psychologically, socially, culturally, and discursively.

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Moreover, discussions on futurity mainly take place during Gezi Park protests—where activists witnessing the largest protest movement in country’s history could not help themselves, but ask what will happen after this is over? What will tomorrow look like once the protests die down? How will we organize in the light of this massive uprising? Other instances of state oppression that is the focus of this study—2016 pride parade ban and 2017 Ankara LGBT events ban—did not have a space that allowed big questions about the shape of the future. In other events, organizations and activists had to be more reactionary. While their reactions rested on a particular understanding of the future, their concerns were far more practical: how can we organize protest movement based on dispersion, how can we sustain activism in the light being banned from organizing events, etc. Nevertheless, whenever texts engage in futurity, it takes two broad forms. One form of futurity is focuses on the positive—a future of a utopic dream, similar to the construction of the future in the above text—and the other form of futurity is based on contestation—it paints a binary picture that forces an either/or position regarding whose agency shapes the future. While both constructions of the future rest on emphasizing the difficulties and the struggles people go through in the present, utopic constructions frame these struggles as a worthy and perhaps a necessary stage one must go through in order to reach the better days. Whereas contentious constructions of the future do not take a coming utopia for granted, and consequently, frame the present moment as one in which people must actively engage in order to shape an uncertain future. For instance, in the Gezi Park Protest special issue magazine KAOS GL published after the protests, an opinion piece states: [Homofobinin hemen öyle bir çırpıda aşılamayacağı aşikar, fakat 90’lı yıllardan bu yana, neredeyse tırnakla tünel kazarak bugünlere gelen LGBT hareketi için umut vaadeden bu süreç, ilerleyen günlerde daha büyük bir mirasın garantisi olacaktır.] 1. It is obvious that homophobia will not be overcome in a single struggle, but this 2. process that is very hopeful for the LGBT movement, which made it to these days 3. from 90’s where it almost dug a tunnel with nails, will be the guarantee of a much

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4. bigger inheritance in the future days.

“The guarantee of a much bigger inheritance” that describes what the “future days” will look like gets modified by “hope” and “overcoming homophobia”. To achieve such future, the passage frames “struggle” and “digging a tunnel with nails” as a necessary “process”. The process itself, in return, becomes a “guarantee” as well as the harbinger of a sense of utopic future. Another opinion piece in the same magazine suggests similar aspirations for the “future days” while describing the experience at the Gezi Park during the protests: [Gezi’de farklılıkların politik birliği kendisini göstermiştir; buradaki dayanışma hiyerarşik olarak denetlenen bir dayanışma olmamış ve yeni bir yurttaşlığa ilişkin değerleri sergilemiştir. Feministler ve LGBTT gruplar yurttaşları yeni değerlerle tanıştırıp Gezi’yi bir değerler eğitimi merkezi haline getirmişlerdir. Muktedir gövdeye duyulan öfkeyi seks işçilerine ve LGBTT bireylere karşı cinsel nefret hareketine tercüme etmemeyi öğrenmek bile çok önemlidir. Buna eşlik eden biçimde, farklı etnik ve dinsel gruplara saygı duyma, islamofobik dilden kaçınma çabası hayran vericidir. Böylece şiddet üreten karşıtlıklar yıkılmış ve toplumsal barışın imkanı doğmuştur.] 1. In Gezi, political unity of differences manifested itself; the solidarity here has not 2. been a solidarity regulated by hierarchy and has displayed values for a new 3. citizenship. Feminists and LGBTT groups introduced new values to citizens turned 4. Gezi into an education center for values. It is very important even to learn not to 5. translate the anger towards powerful bodies into sexual violence against sex workers 6. and LGBTT individuals. In the same vein, respecting different ethnic and religious 7. groups, refraining from Islamophobic language is worthy of admiration. As such, 8. oppositions that produce violence has collapsed and the opportunity for social peace 9. was born.

This text takes the experience at Gezi Park and poses it as a possible utopic future, which is evident from the way in which the text frames this

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entire experience as an “opportunity for social peace”. Opportunity, here, is temporal marker that sets its sights to the future. The implication being that the future needs to carry the various successes of the experience at Gezi Park, which will then bring about “social peace”. The construction of temporality with an end point, “social peace”, is reminiscent of teleologies that point to a utopic end of times. The difference is the content of what this utopia entails. What the text indexes as the utopic properties of the experience through lines 3–7—non-hierarchic solidarity, values for “new citizenship”, education of citizens about values, reducing violence against LGBT individuals and sex workers, and respecting differences— are the bedrocks of this utopic end point, since because of these properties there was, indeed, the opportunity for social peace. These kinds of texts, which regard the future as a utopic place and the struggles one must go through today as a necessary step in the way of getting to that future engage with the question of agency in a particular way. They describe the kind of struggle that worked in the past or the kind of struggle that is necessary to build a future and to get to the destination of “better days”. The other kind of futurity, that sees the future as a place of mutually exclusive binary and contestation where only one ‘side’ will ‘win’ does not engage with the question of agency in a particular manner, but mores so in a general way. The excerpt below is from a group called “The Red of the Rainbow” (Gökkuşağının Kızılı), which self identifies as an “anti-capitalist queer liberation group” and fashions a rainbow flag with an extended red area that has a large, yellow hammer and sickle in the center. While most LGBT groups refrain from officially identifying anywhere on the political spectrum and try to work with whoever occupies the legal and political structure, this group has a political commitment. In one of their Facebook posts on June 3, 2013, they state: [Özgürlüğümüz için mücadele etmeli, LGBT düşmanı AKP’yi yıkmalıyız! AKP’yi yıkamazsak, LGBT’lere yönelik düşmanlık ve saldırılar her geçen gün yaygınlaşacak. AKP’yi yıkamazsak, açık LGBT’ler hedef haline gelecek, gizlilik ve muhafazakarlaşmak dayatılacak. AKP’yi yıkamazsak sinema baskınları yerini ev baskınlarına bırakacak, eşcinsellik fiilen suç sayılacak. AKP’yi yıkamazsak, Beyoğlu’nun dönüşümü LGBT görünürlüğünü kısıtlayacak, sokaklardan gettolara çekiliş başlayacak. AKP’yi yıkamazsak, Gezi Parkı yıkılacak!]

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1. We need to struggle for our freedom and topple LGBT enemy AKP! If we cannot 2. topple AKP, animosity and attacks against LGBT people will spread every day. If we 3. cannot topple AKP, out LGBT individuals will become targets, secrecy and 4. conservatism will be forced. If we cannot topple AKP, movie theater raids will turn 5. into house raids, being gay will be a crime. If we cannot topple AKP, Beyoglu’s 6. gentrification will limit LGBT visibility, withdrawal from streets to ghettos will start. 7. If we cannot topple AKP, Gezi Park will be demolished [toppled]!

Here, the future is uncertain—and certainly is not a utopic place as the previous texts have suggested. If anything, the future has the possibility to turn out good or bad. It will turn out good if people topple AKP and the text lists in detail what will happen if the future turns out to be bad if people cannot topple AKP. The text establishes a mutually exclusive relationship between AKP and freedom and based on the mutual exclusivity, the only path to freedom is the toppling of AKP. The text does not expand on what could go right, what can the future look like if indeed they topple AKP and achieve a sense of freedom. Rather, the text focuses on the state as the agent and lists the steps AKP can take in order to further oppress and target LGBT individuals and groups. While the only agency LGBT individuals seem to have is to “topple” AKP. Furthermore, the text is not clear about what “toppling” entails. As such, the text paints the future as a place where the state has far greater agency and threatens further oppression against LGBT individuals and groups. Consequently, this kind of binary and mutually exclusive construction takes agency away from LGBT individuals and states, at best emphasizes state’s agency far more than what can be done against state oppression. Toppling, as a verb, does not signify anything other than taking an opposing action against powers that be, however the substance of that action is not clear.

Conclusion Queer history is meant to be disruptive of essentialisms, dichotomies, and binary constructions of self/other. This is the basic tenant of queer theory framework—whether applied to analysis, methodological framework, or

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historiography. In terms of queer historicizing, these histories are alternative narratives that persistently exist against normative narratives that erase queer voices and concerns. On the other hand, normative historical narratives that align with the state and cultural violence impose essentialisms about gender, sexuality, nationality—and these essentialisms work by mobilizing binaries. Moreover, the power to tell the official history or story of an event usually lies with the state apparatuses and that results in writing particular kinds of stories that frame the past, the present, and the future in the favor of what the state wants. This is not surprising because state apparatuses have the resources—time, money, established propaganda network, and enough intelligentsia who align with the state—in order to exert that kind of discursive power. However, queer historicizing aims to take that power and monopoly away from the state. Doing so introduces competing narratives and questions the legitimacy of the state’s story on a given event. The first part of this chapter serves a similar function. By documenting the events from the perspective LGBT individuals, it aims to disrupt two kinds of normative historiographies: those that are pushed by the state based on conspiracy theories about how Gezi Park Protests were pushed by foreign agents to saw the seeds of dissent and uprising in otherwise very stable and extremely strong, self-assured Turkey, that LGBT individuals and groups were somehow conspiring against state’s well-being, and it would surely corrupt the youth into being gay—therefore the pride parade needed to be banned and LGBT events had to be indefinitely be suspended. The other kind of normative historiography was pushed by the society at large who, while claimed to be democratic and resisting the authoritarian reflexes of the state, not only did not acknowledge LGBT groups and activists in front of them in the course of the protests—or pretend it was not their problem through the bans—but actively constructed “LGBT” as a monolithic category of a discursive other whose demise and erasure could be used a discursive resource to attack the state through homophobic, patriarchic, misogynic, and transmisogynic chants and slogans. Writing queer history, however, argues that there is an alternative voice, an alternative way of looking at these events. Queer historiographies focus less on big picture concerns—such as national pride, international political chess, or implications of conspiracy theories. Instead, the driving force behind writing queer historiographies of these events is to make sure those who are readily used as an expandable population for the benefit and

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existence of the rest, those who are deemed as erasable, or should be erasable, whose existence is perceived as mutually exclusive by the society and culture at large, take the center stage and tell what have happened by centering themselves and their issues. From this perspective, queer historiography is an exercise in queer talkback—it is, definitely, an indispensable part of the assemblage that forms what talkback should be. Indeed, commenting on temporality, rather displaying agency in terms of temporality is one of the main parts of talkback, but it does not constitute it as a whole. On that note, what were the discursive constructions that exemplified queer talkback along the lines of temporality in this chapter? In other words, what were the discursive formations that enabled queer voices to claim agency in the face of erasure on the lines of temporality? Temporal constructions in the discourses of LGBT individuals and groups seem to have an essential role in identity construction. The sense of self, expressed through how individuals understand the past, present, and the future, has discursive agency as an interwoven characteristic of temporal markers. In other words, agency as expressed through temporality weighs heavily on how queer discourses position themselves as subjects or objects—as agents or victims. There are cases where the temporal narrative rests on the narrative of improved conditions over time: the things were bad in the past, they have increasingly got worse and they are very bad now. This sort of temporality constructs LGBT identity on the lines of victimhood, takes agency away from LGBT individuals and groups, and marks the state as the primary agent in any given time. The texts that frame the past and the present from a victim perspective and that do not discuss futurity; consequently, do not also engage in talkback. Furthermore, when the future is constructed as a battleground where the state has all the tools and opportunities to oppress, that further takes agency away from LGBT individuals and groups. This kind of discourse aligns with Edelman’s take on futurity—where it is merely a bleak postapocalyptic land of nothingness and the best course of action is to let go of any sense of agency or any claim into shaping the future, since the mere suggestion of involvement in the construction of the future not only implies risk of failing, but also disrupts the fantasies of ideological purity. One might, after all, get involved in decision making processes and lose one’s radical edge, make mistakes, and try to correct them. As such narratives note, if one never takes any risk in shaping the future, one can always stay at a position of ideological purity and therefore

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a moral high ground where it is always appropriate and even welcomed as well as expected to launch generalized critiques against those who do get involved, make decisions, and make mistakes. However, talkback is a framework of discursive agency, it is not a framework of discursive purity in pursuit of moral high ground. This means temporalities that construct the past, present, and the future as spaces of struggle frame LGBT identity not as a victim who cannot make decisions and is at the mercy of other decision makers as well as power sources such as the state or society at large. Instead, they frame time as a construct in which an agent has capacity to act, react, and organize against ongoing and future attempts of oppression. This sense of agency is a function of the relationship between constructions of the past, present, and the future— oppression of the past informing the framing of agency in the present and the future. Moreover, uncertainty of future and function of agency as a determinant of what future might look like fuels the sense of agency. If the future is certain and it is nothing but hopelessness, it does not fuel agency, it only creates excuse for further inaction. If we frame the future not as inevitable, rather a culmination of choices, influences, actions, and so on, then it creates the space where one can frame the ‘now’ as moments where agency, action, and choices matter. Such discourses emphasize agency as the central component of LGBT identity and they extend the same logic to their constructions of the future. Talkback, in this sense, assigns agency to LGBT individuals, centers their voices and concerns against erasure that stem from a yearning for victimhood. Consequently, talkback also simultaneously works against normative constructions of temporality.

Notes 1. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 2. 2. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 154. 3. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 153. 4. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 3. 5. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality. 6. Valerie, The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies. 7. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet. 8. Traub, The New Unhistoricism, 23. 9. Freeman, Time Binds, 11. 10. Traub, The New Unhistoricism, 36. 11. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990) Epistemology of the Closet.

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12. Goldberg and Menon, Queering History, 1609. 13. Love, Feeling Backward. 14. Traub, The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies, 36. 15. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. 16. Alimahomed, Thinking Outside the Rainbow, 155. 17. Ze’evi. 2006, Producing Desire, 97. 18. Human Rights Violations of LGBT Individuals in Turkey.

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CHAPTER 4

Queer Talkback on Space

Previous chapter’s focus on temporality necessitates a focus on spatiality. Whenever we consider a temporal reality or a fantasy, we also consider the spatial reality or fantasy that goes along with that temporality. Neither disidentifying, nor fantasizing takes place only in temporalities; they also take place in spaces. Just like time, however, spaces are arranged and regulated in a way that privilege heteronormative desires. This regulation is often achieved by imposing certain moralities on spaces either through discourses or through architectural designs that reflect those discourses. When we think of space, therefore, we have to keep the morality associated with that space in mind. This is what Jane Hill calls “moral geography”—the ways in which a specific understanding of morality is described alongside a description of a spatial context.1 Following Hill, in her book Turf Wars: Discourse, Diversity, and the Politics of Place, Gabriella Gahlia Modan suggests that a given community employs discursive strategies to evaluate a geographic space either in a positive or in a negative way based on their value systems.2 However, evaluative power does not have a single source. As Butler suggests,3 every instance of evaluation gives the opportunity to develop counter or alternative evaluations. Therefore, morality

Parts of this chapter was published in my previous work: Erol, A. E. (2017). Queer contestation of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies during #occupygezi. Sexualities. 21(3): 428–445. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7_4

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of a geographic space is neither a single instance of evaluation, nor a static construction by a community, identity group, or ideology. Rather, it is an ongoing and dynamic contestation between various performativities that are part of or lay claim to that particular space. In other words, occupying a space, either as a form of protest or for any other reason, results in interacting and shaping the morality of that particular space. Who is allowed to exist in a space under what conditions, who can walk freely or who feels at risk, what can be worn or done in a space and myriad of other questions we can ask about a particular space point to the morality of that space. Gezi Park presents an example of this contestation. On the one hand, the state, following its heteronormative practices, wants to build a shopping mall on a piece of green public space. On the other hand, as Halberstam notes, queer constructions of space “develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction.”4 As a public space, Gezi Park not only hosts working class individuals and has a history of leftist protests, but it is also the most well-known cruising spot in Istanbul.5 In other words, the state focuses on consumption and a classist neoliberal re-arrangement of public space by building a shopping mall and restoring military architecture without consent from the public. Whereas queer performativities of the same space not only disregards classist divisions a shopping mall would bring, but also contests the neoliberal trend that would take place through privatization and deregulation of the public space. Most importantly, queer performativities use the space to defy capitalist logic of family and reproduction through sexual dissent. Therefore, queer performativities that construct the moral geography of Gezi Park compete with the state’s construction of the same space. Consequently, the moral geography of the Gezi Park is not a stable one. Rather, moral geography is contested as discursive and performative constructions between competing identity groups that hold a claim to that particular space—in this case, the heteronormative performativity of the state and queer performativity of the LGBTQ-identified individuals who had been a part of Gezi Park. Those who participate in cruising and public sex queer the moral geography of Gezi Park by centering their bodies and their non-reproductive sexualities in the construction of that space. Queering a space and its morality does not take place through merely cruising and hooking-up within that space. Indeed, such sexual activities run in opposition to the heteronormative and homogenizing constructions and moralities of public spaces assigned by the state and national mechanisms of power. After all, the state establishes the policing of a public space through series of

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regulations. And defying those prohibitions might mean to contest the logic behind assigning heteronormative function to a public space. However, those kinds of sexual acts do not move beyond a momentary defiance of an established system of signification. This work, however, does not take queer to be an identity position that refers to a stable and constant sense of being-in-the-world that is informed by sexual desire. As Berlant and Warner6 note, queer is not “an umbrella for gays, lesbians, bisexuals, and the transgendered.”7 “To see oneself as “gay”, writes Blasius, is to adhere to a distinctly modern invention, namely the creation of an identity and a sense of community based on (homo) sexuality.”8 Such identifications come with certain social structures, such as networks or spaces, and are safe havens: physically, psychologically and socially. Queer discourses and practices aim to debase discourses, practices, and established norms that find comfort in stable identity positions—independent of sexual identity or desire. Being straight does not mean to be heterosexual, when existing in queer spaces are concerned—it means to be a part of the normalcy against which queer discourses and practices resist.9 Queering, therefore, seeks to question the core assumptions that sustain the homogenizing reflexes of the state and its apparatuses. In order to question the established system itself, therefore, queer voices need to produce of alternative discourses, practices, and performativities associated with those spaces, which are not momentary, but are sustainable and run parallel to their heteronormative counterparts. As Berlant and Warner note, “queer project… support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity.”10 This can take place through questioning, defining and redefining identities, which in turn engages in production of alternative moralities associated with spaces those identities occupy. Resisting the construction of a shopping mall by queering the moral geography of Gezi Park, then, is not a momentary defiance of neoliberal and heteronormative signification of exclusive (on several layers) identities assigned to a public space. Rather it is a production of an alternative way of existing that goes beyond binaries of exclusive identities. Consequently, what queer discourse brings to a public space is nothing short of a(n) (em) bodied critique of neoliberal and heterosexist state structures—as well as a utopic re-imagination of existence within a space that does not rely on social boundaries such as class, gender, and sexuality. This type of re-imagination of space lands closely to what Foucault named as a heterotopic space. Foucault describes heterotopias as “something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the

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real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted.”11 Heterotopic spaces, according to Foucault, have various meanings existing within another space that has the capacity to encompass all other spatial meanings. While such notion works against a homogenous construction of a space, it is not as useful when talking about groups and identities contesting the morality of a single space, such as Gezi Park. Matthew Gandy, in his article Queer ecology: nature, sexuality, and heterotopic alliances, has another take on heterotopia. He writes: If for Foucault the heterotopia is marked by a coterminous juxtaposition of incompatible elements then this paper reads this dimension somewhat differently by emphasizing how the material characteristics of specific places might engender ostensibly disparate or heterotopic alliances, with political implications for the use and meaning of urban space.12

Gandy’s definition takes Foucault’s idea on heterotopic space and applies it to identities that take up a space. Instead of focusing on the space itself, Gandy shifts attention to those who are in a particular space. Gandy’s take on heterotopia opens up possibilities to interpret the notion to further the conceptualization of queer talkback. A queer take on heterotopia not only strips the need to rely on the existence of various spatial meanings superimposed on a single space, but also does not require ‘identities.’ Rather, heterotopia in the context of queer talkback means queering of spatial homogeneity, therefore its morality, through queer discourses and practices. Queering space takes place through a reversal of the normal. The dominant culture “appropriates, sanitizes, and homogenizes the signs of marginality, making them institutions of consumerism, and thus politically nonthreatening.”13 Queer space, on the other hand, not only “value[s] and celebrate[s] difference”14 but also runs in opposition to spaces that are built on exclusivity and regulation via heteronormative institutionalization, such as family and consumption. What Buckland means by difference, and what I try to convey with heterotopia, is not the celebration of individual differences—not the kind of spirit of individuality that spurs the fantasies of upward class mobility through consumption.15 Instead, Buckland’s idea of celebrating difference, akin to what I have been trying to convey with heterotopia, rests on deconstructing homogenizing reflexes and moralities in a given space in order to make sure a space does not endorse exclusivity by privileging one

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difference over the others. Consequently, heterotopic re-imagination of space refers to the lens of queer talkback to an emphasis on inclusivity and coexistence of various and seemingly incompatible identity groups to resist hegemony of homogeneity, which, therefore, can carry different spatial moralities in the same space. What a person or a group of people can or cannot say in a particular space also factors into moral geography. During Gezi Park protests, the mainstream protests discourses were about expressing discontent and dissatisfaction with then PM Erdogan and his regime. Such reactionary parts and parcels of the protest movement against what the participants perceived as Erdoğan’s authoritarian rule brought with it reactionary discourses. For instance, a soccer club chant named “sık bakalım” [spray, let’s see], which originated in 2007, became one of the most famous chants, if not the most famous, during Gezi Park Protests. The lyrics of the chant display a bravado standoff against the police: Sık bakalım, sık bakalım      Spray let’s see, spray let’s see Biber gazı sık bakalım       Spray pepper gas, let’s see Kaskını çıkar, copunu bırak       Take off your helmet, drop your baton Delikanlı kim bakalım       Who is the wildblooded, let’s see

While the text directly refers to the police as the subject who sprays the pepper gas, though association it challenges state power and therefore authority figures, like the PM. The lyrics not only refer to being defiant in the face of being sprayed with pepper spray, it provokes the police to do so. Provoking takes place though the invitation, “let’s see”, which invites the police to a fistfight to determine who is more of a man. “Delikanlı,” transliterated into ‘wild-blooded,’ is a slang term that is used to describe adolescent men who have the habit of engaging in threatening or daring acts. The chant, therefore calls to determine the real man by means of a fistfight, urging the police to let go of privileges that make them superior during clashes. These privileges, such as the helmet or the baton, is incompatible with the notion of a ‘fair-fight/play’ that is essential not only to the soccer culture in which this chant is popularized, but also to the machismo that is prevalent among the fans. Through these chants, public space contested between the protestors and the police becomes a place of contesting masculinities to determine the seat of power. Other chants and slogans that the protestors used during Gezi Park Protests were overtly

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heterosexist, heteromasculinist, misogynistic, or like the above example, had patriarchic undertones. LGBT activists took a stern stance against such sexist and heterosexist chants. In fact, according to the records of a street forum held on 6th of July 2013 in Ankara, a KAOS GL member reported that a soccer fan club member asked for their opinion to choose the ‘right’ curses, that is, those that would not be heterosexist or sexist.16 Consequently, by questioning the discourse of resistance about a particular space, KAOS GL members also drew attention to what it means to exist within that space. In other words, by suggesting that claiming ownership of the street and of public spaces cannot take place through heterosexist and sexist discourses, KAOS GL members further suggested the moral geography of public spaces could not be built on such discourses. The aforementioned contrast between the usual public reaction versus the way in which the LGBTQ protestors challenged the established norms of protesting through queer discourse raises larger issues regarding existence within public spaces. As Peterson17 and Leap18 note, heteronormative commitments to public spaces, such as nationalism, neoliberalism, and statist ideological commitments, recruit their subjects through heterosexist reductionism and homophobia. Especially in Turkey, where conservative ideology and identity dominates political and social circles, homogeneity—under the guise of tolerance to difference—becomes the main driving force of such heteronormative commitments.19 During Gezi Park Protests, however, LGBTQ identified individuals not only showed their commitment to the park by defying the heteronormative and neoliberal moral geographies that such ideologies wanted to associate with the park through the construction of a shopping mall,20 but also encouraged, with occasional success, non-LGBTQ identified individuals to do the same. Interrogating the moralities of neoliberal and heteronormative geographies using queer notions of space alongside with an interpretation of Foucault’s21 concept of heterotopia, this chapter further examines the ways in which discourses of LGBTQ identified protestors contest the moral geography of the Gezi Park, and the discursive mechanisms of this contestation. As such, this chapter investigates the discursive mechanisms through which queer discourses challenge and reconstruct the meaning of existing within a public space as an alternative to discourses that impose commitment through neoliberalism and heteronormativity.

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Neoliberal and Heteronormative Space Spaces, especially urban spaces are such sites of moral and ideological contestation simply because they were planned. The very act of planning a space requires a multitude of institutions that already occupy structural and cultural power positions22 decide, build, and therefore impose a certain way of living to those who do not have access to such power structures. In other words, planning “appears as inherently political, and ought not to present itself as a value-neutral and/or scientific endeavor”.23 In Istanbul, this lack of access resulted with the public challenging existing power structures in the street. However, this challenge did not mean that cultural and social factors behind institutional power were targeted by the protestors. In Gezi Park, while the Turkish state pushed for the creation of a neoliberal space, the protestors fell back on defining the park through heteronormative and patriarchic geographical lens, despite believing that they were opposing the state. Queer discourses, on the other hand, ended up contesting both moral geographies. Neoliberalism is a process in which the state engages in regulative practices in favor of deregulation, privatization, corporate interest, consumerism, and intervenes in the market so that the market seems free of intervention.24 Neoliberal space is the materialization of neoliberal logics and policies in the ways in which spaces are constructed, planned, and actualized as specific practices of exclusion—such as limiting and eliminating accessibility of lower classes, increasing state surveillance, imposing exclusivity by means of market rhetoric, and promoting consumption.25 In Gezi Park, this manifests itself as the state’s desire to build a shopping mall to replace a public park. In other words, the morality of the neoliberal geography is based on consumption, classist neoliberal re-arrangement of public space, and regulation of the movement bodies to be under the gaze of CCTV and further surveillance. Heteronormativity is the collection of policies and logics that normalize, in a Foucauldian sense of the word, cultural practices that privilege heterosexual monogamous couplehood that culminates in marriage and child-rearing, over other types of relationships.26 In a similar vein to neoliberal space, heteronormative space is the culmination of these logics in spatial settings—realization of an exclusive morality based on reproductive logics, gender expression, and sexual desires that are classified as deviant.27 In the context of Gezi Park, morality of heteronormative space presents itself in two ways. Not only the moralities of shopping malls are further

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exclusive on the axis of heteronormativity—as it can be deduced from the prevalence of gendering in stores and restrooms—but also, non-queer responses to state oppression also actualize in terms of exclusive discourses based on gender, sexuality, and masculinity. Queer, as I stated in the introduction, is a being-in-the-world that aims to deconstruct logics of neoliberalism and heteronormativity. Just as heteronormativity aims to normalize heterosexual monogamous couplehood that culminates in marriage and child-rearing and neoliberalism produces moralities that privilege logics of profit-making, individual benefit, and deregulation, queer being-in-the-world centers the experiences of those who are pushed to the margins due to such normalization and offers critiques as well as worldmaking to debase existing assumptions of normality. This includes, of course, existing in a space as well as the arguments of morality that comes with existing in a particular space. In terms of Gezi Park, queer morality of the park not only disregards classist divisions a shopping mall would bring, but also contests the neoliberal trend that would take place through privatization and deregulation of the public space. As a public space, Gezi Park not only hosts working class individuals and has a history of leftist protests, but also it is the most well-known cruising spot in Istanbul.28 Consequently, queer performativities use the space to defy heteronormative logics of spatial arrangement of family and reproduction through sexual dissent. Cruising is an excellent illustration of how sexual dissent disrupts the neoliberal and heteronormative spatial moralities. Centering one’s body and non-reproductive sexuality in the construction of that space runs in opposition to the heteronormative and homogenizing constructions and moralities of public spaces assigned by the state, neoliberal, and national mechanisms of power.29 After all, the state establishes the policing of a public space through series of regulations. And defying those prohibitions might mean to contest the logic behind assigning heteronormative function to a public space.30 Krause suggests that cruising resignifies and the architectural structure around which cruising happens by reinscribing gender and sexuality in spaces that are meant to be devoid of any signification of gender or sexuality.31 However, spaces that are designed to be devoid of an expression of gender or sexuality merely assume reproductive and non-promiscuous cisgender-heterosexual expressions to be the norm—and impose that assumption on to the space by an attempt at sterilization of the space from such expressions. Therefore, cruising not only resignifies, but also challenges, disrupts, and queers the social and cultural

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structures that shaped the planning of a given space. Consequently, moral geography is not a stable concept. Rather, different groups of people with competing moralities contest how that morality reflects in the space, its architecture, planning, regulation, and the movement of bodies within that space. Cruising, therefore, is not merely sex, or a momentary pleasure. As I mentioned in the introduction, queering, and the morality that comes with the disruption of queering, such as cruising, leads the way to a heterotopic moral geography—a space in which differences can and do exist without falling on the need to homogenize or organize through hierarchy and, consequently, enabling seemingly incompatible moralities to exist in a single space.

Queer Discourses on Space In order to understand the ways in which queer discourses contested neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies through framing Gezi Park as a heterotopic space, I examine opinion articles KAOS GL members wrote on the organization’s website. KAOS GL has a website feature in which members can publish opinion pieces about current events, called the Rainbow Forum. While the editorial or the selection process is not clear on the website, it presents itself an online space in which members can share ideas and comment on the news, recent events, or about any subject they see fit. During the protests, KAOS GL was the only LGBTQ organization that had such an online feature, where members were able to share their reflections and opinions as they saw fit. That is the reason why this article focuses on KAOS GL.  These opinion pieces are first-hand queer discourses of LGBTQ identified individuals who took part in the protests. These pieces, therefore, reflect the ways in which queer discourses challenge the neoliberal and heteronormative constructions of space. In other words, queering of the moral geography did not only take place through participation in protests; it also took place through reflecting on those participatory practices to produce discourses that further dismantled heteronormative moralities of that space. Consequently, this study not only finds it appropriate, but also necessary to examine discourses that are a part of bodies that engage in protest. To find pieces on the Gezi Park Protests, I read all the pieces that were published in the Rainbow Forum during the uprisings, from 28th of May until October 2013, which was a total of 156 articles. Then I eliminated

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any article that did not talk about the Gezi Park Protests. This left me with 58 articles published between 3rd of June and 5th of September, 2013. Queer discourses engage in the protest in two broad ways. One way revolves around critiquing discourses that promote exclusivity and homogeneity of the Gezi Park through neoliberal and heteronormative discourses—either due to the construction of the mall, or the way in which corporations have supported the state, or the use of heteropatriarchic chants by the protestors. The other strategy is discursively constructing what heterotopia looks like through constantly linking a specific kind of personal markers—what call universal personal markers—with spatial markers such as the park or the country. LGBTQ identified individuals perceive state’s construction of Gezi Park as an exclusive space on several fronts, such as ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, ideology, and class. This stems from the idea that state’s construction of Gezi Park is not different than state’s construction of any other public space—such as the nation itself—since the state works with a homogenizing reflex within its borders. As one author notes: [Bu ülkede herkes Müslüman, Türk, heteroseksüel ve muhafazakâr değil ̇ yazık ki! Idrak edilemeyen belki de bu. Yani insanların tek tip olmadığı, olamayacağı.] 1. [In] this country everyone isn’t Muslim, Turk, heterosexual and conservative, 2. unfortunately! Maybe this is not understood. That is, people aren’t one type, 3. can’t be.

The talkback against the statist morality is not necessarily constrained to critiquing the state regarding Gezi Park. The spatial marker that refers to public space, “this country” on line 1, is associated with series of restrictions against existing within that public space that define a perceived personal deictic marker that the state would deem ideal. These restrictions, constructed through as the intersection of several identities outlined on line 1, are perceived to be accord with the norms of existing in any public space within the borders of “this country.” The personal marker associated with this particular intersection of identities, “everyone”, collocated between the spatial marker and the intersection of these exclusive

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identities on line 1, underlines how the author of this text understands statist exclusivity as a homogenizing and exclusive force. The text constructs the imposed homogeneity as factually impossible both in the present and in the future. “Aren’t” and “can’t” on 2nd and 3rd lines imply the impossibility of existence of such homogeneity both now and ever—due to a lack of any restriction on the timeframe provided by “can’t.” Such construction not only points to the contradiction in statist moral geography, as in demanding the impossible, but also through revealing the contradiction, questions it. In addition to homogenous moral geography as they perceived that the state was imposing, activists also drew attention to the collaboration between corporations and the state. Such collaboration was one of the ways in which the morality of neoliberal spaces seeped into the public space. To point to this unison, one blogger writes: [Her sabah Starbucks’tan bir kahve almadan işine gidemeyenler artık Starbucks gördüklerinde ya da Saray Muhallebicisi gördüklerinde akıllarına bu firmaların polisle yaptıkları iş birliği geliyorsa bu isyanın antikapitalist kazanımlarını görmezden gelmek ne kadar ‘sol’ bir refleks olur?] 1. From now on, those who cannot go to work every morning without buying a 2. cup of coffee, if seeing Starbucks or seeing Saray Pudding Shop, reminds 3. them the collaboration these companies did with the police, how much of a 4. ‘left’ reflex would it be not to see the anticapitalist gains of this uprising?

Perception of classism, in this post, does not only manifest itself in the purchasing power of a cup of coffee every morning and the disposable income it entails. Rather it is the class performance: the implication of having a stable work and getting a cup of coffee on the way to work, the image of a well-integrated citizen contributing to society, has a daily routine based on consumption habits, and establishing a sense of self through habits imposed corporate consumption. Neoliberal morality in this picture does not leave room for those who cannot or does not want to engage in such consumption habits, for those who do not have stable jobs, or whose schedules are comfortable enough to leave room for a coffee stop during their commute. The exclusivity of this neoliberal morality creates a certain divide between those who are well integrated to the capitalist machine and

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those who are not—those who are in queer times and spaces32 and those who are not. Moreover, during the protests, both of these shops closed their doors to the protesters and prevented the protestors from seeking refugee inside the shops. The class-centric critique is also about the ways in which these shops denied support to the protesters and how the memory of corporations working in favor of the state should, effectively, form a piece and parcel of the class consciousness. The hope in disrupting this consumption-based routine does not stem from a desire to undermine corporations themselves. Rather, the point, again, is to identify those who align with the exclusive morality of neoliberal logics and hoping that the uprising was useful to question that exclusivity. Blog posts also critique the protests at large whenever they detect a heteronormative and patriarchic discourses that create exclusivity. A blogger notes his observations and his reactions after the protests begin: [eğer olayların patladığı 30 mayıs ertesinde olan ilk eylemin “insanlık” için olduğunu görseydim sabahlara kadar sokaklarda oturabilirdim. ama ben neler gördüm biliyor musunuz? istiklâl marşıyla başlayan bir eylem, akabinde ̇ söylenen onuncu yıl marşı, “ne mutlu türküm diyene!” naraları, IBNE ̇ ̇ TAYYIP sloganları, bir elinde pankartta OÇ TAYYIP diğer elinde türk bayrağı olanlar ve daha niceleri.] 1. I could have sat on the streets till the morning if I saw that the first 2. protest that happened after 30th of May, when things exploded, was about 3. “humanity”. But do you [pl.] know what [pl.] I saw? A protest that starts with 4. the national anthem, followed by the singing of the tenth year march, “how 5. happy is the one who says I m a Turk” chants, FAGGOT TAYYIP chants, 6. those who carry a SOB TAYYIP sign in the one hand and a Turkish flag in 7. another and many others.

The author of this post observes that the moral geography based on exclusion manifests itself during the Gezi Park protests through the use of sexist, and heterosexist. As the protestors use such discourses, the author notes that the space becomes associated with such exclusive morality. The author notes that he did not sit “on the streets till the morning”, that is, as a queer individual, he could not become a part of the public space, precisely because the morality constructed within that space through chants were exclusive because it uplifted statist discourses that relied on sexism

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and fascism. To highlight conflict between his sense of morality and that of the chants, he contrasts a personal universal deictic marker on line 3, “humanity”, against the exclusivity imposed by the chants. In other words, anything less than supporting the entire humanity falls short according to the author’s sense of morality. Another exemplar of this kind of critique is reflected below, and it presents us with a discussion on what democracy means in heteronormative imagination versus in queer imagination. [Evet, orada özgürlük için yer alıp baskıya karşı olanlar bile, eşcinselliğe karşıydılar. Herkes demokrasi mücadelesi verirken, biz eşcinseller hem muhafazakârlara, hem de demokrat geçinenlere karşı demokrasi mücadelesi vermek zorunda kalıyorduk.

1. Yes, even those who were there for freedom and against oppression were 2. Against homosexuality. While everyone else was struggling for democracy, 3. we homosexuals were forced to give a struggle for democracy both against 4. conservatives and also those claiming to be democrats.

The author notes that democracy, in heteronormative morality, has the same consequences for those who exist outside of it—whether it is a conservative or liberal who pursues heterosexist norms of existence. “Everyone else” the author mentions in line 2 includes both “conservatives and also those claiming to be democrats”, while excluding “we homosexuals”— since “we homosexuals” struggle for democracy that is not “against homosexuality”. Therefore, the democracies the author refers to in lines 2 and 3 must have different meanings. What is more striking in author’s statement beyond competing definitions of democracy in the lines of heterosexism, is the observation that when it comes to existence of LGBT+ individuals, conservatives and those who oppose conservatives, those who are a part of the uprising, align to be “against homosexuality.” This observation lies at the core of the queer critique of Gezi Park protests and informs the critique extended to the protestors beyond the state and those who support the state. Critique of the neoliberal and heteronormative morality imposed on space is constructed through an appeal to broader moralities, such as humanity and impossibility of homogeneity—which also stems from a similar axiomatic appeal of ‘everyone is different’. As such, queer discourses critique constraints on existing within public spaces, such as

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religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and ideology, by pointing to the incompatibility of homogeneity with how they construct queer moral geography. Constructing a heterotopic queer moral geography of Gezi Park uses same discursive strategy used during critiques of associating seemingly limitless personal deictic markers with spatial deictic markers. A blogger writes: [Devrimi bir yaşam fışkırması olarak anlıyordu Bakunin. Yerel tutkuların ve özlemlerin olabilecek en büyük uyanışının gerçekleştiği, olağanüstü bir kendiliğinden yaşam fışkırması olarak. Gezi Parkı’nda fışkıran bu yerel tutkular ve özlemler, despot iktidarın kurduğu barajları, tuzakları, hayata giydirmeye çalıştığı deli gömleklerini parçalayacak. 1 Mayıs’ta Taksim’e çıkma talepleri karşısında “ayaklar baş olunca kıyamet kopar” diyordu ikti̇ dar. Iktidarın kıyameti bizim karnavalımız demektir. Ayakların baş olmadığı, aksine bedene atfedilen her türlü hiyerarşik yapılanmanın yıkıldığı, organların sabit işlevlerinin terk edildiği ‘organsız bedenlerin karnavalı’na dönüştü Gezi Parkı. Direnen, yardımlaşan, özgür bedenlerin inşa ettikleri bir sanat yapıtıdır Gezi Parkı… Sokaklarımızda olanlar direnişçiler için bir trajediye dönüşsün isteniyor; oysa biz şehrin ortasında bir karnaval yarattık ve o karnavalda ‘Çokluk’ (Multitude) dahilindeki herkes için bir şey ifade ediyordu.]

1. Bakunin understood revolution as an outburst of life. As an extraordinary 2. spontaneous outburst of life, realized in the biggest waking of local desires 3. and longings. These local passions and longings that outburst in Gezi Park, 4. will destroy obstacles, traps, the straitjackets [they are] trying to put on life. 5. Government was saying that “if the feet become the head, apocalypse will 6. ensue” against the demands of going to Taksim on 1st of May. Government’s 7. apocalypse is our carnival. Gezi Park turned into ‘a carnival of organ-less 8. bodies’ where feet did not become the head, rather [where] all kinds of 9. hierarchic structures are dismantled, fixed functions of the organs were 10. abandoned. Gezi Park is an art structure [, which] resisting, cooperating, free 11. bodies built… [It is] wanted that happenings in our streets turn to tragedy for

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12. the resisters; whereas we created a carnival in the middle of the city and that 13. carnival meant something different for everyone within the ‘Multitude’.

The key term in this passage, ‘multitude’ at line 13, is the cohesive pronoun that ties all other personal markers together in order to signify a universal marker that refers to all who are dissenting against neoliberal and heteronormative moral geographies. Existing within Gezi Park not only becomes being part of the multitude, it also means to exist without any hierarchical structure. Multitude, just like “everyone”, encompasses a heterotopic ‘reality’ of existing within the space. This kind of existence is associated with destroying obstacles (line 4), and upsetting hierarchical structures (line 9). Consequently, being in the world is constructed in a way that defies limitations. As previous examples have pointed out, any kind of restriction falls short of a queer construction of moral geography and heterotopia. Below is another example of such heterotopic existence in a blog post: [Gezi Parkı’ndaki herkes son bir haftadır AVM melankolisini, şehir sıkıntısını, gündelik nihilizmi reddedip silkindi, orada bulunuşlarının hiçbir anında kendi önceliklerini ortaya koymadan bir arada yaşıyorlar.] 1. For the last week, everyone in Gezi Park refused the melancholy of the 2. shopping mall, the discomfort of the city, the daily nihilism, and shook 3. [themselves], and at no moment of their being there do they put out their own 4. priorities [and] they live together.

Once again, the universal personal deictic marker “everyone” engages in anticapitalist and heterotopic behavior in the queer imagination of this author. While we do not know, and indeed the author could not have known, if indeed everyone refused melancholy and discomfort and did not put their own priorities before anyone else’s. However, that exactly is the point of using such universal deictic personal markers in conjunction with spatial markers that depict heterotopic action. It is the author’s perception, and in this case queer imagination, that reflects the relationships and conglomeration in that space as the way it is written. The public present at Gezi Park, in the above passage, is being represented as anticapitalist and

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heterotopic because of their resistance against the construction of a shopping mall, and their refusal to prioritize their self-interest over others. The way in which posts use ‘cruising’ to imply dissent, and associating dissent within a public space, again, with a universal personal deictic marker, ossifies heterotopia as the queering of moral geography. As a blogger notes: [Gezi Parkı, bir zamanlar çeşitli insani işlevleri arasında eşcinsel argosunda ‘çark’ denilen şeye de yarardı; bakışmak, görüşmek, anlaşmak için parkta gezinmek… Gezi Parkı’nda şimdi herkes ‘çark’ta.]

1. Gezi Park, once upon a time, among its other humane functions, was also 2. useful for what is called ‘cruising’ in same-sex slang; to wander the park to 3. glance [at one another], to see [one another], to get together [with one 4. another]… In Gezi Park, now everyone is ‘cruising’.

The morality of heterotopic coexistence is dubbed as ‘cruising’—associating heterotopia with queer practices of bringing sex into public spaces. This is significant because the text touches on two points: first, the text uses cruising as a metaphor to make the political point of the appeal to the personal deictic marker, “everyone”, is cast without any constraints or limits. The universal personal marker, which signifies heterotopic moral geography is now juxtaposed with cruising. As aforementioned, cruising is beyond a mere sex act. It also disrupts the neoliberal and heteronormative morality of the space in which it takes place. When everyone is framed as cruising, consequently, that becomes an implied political statement which contests regulatory and exclusionist attempts that tries to deny access to those who do not fit within neoliberal and heteronormative morality. And through protesting, “everyone” in that space was contesting regulation. Universal personal marker, “everyone”, therefore, not only equates the dissent of everyone in that space, it also imagines resisting against regulation as a heterotopic spacetime and existence. Other instances, ban of 2016 pride parade and the indefinite ban of all LGBT events in Ankara, are also based on a particular contestation of moral geography. Both cases point to how the Turkish State sees and imposes a particular morality to a space. In both cases, these spaces are also relatively small—Istiklal Street for the pride parade and Ankara municipality for the indefinite events ban. However, with these bans, the state makes a larger statement about who can and should publicly exist in Turkey— and who should not. As such, queer discourses that challenge these bans

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engage in counter arguments about existence in public spaces and about morality. For instance, response to the pride ban in 2016 took two forms. On the one hand, there LGBT discourses defined “dispersing” as a morally loaded term. This had to do with the ways in which the activists and the protestors engaged the street, the police, the state, and authoritarianism at large. On the other hand, LGBT discourses defined themselves and their activism as larger than a single street, city, and country. As such, they connected their own position and morality with a bigger struggle. “Lesbian and Bisexual Feminists”, an LGBT activist group who participated in “dispersing”, made a statement through their websites. In the statement, they expanded on what dispersing meant. [Yürüyebilecek miyiz, yürüyemeyecek miyiz? Valiliğin ‘güvenlik gerekçesi̇ yle’ yürüyüşü ve basın açıklamasını yasaklamsı nedeniyle, 14. Istanbul LGBTI+̇ Onu Yürüyüşü’nün nasıl geçeceğine dair sorular ve tahminler bu ikiliğin dışına çıkamıyordu. Üzgün, kızgın, endişeli… Her an farklı bir ruh halindeydik. Komitenin on binlerce kişi adına karar alamayacağı aşikar olsa da herkes yapacakları açıklamaya kulak kesmişti. Yürüyüşe çağırmak ya da “evlerinize dönün” demek dışında bir ihtimali tahayyül eden pek kimse yoktu ve tartışmalar çoğunlukla bu ikiliğe sıkışıyordu. Ve nihayet, yürüyüşten iki gün önce komitenin metni soyal medyaya düştü: “Dağılıyoruz!”.] 1. Will or will not we be able to walk? Guesses and questions about how Istanbul 14th 2. LGBTI+ Pride Parade will take place did not go outside of this binary due to Governor’s 3. ban of the walk as well as the press statement because of ‘security concerns’. Sad, angry, 4. worried… Every moment we were in a different mood. Although it was obvious that the 5. committee would not make a decision in the name of tens of thousands of people, 6. everyone was listening to the declaration they were going to make. No one guessed any 7. other option other than calling people to participate in the parade or saying “go home’ 8. and discussions mostly stuck between this binary. And finally, two days before the 9. parade, committee’s dropped its declaration to social media: “We are dispersing!”

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Text openly considers the binary and frames dispersing as a third option. The morality of dispersing is implied when we read this text alongside Pecheux’s framework of identification, counteridentification, and disidentification. The binary options stated in line 7, executing a pride parade regardless or calling it off completely, are the counteridentification and identification options that Pecheux explores in length when we talks about how can people react to oppression. As I explained in the introduction, both of those occupy a subject position, bad subject and good subject respectively. However, disidentification, in this case achieved through dispersing, does not occupy a subject position because it is not a position or an action against which the state can react. The question such activism raises is this: can disidentification occupy a moral ground in terms of how people engage with a particular moral geography? Different identification or subjecthood positions are functions of the state power—subjecthood relative to power structures does not exist by itself or in a vacuum. As such, being a good subject or identification is indeed a moral claim—it agrees with the laws, policies, and practices the power structure engages in. Dialectically, then, counteridentifying or occupying the position of a bad subject is also moral claim. It rejects the laws, policies, and practices of the power structure. However, counteridentification rejects the power structure in a way that is not only predictable, but also makes it easy for the power structure to justify its own morality as well as laws and policies by painting the counteridentifying position as “bad” subject relative to the “good”, with which it self identifies. Power structure displays itself as necessary in the face of “bad” subjects and reiterates its own “good”ness. Consequently, the morality of counteridentification works only to replicate and reinforce the existing power structure. Disidentification, on the other hand, engages with the power structure in a way that does not allow the power structure to justify its own “good” moral position—because the response itself does not have a subject position. As such, disidentification can and should be considered a kind of morality outside of the “good” and “bad” binary. When people and activists use this moral framework to engage with the power structures in a given space, to challenge the existing “good subject” or “bad subject” morality of a given space, then it indeed becomes a kind of moral geography. An opinion piece on KAOS GL website reiterates a similar point in a different way:

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[Demem o ki, 2016 onur yürüyüşü “kalabalık” kavramının tek bir anlamı olmadığını, dağılarak da kalabalıklaşabilindiğini, amaç tek olsa da, eyleṁ lerin kişisel olabileceğini göstermiştir. Insanların yalnızlaştırılmaya çalışılması, etkinlikler sırasında canından endişelenmek ve dağılmaya mecbur bırakılmak tartışmasız çok kötü olmakla beraber; her ara sokakta ikili üçlü küçük gruplar halinde insanların kesişmesi, herkesin yürüyüşte olması ve tüm caddeyi kapsayarak bunu yapması, karşılaşıldığında sarılıp selamlaşmak tartışmasız bir örgütlenme örneğidir.] 1. What I am saying is, 2016 Pride Parade showed that “multitude” does not have a single 2. meaning, it is possible to become a multitude while dispersing, and protests can be 3. individualized. While it was indisputably very bad that people were pushed to be alone, 4. worried about their life during events, and were forced to disperse; it was an indisputable 5. organizing effort that people glanced at each other on every by-street, everyone was 6. walking taking over the entire street, and hugging and greeting each other when we 7. crossed paths.

Redefining what multitude means is the crux of this disidentificatory activism. Both good subject and bad subject positions have a singular definition for being a multitude—the image of an organized large crowd walking down the street with chants and posters. That kind of multitude engages the space with a particular morality—a morality which the power structure knows how to efficiently engage. However, redefining the multitude, “becoming a multitude while dispersing” is the making of the disidentificatory morality. Stemming from that, the author pits two competing moralities against each other from lines 3 to 7. Statist moral geography is hallmarked by individualization, fear for life in public space, and lack of solidarity. The author claims that the dispersion, on the other hand, engaged with the space in a different way—though solidarity, familiarity, and visibility. This kind of being-in-the-world, this kind of existence in public space actively disrupts the moral underpinnings of any subjecthood position that relies on the binary between ‘good’ and bad’. Another kind of response to the ban revolved around associating with a morality that transcends spatial boundaries and goes against the moral

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underpinnings of ideologies such as nationalism and authoritarianism— such as homogeneity, hierarchy, and strict adherence to rules and traditions. A press statement that the police did not allow to be read in a public space is a good example of this transcendental moral geography: [Onur Yürüyüşlerimiz, bu ülkenin şahit olduğu büyük, çok sesli ve kitlesel eylemlerden biridir. Bizler yürüyüşlerimizde, dünya tarihinde bizim payımıza düşen bu karanlık zamana aşkımız ve arzumuzla kafa tutarız. El konulan emeğimizin hesabını sorar, kaderimizi başkalarının elinden alır, geleceğimizi tahayyül ederiz. Savaşa karşı barışı, korkuya karşı cesareti, zulme karşı tüm ezilenleri savunuruz; başka bir dünyanın, cinselliğin, bedenin, hayatın mümkün olduğunu gösteririz. Yürüyüşümüzü engelleyenler bize “toplumun hassasiyetleri”ni mazeret göstermiştir. Oysa gözetilen toplumun değil, iktidarın hassasiyetleridir. Toplum bizden başkası değildir. Yasaklanan, bizim, bu dünyanın onurlu varoluşunu, taleplerini, barışa, adalete ve eşitliğe dair özlemlerini duyurma çabasıdır. Yürüyüşümüzün yasaklanması, sesimizin duyurulmasını engellemek için yapılan başarısız bir çabadır. Başarısız, çünkü varoluşumuzun bize verdiği onur, gördüğümüz baskıyla büyüyor. Bizi incitmek için ettikleri hareketleri biz gururla sahipleniyoruz. Sahip olduğumuz sınırlı alanları dayanışmayla büyütüyoruz. Bizler yürüdüğümüz her sokakta, emek verdiğimiz her mesai gününde, her evde, yaşadığımız her aşkta ve her ̇ ̇ sevişmede bir devrim gerçekleştiriyoruz. Istanbul’da, Ankara’da, Izmir’de, Antep’te, Amed’de, Meksika’da, Bangladeş’de, Orlando’da öldürülüyor ve tekrar doğuyoruz. Biz hep varolacak, varoluşumuzu hep haykıracak ve varoluşumuzdan hep onu duyacağız.]

1. Our pride walks are one of the large, polyvocal mass actions that this country witnesses. 2. In our walks, we challenge these dark times that befell on us in the world history with our 3. love and desire. We hold accountable for our stolen labor, take our fate from others’ 4. hand, we determine our future. We defend peace against war, brevity against cowardice, 5. and all oppressed against cruelty; we show that another kind world, sexuality, body, life 6. is possible. Those who banned our walk, showed “people’s sensibilities” as an excuse. 7. But what is being protected is the government’s sensibilities. The people is no one else, 8. but us. What is banned is our effort to make us, our honorable existence, our longing for

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9. peace and equality heard. The banning of our walk is an unsuccessful attempt to hinder 10. our voices from being heard. It is unsuccessful because the honor that our existence gives 11. us grows with the oppression we experience. We proudly own the insults they use to hurt 12. us. We expand the limited spaces we own with solidarity. We make a revolution in every 13. street we walk, every day we labor, in every house, in every love we live, in every love 14. we make. In Istanbul, Ankara, Izmir, Antep, Amed, Mexico, Bangladesh, Orlando, we 15. are killed and reborn. We will always exist, we will always yell out our existence, and we 16. will always be proud of our existence.

On lines 1 through 6, The text establishes very clear sense of morality as it continuously associates the first person plural pronoun that indexes the LGBT community at large with qualities such as “peace”, “love”, “desire”, justice for labor, self-determination, standing up against oppressors. This is the first step the text takes against the hetreonormative organization of the nation-state. Argument gets ossified on lines 12 through 15. “Spaces” on line 12, since associated with ownership, refers to geographies where the queer morality is not contested—such as gay bars, cruising spots, houses, and activist organizations. The claim that these spaces are expanded with solidarity is another step the text takes that goes against the heteronormative organization of the nation-state. This becomes apparent not only in lines 12 and 13, where every aspect of existence is marked as a ‘revolution’—and the implied against here is the nation-state since the state power is the source of the ban and that is the focus of the protest— but also when the text shows solidarity with other LGBT individuals and communities across nation-state borders on line 14. As such, the struggle of LGBT individuals and the way in which they define themselves and their morality becomes larger than a loyalty to a nation-state. Rather, the morality they expand on lines 1 through 6 becomes the moral basis of solidarity that enables these activists and groups to associate with people outside of the boundaries of a nation-state.

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Conclusion Blog posts reflect the discursive mechanisms by which LGBT identified individuals contest and queer the morality of public space through associating universal personal deictic markers with public space, both in critiquing the neoliberal and heteronormative exclusivity of the space and also in constructing the inclusivity. Queer contestations of moral geography revolve around appeals to dismantling of limitations imposed by moralities that rely on exclusivity. These simultaneous acts are also the ways in which LGBT individuals claim agency. Consequently, concurrent deconstruction and construction is the crux of queer talkback on the axis of spatiality. Discursive agency of queer talkback constructs dissent as a heterotopic being in the world and accomplishes this by associations and counter-­ associations. While counter-associations rely on rejecting and opposing homogeneity, heteronormativity, capitalist logics of privacy and reproduction, and questioning the institutionalized oppression as well as regulation, associations are characterized by celebrating differences, creating and sustaining a sense of community and culture of non-fixed identities.33 Heterotopia, as defined in this paper, attempts to capture these associations and counter-associations as far as queer space is concerned. Moreover, engaging the moralities of nation-state, based on heterosexism, takes place through disidentification—to an extent that perhaps we can claim disidentification as a moral geographical framework, a way in which one can ‘queer’ a space. Queering also takes place through rejecting the boundaries of the nation-state and seeking moral frameworks that place a sense of solidary across borders, ethnicities, peoples—in other words, the very lines that power structures draw to impose heteronormative morality to a particular political space. Just as queering and disidentification rejects the boundaries of the nation state, it rejects the binary that forms as a result of such boundaries. One of the chief functions of boundaries for nations is to establish who is inside the borders and who is outside the borders in order to give meaning to what it means to be in versus what it means to be out. In a way, the political boundaries get transferred into psychological boundaries. Just as the nationalist rhetoric easily others other nations who are outside of political boundaries on the map, it also easily rejects those who do not align with its morality—constructing a psychological border. This way, those who do not agree with the nationalist morality are deemed as others, and by extension, not worthy of having the privilege of being good citizens or subjects.

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Examining these queer discourses questions the nature of dissenting for all involved. Can it be considered dissent when the discourses of those who resist fall short and rely on sexist, heterosexist, and fascist templates? Is it still dissent when the dissent itself replicates the moralities of ideologies on which existing power structures are built? Is disidentification, in other words strategies and tactics to side-step subject position necessary to have any kind of impact? Can resistance only exist when it is universally heterotopic: inviting everyone possible to exist within that particular space without any restrictions or hierarchy? Queer discourses examined above seem to produce series of answers to these questions. In examined texts, queer‘ing’ dissent means to rid its discourses of exclusive residues and limiting ideological and moral frameworks in favor of heterotopic moral geography and disidentificatory approaches to talkback and standing up against the state power. Statist constructions of spatiality revolves around imposing limits. These limits can take different forms, such as physical barriers, psychological boundaries, or political borders. The purpose of the state is quite straightforward: to consolidate power within these limits by controlling not only what happens inside these limits but also what happens at the edges of these limits—at the barriers, boundaries, and borders. In this sense, the existence of the state directly relates to the amount of power and control the state can exert within these limits since that is the political structure by which the state constructed its legitimacy. Indeed, if a given state did not base its legitimacy on imposing control over limitations, then it would not have the need to tighten its control around those limitations. In this sense, a state’s obsession with limits is a self-imposed dilemma. While it gives the state a mechanism by which it can consolidate more power, it also provides a target for activism and critique. If, hypothetically speaking, a country is building a wall on its borders to limit the amount of people crossing it, that wall now becomes a target whereby the state’s legitimacy can be questioned since the state itself communicated by the act of building a wall that such a barrier is a component of its legitimacy. This is especially true of totalitarian states such as Turkey. By defining its legitimacy through the amount of control it has over these limits and how well it can control what happens in these limits, any critique regarding these limits becomes an existential threat since it ends up questioning the very basis of state’s legitimacy. Consequently, how a critique positions itself relative to these limits becomes extremely important—especially if the critique wants be long lived and sustainable.

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The sustainability of such critiques of legitimacy is important when these critiques come from groups who are marginalized and who are especially vulnerable to violence and erasure, such as LGBT organizations or individuals. Since there are deliberate attempts to erase LGBT presence and voices in Turkey both by conservative and liberal discourses, walking a line between offering a critique and surviving becomes an important one to walk. This is where talkback comes into the picture. Talkback can walk that line due its disidentificatory nature—it can look like obedience but it is, in fact, subversion. We see this nature of talkback as queer discourses engage heteronormative spatiality and moral geography of such spatiality. Queer talkback does not revolve around destroying these limits and boundaries. It does not advocate for getting rid of borders—physical or psychological. As the text shows, queer discourses are not concerned with that perspective, they do not care to be part of such debates. What matters to queer discourses, what makes them disidentificatory and the reason I classify them as talkback is because without concerning itself with the legitimacy of borders, it merely advocates for heterotopia within these limits. This, of course, ultimately is a strong critique of neoliberal and heteronormative moral geography. But because at a first glance it does not argue against these limits, it can survive, persist, and get its point across. Here agency lies within this reimagination of what a space means, instead of engaging where that space beings or ends. Enabling various and contradicting identities to exist in a given space, challenges the moral geography of that space that is based on heteronormativity and neoliberalism. As such, queer talkback is subverting such moral geographies while seemingly not overtly challenging their existence.

Notes 1. Hill, The Voices of Don Gabriel. 2. Modan, Turf Wars. 3. Butler, Excitable Speech. 4. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place, 3. 5. Yildiz, Cruising Politics. 6. Berlant and Warner, What does Queer Theory Teach us About X?, 343–349. 7. Berlant and Warner, What does Queer Theory Teach us About X?, 344. 8. Blasius, Sexual identities, queer politics, 103. 9. Buckland, Impossible Dance, 156.

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10. Berlant and Warner, Sex in Public, 562. 11. Foucault, Of other spaces, heterotopias, 46–49. 12. Gandy, Queer ecology, 733. 13. Buckland, Impossible Dance, 155. 14. Buckland, Impossible Dance, 153. 15. Sender, Queens for a Day. 16. Everywhere Taksim, July 6 2013 Forum Notes and Decisions. 17. Peterson, Sexing political identities. 18. Leap, Homophobia as moral geography. 19. Birdal, Queering Conservative Democracy. 20. Casey, Belonging; Jeyasingham, Building heteronormativity; Vanska, New kids on the mall. 21. Foucault, Of other spaces, heterotopias, 46–49. 22. Assche et al, Formal/informal dialectics; Wood, Desiring docklands. 23. Assche et al, Power and contingency in planning, 2386. 24. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism. 25. Gunder, Planning as the ideology of (neoliberal) space; Kamel, The actualization of neoliberal space and the loss of housing affordability in Santa Monice, California; Newman, Commons? Vigilant Citizenship and Neoliberal Space in Multiethnic Paris; Venkatesh, Neoliberal spaces. 26. Farrell et  al, Interrupting Heteronormativity; Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality. 27. Helmer, Gay and lesbian literature disrupting the heteronormative space of the high school English classroom; Van den Berg, The Closet. 28. Yildiz, Cruising Politics. 29. Berlant and Warner, Sex in Public. 30. Jeppesen, Queer anarchist autonomous zones and publics. 31. Krause, Cruising Eisenman’s Holocaust Memorial. 32. Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place. 33. Berlant and Warner, What does Queer Theory Teach us About X?; Buckland, Impossible Dance; Warner, Fear of a Queer Planet.

CHAPTER 5

Queer(ing) the Affective

When queer discourses talkback to either statist or otherwise normative hegemonic discourses, they do more than merely to challenge assumptions, ideologies, and preconceived notions contained within and communicated through these discourses. They also engage the affective economies these hegemonic discourses engraved in by disrupting structures of feeling they rely on for their continued existence. In previous chapters, the disruptive discourses that formed queer talkback worked on the axes of time and space. However, an analysis that does not take the affective field through which these axes run through is lacking a vital dimension of analysis. It is important to note, however, affect theory has a strand that takes it to be a pre-social and pre-cultural force beyond the reach of discursive analysis. In this chapter, I will start by distinguishing the theoretical framework I use from that particular strand of affect theory. Then I will expand on finding the affective in discourse, followed by touching on hegemonic structures of feeling against which queer discourses talkback. Finally, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which queer discourses engage these hegemonic structures of feeling and attempt to establish competing ones. Queer talkback is a critical act—which means it strives to amend an existing imbalance in distribution of power and authority on the lines of politics of desire. As I have explained in the previous chapters, the social critique that comes with the act of talkback simultaneously engages in utopic thinking. The critique of what should not be stems from what © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7_5

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should be instead. In this sense, queer talkback, while it challenges heteronormative and neoliberal constructions of space, spurs from feelings such as hope and resilience—in this sense, time and space cannot be separate from affect. Heather Love, in Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History contemplates about this relationship between the present and the future. “A central paradox of any transformative criticism”, she writes “is that its dreams for the future are founded on a history of suffering, stigma, and violence. Oppositional criticism opposes not only existing structures of power but also the very history that gives it meaning. Insofar as the losses of the past motivate us and give meaning to our current experience, we are bound to memorialize them (“We will never forget”). But we are equally bound to overcome the past, to escape its legacy (“We will never go back”).”1 The aim of fantasizing about the future, therefore, is to constitute a sense of self, or a sense of being-in-the-world that stems from the now, which is the constant past, but does not get stuck with the spatial, temporal, and affectual structures of the now or of the past. As Love suggests in the same passage, “[f]or groups constituted by historical injury, the challenge is to engage with the past without being destroyed by it. Sometimes it seems it would be better to move on—to let, as Marx wrote, the dead bury the dead. But it is the damaging aspects of the past that tend to stay with us, and the desire to forget may itself be a symptom of haunting. The dead can bury the dead all day long and still not be done.”2 Then the question becomes how do we feel about a queer future today? This question underlies the affective drive of queer talkback. This question, however, loses any meaning in the face of Tomkinsian or Deluzian understandings of affect—two main paradigms of affect theory that offers varying explanations of action but converge on the premise of what affect means. Before getting to Tomkins or Deluze, however, let us clarify what affect means. Clare Hemmings writes, “[a]ffect broadly refers to states of being, rather than to their manifestation or interpretation as emotions.”3 These states of being are “amorphous, outside conscious awareness, nondirectional, undefined, full of possibility. In this framing, affect is distinct from emotion, which is understood as the product of affect being marshaled into personal expression of feeling, as shaped by social conventions.”4 Being distinct from emotions or feelings, somehow preceding them5 further suggests that “affects must be viewed as independent of, and in an important sense prior to, ideology—that is, prior to intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs—because they are

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nonsignifying, autonomic processes that take place below the threshold of conscious awareness and meaning.”6 Consequently, according to Massumi, “affect is important to the extent that it is autonomous and outside social signification.”7 There are, however, two distinct ways to approach these pre-cognitive, and pre-social acts of the body: Silvan Tomkins’s psychobiology of differential affects (1962) [this is the school of thought Sedgwick supports with her book Touching, Feeling] and Gilles Deleuze’s Spinozist ethology of bodily capacities (1988a). With Tomkins, affect follows a quasi-Darwinian “innatist” bent toward matters of evolutionary hardwiring. But these wires are by no means fully insulated nor do they terminate with the brain or flesh; instead they spark and fray just enough to transduce those influences borne along by the ambient irradiation of social relations. Meanwhile, Deleuze’s Spinozan route locates affect in the midst of things and relations (in immanence) and, then, in the complex assemblages that come to compose bodies and worlds simultaneously.8

As Ruth Leys points out, however, both these schools of thought end up converging on the basic premise of the affect theory; the pre-cognitive and virtually unintentional nature of action. What the new affect theorists and the neuroscientists share is a commitment to the idea that there is a gap between the subject’s affects and its cognition or appraisal of the affective situation or object, such that cognition or thinking comes “too late” for reasons, beliefs, intentions, and meanings to play the role in action and behavior usually accorded to them. The result is that action and behavior are held to be determined by affective dispositions that are independent of consciousness and the mind’s control.9

Both of these paradigms emphasize individual actions as outside of the realm of the social. The descriptive direction of affect theory, consequently, becomes an attempt to get away with establishing an “objective” perspective on human behavior, at least as much as an attempt to understand it. How can anyone claim a subjectivity, after all, if human behavior pre-­ social, pre-culture, pre-ideology, pretty much pre-anything. However, “feelings are both created and transmitted publically and socially”10 and the turn towards analyzing individual actions with frame of pre-social completely avoids the question of agency. For this reason, I turn to Cvetkovich: “I tend to use affect in a generic sense, rather than in the

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more specific Deleuzian sense, as a category that encompasses affect, emotion, and feeling, and that includes impulses, desires, and feelings that get historically constructed in a range of ways.”11 As Cvetkovich implies, however, if reactions indeed occur below the cognitive threshold, that does not mean they are not learned. This brings back the question of agency as well as subjecthood, and disidentification as reaction. Similarly, to talk about affect, I combine the works of Williams and Ahmed. I interpret affect not only as emotions, but also as the manifestations of social, institutional, and cultural power structures that influence how individuals feel and assign value. For example, let us introduce Sara Ahmed’s example of a happy family: Take for instance the happy family. The family would be happy not because it causes happiness, and not even because it affects us in a good way, but because we share an orientation toward the family as being good, as being what promises happiness in return for loyalty. Such an orientation shapes what we do; you have to “make” and “keep” the family, which directs how you spend your time, energy, and resources.12

Ahmed suggests that happiness, like any affect, sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.13 As such, Ahmed explores this orientation between the affect of happiness and the object of family. However, let us ask why that orientation exists in the first place. Raymond Williams’ “structures of feeling” paradigm might seem too old to be a part of any discussion on affect theory today, however he provides the link between the personal and the social. Williams writes: We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity. We are then defining these elements as a structure: as a set, with specific internal relations, at once interlocking and in tension. Yet we are also defining a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis (thought rarely otherwise) has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies. These are often more recognizable at a later stage, when they have been (as often happens) formalized, classified, and in many cases built into institutions and formations.14

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Individuals do not feel, or exist for that matter, in a vacuum. Without a doubt, examining the affective orientations towards objects individuals have, as well as the process of being oriented, is important. However, we would miss an important part of the puzzle if we did not consider the social forces that form the orientations of certain feelings towards certain objects in the first place. Take, for instance, the feelings of disgust, fear, and hate that the most of the public has towards LGBTQ individuals in Turkey, and in much of the world. Can these feelings really be explained by any pre-social neurological wiring? Rather should we give credence to Jackson and Meiners’ explanation: Feelings of disgust and fear, instrumental to privatization and produced through the specter of the criminal (rapist, terrorist), continue to be used to remap public spaces… [A]n increased punitive focus on sex offenders often coincides with local and national legislative activity that attacks gay and lesbian rights, antiabortion activism, and state restrictions on abortion, as well as other backlashes to feminism and gender and sexual equity initiatives. Those do not fit into patriarchal ideals of sexual morality suffer from the evocation of public disgust towards out-of-control or monstrous sexualities.15

At this point, after conceptualizing affect in the social, capacity to feel as a part of social forces—not separate from it—the question about affect makes more sense: how do we feel about a queer future today? Here, we can go back to Rodriguez’s article Queer Sociality and Other Sexual Fantasies. In her article she writes “[n]either Edelman’s nor Muñoz’s position even attempts to imagine sexual possibilities for female of color subjects, a subject position that remains vacated of erotic impulses, or nonnormatively-abled bodies of all genders that are likewise imagined as always already asexual or simply undesirable.”16 By way of critiquing Muñoz, for a lack of an attempt to imagine those who are not considered worthy of desire by the society, Rodriguez sketches a direction for queer talkback—it is a time and place where affective drives are not restricted by cultural forces, by standards of beauty, and by commodity relations. To desire in a queer space and time would aim for authenticity, just as self-­ expression that deviates from heteronormative sexual and gender norms desires to find that kind of authenticity. The structures of feeling, therefore, either would be unrestricted or would not exist. Consequently, queer

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talkback takes individuals outside of structures of feeling that aim to impose subject positions via affect—which, as a part of the queer talkback, gives queers agency to act on impulses and perform disidentificatory acts.

Affect and Discourse Analyzing affect in discourse might sound like an oxymoron to those who are orthodox followers of affect theory led by Deleuze, Massumi, and Tomkins. How can an intrinsic experience that is pre-social, pre-cultural, and pre-verbal, which almost exists in an unreachable realm like Lacanian Real, be a part of semiotic structure—let alone analyzed? Affect, such scholars claim, precedes language or any semiotic structure. Due to the popularity of the affectual turn led by Deleuze, Massumi, and Tomkins, scholars who attempted to merge affect theory with discourse analysis either do not engage in discourse analysis,17 focus on non-verbal cues to analyze the affect in accompanying discourse,18 or do not take power into consideration.19 That is, perhaps, one of the biggest pitfalls of that particular strand of affect theory—the way in which social power is abused, exerted, or otherwise mobilized to contribute to inequality lacks a convincing explanation. However, once we take affect out of the realm of the impossible and interpret it as a function of power, we can locate it in text or in any meaning structure. Because studies at the intersection of power, discourse, and affect do not explain how to locate affect in discourse and to understand its relationship with power, I will briefly explain the way I conducted the analysis and interpretation here. To locate affect in text, we need to look for mental process clauses— those that are concerned with what takes place at the level of consciousness instead of, say, what takes place materially. In such clauses, the agent, which Halliday calls “the senser”, feels or thinks a phenomenon. Within different types of ‘sensing’, whatever can be interpreted as “emotive phenomenon” is the location of affect in discourse.20 Just like any other aspect of critical discourse analysis, these emotive phenomena do not exist within a clause in a vacuum—they exist as a function of social, cultural, and ideological structures; in short, power. The orientation of the senser towards the emotive phenomenon is always related to the orientation of the senser to the power structure in which that particular emotive phenomenon exists. As such, any emotive phenomenon is able to exist because the social or cultural structure enables it to exist the way it does. In other words,

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existing power structures poke and prod individuals to feel certain things under certain circumstances—engineer what people feel, in a manner of speaking—in order to maintain its position.

Hegemonic Sensibilities The relationship between power structures and personal feelings is the crux where William’s structures of feeling and Ahmed’s affective economies merge. This also enables us to analyze emotions in texts as functions of ideologies and social or cultural forces. Raymond Williams defines “structures of feeling” as the ways in which “affective elements of consciousness and relationships”21 are functions of institutions and formations. As such, Williams introduces a way to study how feelings are produced, perpetuated, and maintained—not due to an intrinsic and purely psychological dynamic out of the reach of social analysis, but as a result of social forces, cultural dynamics, ideology and so on. Williams was interested in visual and literary art and the ways in which similar affects would show up in various media in a given age or era. However, we can take his idea a step further and argue that power structures actively engineer how people feel or should feel under specific circumstances to benefit the continuity of that power structure. Sara Ahmed clarifies this point even further. She introduces the term “affective economies.” With this term, she suggests that emotions are not merely possessions internal to individuals; rather “emotions circulate and are distributed across a social as well as a psychic field.”22 According to Ahmed, emotions gain value as it moves between signs and individuals who give meaning to those signs, with what she calls “sticky associations”.23 While Ahmed was interested in how fear influences a society and a society’s reaction to events, we can think how these sticky associations take shape across symbols of the state and its loyal subjects. Take, for instance, pride, honor, or love, any emotion that has a positive “sticky association” with state’s symbols such as the flag or constitution or national anthem or uniform. The more a feeling gets associated with these symbols, in other words, the more it is shared across symbols as well as across individuals who associate these feelings with these symbols, louder, or perhaps ‘stickier’, this particular affect becomes. This, in turn, results in that particular affect ‘sticking’ to anyone who is newly introduced to that symbol in a given context, such as a newborn baby—or as Ahmed puts it: “the individual subject comes into being through its very alignment with the

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collective. It is the very failure of affect to be located in a subject or object that allows it to generate the surfaces of collective bodies.” In other words, these sticky associations manifest the collective affective will, as it were, and circulate them across bodies. Williams and Ahmed tell similar stories about affect from different points. Williams suggests that affect is a function of institutionalization and implies that people who associate with those institutions also harbor the affects those institutions set as a structure. Ahmed claims that affects move around people and symbols and gain more prominence—as well as stickiness—with that movement. Both authors argue against affect being a purely psychological phenomenon that is outside of the reach of language or analysis, rather they argue that affect is more external than internal— rather the internality of affect is quite irrelevant to social analysis. Taking Williams and Ahmed together, I argue that institutions use symbols that are related to power—that is, to themselves—in a given context to set up affective structures as a reward/punishment system for the purpose of self-preservation, sustenance, and growth by recruiting more subjects. Not only a subject is born into a semantic system of indexification that highlights these symbols to that individual, but also, these indexed symbols as signifier for institutional power that aim to communicate, teach, or in some cases indoctrinate certain affects to the subject. The work of recruitment is complete through this kind of affective power exertion. While humans are not born with the knowledge that they should harbor these feelings towards particular symbols, they are oriented towards feeling these kinds of emotions to particular symbols from birth. Unless a child grows in a rather rare circumstance where members of the household do not care or possess this orientation, a child is indexed to things like the flag, soldiers, police, lives through and participates in celebrations that have a special meaning for a particular country. A child learns the national anthem and other texts, associates certain non-verbal cues—such as the change in tone of voice or posture—with certain symbols, and perhaps most importantly learns that the consequence of not being in line with these feelings are a set of other feelings such as shame, humiliation, embarrassment, or animosity. Not just in family, but also among friends and school same set of associations between feelings and symbols are reinforced. Althusser talks about this in terms of Ideological State Apparatuses,24 as structures that recruit and indoctrinate individuals into being the subjects of the state. While

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such top-down understanding of power is attractive, it does not account for other instances of power exertion, especially when those who oppose the state exert statist power or the ways in which people resist being made into subjects. However, we can think of state apparatuses as realizations or manifestations of various affects and their functions within a structure or a network of power and oppression. These institutions, through discursive means, communicate, inject, and enforce affects such as shame, happiness, guilt, acceptance, and anger, and so on—always relative, more accurately always in tune with affective demands of the existing power structure. In this sense, they are ideological affective apparatuses, structures that attempt to recruit individuals in exerting the affective dynamics they learn from these institutions. As such, even if an individual convinces themselves that they are against the state, they can still be exerting the same affective power by participating in the same affective economy. Consequently, we see that people can be against these institutions but still operate within the same affective field and can indeed exert the same affective power, if they are subjects of the structures of feeling. This is the case with anti-state normative discourses, where protestors who believe they are disrupting the state’s power, and in all fairness the state agrees with them. However, all the while they are reinforcing the same structures of feeling through their unconscious adherence to an affective economy that marginalizes LGBT voices and concerns. Consequently, the way in which people feel under certain circumstances, in certain spaces, and times, are a matter of a structure. Institutions that can exert affective power to public life, through discursive constructions of institutions such as the nation or family, engineer how people should feel towards the symbols of that institution. Besides, it is in the interest of the institution to do so—if the institution is not successful in recruiting subjects for its ideology, then it perceives that it is under existential threat. Through maintaining a certain structure of feeling, therefore, these institutions maintain their own existence. Therefore, it makes sense to talk about affect as a social or a cultural force as a function of power. This does not leave affect to be an all-­ encompassing structure that does not leave any breathing room, nor does it reduce this kind of widespread affect to zeitgeist. Rather, this perspective acknowledges that affect, as a function of power, is a social and a cultural force that shapes individual thought, discourse, and behavior. Affect is a collective issue—not an individually psychological phenomenon and always shaped by structures of power. This still leaves room to resist its

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force—as this chapter will show—through different connections, different ways of being-in-the-world, and different ways of relating to the power structures.

Queering the Affective Queering the affective, under these circumstances, means engaging bodily and discursively with the existing structures of feeling in a disidentificatory manner, that disrupts the uninterrupted flow of affective economies in the way they do. Indeed, when queer discourses talk back against statist or anti-statist normative discourses, they do interrupt existing structures of feeling. Nevertheless, there are particular cases where this interruption and disruption is more obvious. For instance, a particular phrase that LGBT activists used during the first days of Gezi Park protests, which then took a life of its own, sheds more light into how queer discourses disrupt the affective binary on which the institutions rely on to maintain established structures of feeling that sustains their power and status. This particular phrase is “ayol”, which, unfortunately, does not have any translation or transliteration to English. However, according to the Turkish dictionary of the Turkish Language Institution (Turk Dil Kurumu, TDK), the official authority in Turkey on the Turkish language, “ayol” is “an addressing/hailing phrase used generally by women”. The lack of definition of or general attention to this particular phrase is not surprising. Ayol does not have an actual meaning, like a noun—it is merely a hailing phrase such as ‘hey’ or ‘yo’. As such, an academic paper or research that directly examines this word or its role in any social context is nonexistent. Two academic publications examine gender roles in Turkish phrases and politeness in Turkish merely touch on “ayol” in passing and one conference paper about Turkish cinema mentions it in a mere sentence. Hayyasi notes, talking about gender differences in Turkish, that “ayol” is a female expression and confirms TDK’s definition.25 In his analysis of politeness in Turkish, Zeyrek classifies “ayol” as an interjection that women use almost exclusively when talking with other women to establish solidarity in order to “minimize the possibility of conflict and consolidate the relationship”.26 A third study that examines the “construction of queer characters in new Turkish cinema” suggests that “ayol” was used as a marker to stereotype a gay character.27 While this meek literature on “ayol” does not look like a lot to build on to understand how this phrase upsets heteronormative structures of

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feeling, it provides a substantial point of inception. To better understand how “ayol” functions, I have took all the tweets that included the word “ayol” that were tweeted between May 25 2013, a few days before the Gezi Park Protests began, and September 25 2013, well after the protests died down in mid to late August. Out of 70 pages of tweets that included the word “ayol”, only 57 of them related to resisting or protesting in Gezi Park. While not all of them were written by LGBT individuals or activists, their use shows how particular affects can ‘stick’ to certain phrases and work to disrupt established patterns. If we were to peak more into the established pattern, we see that there are rather strong feelings about who should or should not use “ayol”. Not only the TDK as well as previous academic studies mark “ayol” as a feminine speech marker, but also in the data corpus I have used alone, there were frequent tweets—by men and women alike—claiming only women can and should use “ayol”, if a man is using “ayol” that means either he is not a man or that he enjoys receiving anal sex, and instead of “ayol” man should use “amk”—an abbreviation of a curse phrase (an accurate transliteration would be “fuck your/the pussy”), a sexist phrase which centers vagina as the object of masculine violence, anger, and expression in general. Like other misogynist discourse, the construction and existence of hegemonic masculinity relies on the erasure of the feminine, both within and without, through violence. In short, “ayol” carries an affect—a socially and culturally constructed affect that falls on gender lines. As the data shows below, “ayol” carries other affects as well—such as lightheartedness and ironic ignorance—that is culturally associated with femininity. Using “ayol” strategically, activists and protestors interject into the existing structures of feeling, upsetting their regular operation, consequences, and the assumptions it relies on for its function. Consequently, “ayol” is part of disidentificatory queer discourses. However, rather than operating as a signifier of space or time, it is “emotive”; it signifies layers of affect on two levels. On the one hand, if the “senser”, in Halliday’s words, is also disruptive of existing structures of feeling, it serves as a signifier of solidarity and a marker of familiarity within the disruptive function. On the other hand, if the “senser” identifies with the existing structures of feeling, “ayol” becomes a marker of disruption. This chapter focuses on the primary scenario—the use of “ayol” as a marker of solidarity and familiarity within queer discourse. Linguistically, there are couple of points about how “ayol” works— important for better understanding its disidentificatory function. Paying

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attention to how “ayol” carries affect means that “ayol”, at least in this context, is not just an interjection, but also it is an emotive. In my corpus, “ayol” is either the first word in a sentence or the last. There is not a single instance where “ayol” does not occupy one or the other position. There is a tendency, although there are rare exceptions, that when “ayol” is the last word of a sentence, it is usually what I call an ironic ignorance—a way in which subjects claim ignorance about a particular rule or norm or law in order to mockingly transgress it. Through this irony, “ayol” serves to create solidarity among people who share the same sentiment. If it is the first word of the sentence, it works as a disclaimer that announces whatever comes after “ayol” is semantically meant for the ‘in-group’—although syntactically it might address the ‘out-group’—and it creates solidarity through this discursive mechanism. To deconstruct the way in which “ayol” serves as a marker for solidarity, mocking, disclaimer, and emotion, I will trace how it was used within the protests and how that use was echoed in social media. “Ayol” first appeared in the first week of Gezi Park Protests as a large sign held by two LGBT activists. The sign said “Yasak Ne Ayol?”, which translates into “what [is a] ban ayol?” This slogan, in later years, became one of the most famous slogan during banned pride parades and in other protests. However, the day the sign was held at Gezi Park, June 5th, it drew the attention of only a few users on twitter. Below are some examples: 1

yasak Ban

ne what

ayol Ayol

2

en matrak pankart The funniest slogan

yasak Ban

ne what

ayol Ayol

3

gezi sloganı şahane Gezi chant [is] great

yasak Ban

ne what

ayol ayol

4

gezi parkı direnişçilerinin sloganı yasak ne gezi park protestors’ chant [is] ban what

tebrikler lgbt Congrats lgbt (eşcinsellerin) (homosexual’s)

ayol Ayol

The obvious issue here is that activists know what a ban is or that protesting is banned. This, however, is how ironic ignorance works. By pretending not knowing about the ban using “ayol” as an emotive marker mocks the ban as well as the heterosexism and hegemonic masculinity of the state by associating that irony with femininity. The desired affect here

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is similar to a stereotypical woman who wanders into a park. When confronted by a male authority figure that there is a ban to be in that park, she says ‘what [is a] ban ayol?’ in a lighthearted way, as if the ban sounds too serious of an issue for her. However with that ignorance not only she can transgress the ban, but also she can walk away from that interaction with that authority figure without any damage to her. Male authority figure will charge her with ignorance or stupidity for not knowing the ban or for not knowing what to do in that encounter but that will be the entire cost of her transgression. In addition, the real ignorance in that scenario belongs to the authority figure for not realizing ‘ayol’ is a strategic tool. Being in this position ironically invokes the same scenario by playing into the same stereotypes—however with conscious strategy to disrupt the structures that allow ‘male authority’ to exist in the first place and to undermine the authority itself. As such, the slogan or the chant also becomes a rallying call to create solidarity among people who feel the same way about engaging the authority figures. This ironic ignorance only happens when “ayol” is the last word of the sentence. There are other similar examples that happened during gezi park protests—the most famous being “diren ayol” (resist ayol) and “gri ne ayol” (what is gray ayol). While those two phrases went viral, there are host of similar phrases that were used and did not go viral, such as “savas ne ayol” (what is war ayol); “her yer bizim ayol” (everywhere is ours ayol); “resmen darbe ayol” (its officially a coup ayol); “orantili siddet ne ayol” (what is proportionate violence ayol). “What is grey ayol”, for example, was in response to municipality’s decision to counter activists’ painting of stairs in central Istanbul to the colors of the rainbow and paint the stairs back to grey. After municipality painted the rainbow-colored stairs to grey, “what is gray ayol” became viral as a hashtag. Not only it linguistically functioned identically to “what is a ban ayol” but also it became a rallying call for people to grab their own painting supplies and paint random stairs in Istanbul to the colors of the rainbow. The slogan worked with projecting even a more absurd version of ironic ignorance—since the theme of the sentence is not a ban but the color grey—and by becoming a call of unity and solidarity. Queer discourses do not interrupt only statist discourses. Through disidentificatory rhetoric, they also deconstruct the anti-state normative discourses. Why “resist ayol” falls into this category and the point of ironic ignorance might be elusive at first. “Resist ayol” is a slogan that is either chanted or shared on social media during the resistance or the protests. As

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such, those who are resisting already know that they are resisting or that they are part of the resistance or protest efforts on social media. Consequently, reminding those who are already resisting to resist cannot be the function of “Resist Ayol”. The chant first strikes as a call for solidarity and unity among those who are protesting—an attempt to lift the spirits and to push people to protest more. However, that is not the affect of “Ayol”, which undermines such serious attitude of resisting or protesting to begin with. In addition being a call for solidarity, ironic ignorance works to undermine the seriousness of the resistance. As with other cases when “ayol” affectually works against the affect of the imperative which it follows, “resist ayol” specifically targets the protestors themselves and challenges the exclusive and hegemonic masculine space in which the protests exists through disidentification with the resistance. In other words, the affectual work of “ayol” undermines through disidentifying with the phrase that comes before it. This disidentification can be against the state as it was the case in “what is a ban ayol” or “what is gray ayol” or it can be against protestors, as it was the case in “resist ayol”. In either case, the affectual work “ayol” brings to space is to open a gap between itself and whatever comes before—a gap through which disidentification can squeeze through and undermine any reflex of homogeneity that the previous phrase might imply. This phrase, the meaning it carried and the way in which it subverted the normative structures of meaning was so important and meaningful that some LGBT activists made a documentary with the title #DIRENAYOL, meaning “resist ayol”. This documentary, made by Rüzgâr Buşki, follows trans activist Şevval Kılıç for 2013 Pride as it becomes juxtaposed with the Gezi Park protests. While the documentary has some general protest footage, what makes it especially important is that it provides the visual queer perspective on the events that otherwise we do not have. In being that voice and in bringing that perspective, the documentary is effectively an artifact of disidentificatory talkback that engages the normative structures of feelings. When “ayol” is the first word in a sentence, it is always a marker of solidarity through mocking the discursive other. Below are all the tweets that use “ayol” as the first word within the aforementioned corpus: 1

ayol ayol

tam roket atılırken tut mobese sen ağaçları çek Just as rockets are thrown, mobese (CCTV) you go and record the trees

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2 3 4 5 6

ayol ayol ayol ayol ayol ayol ayol ayol ayol ayol

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öksürsek polis yığıp her tarfı kapatıyorsunuz If we cough you dump the police and close everywhere faşistler kuduruyordur :/ Fascists must be going mad :/ insanların gözlerini plastik mermilerle düşürdüler They gouged out people’s eyes with plastic bullets malesef çok geç, dünya basını gösteriyor herseyi Unfortunately it is too late, world press is showing everything sordun mu, neden öyle yaratmış o zaman? Did you ask why did [Allah] create [them] that way?

In these sentences, “ayol” and its affectual function is always directed to a personal deictic marker in the same sentence. In examples 2, 3, 5, and 6, these personal deictic markers are collocated right next to “ayol”, while in examples 1 and 5, they are in the second part of the sentence. Either case, this relationship is important because in all of the examples personal markers are addressed to someone who will not likely to read this tweet. In other words, while the personal marker is addressed to the out-group, they are actually meant to be read by the in-group—and “ayol” makes that work complete by doubling down on the affect of solidarity through mocking the out-group and through with this kind of semantic play. As such, the first word “ayol” serves as a disclaimer: what will follow will be addressed to the out-group but it is meant to be read by the in-group since it mocks the perspective of the out-group anyway and strives for solidifying an in-group solidarity through a cathartic use of sarcasm where people who share the same perspective towards the outgroup can find themselves in this process of mocking the other.

Conclusion The purpose of this chapter was twofold. First, it was to converge Williams and Ahmed’s understandings of affect against Deleuze, Massumi, and Tomkinsian model to argue that affect is a social issue that is tied to power, institutions, and symbols and certainly not beyond the scope of linguistic analysis. Second, it was to show how people, more specifically LGBT activists, can resist these structures of feeling and affective economies by disidentifying with these symbols and their discursive signifiers by ‘sticking’ competing feelings to these signifiers.

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The second point is the crux of queer talkback in the affective field. During Gezi Park Protests, one of the discursive signifiers for the state was the word “ban” (yasak), which referred to the ban of physically being in Gezi Park. What to do with a ban? How do we orient ourselves towards the ban? This is where affect does its oppressive work. Structures of feeling tells a recruited individual that tangent signifiers, which share the same affective structure with the state such as the flag and so on, are stuck with the same feelings as other signifiers of the state. An individual who orients themselves with the power and its symbols will, therefore, orient themselves towards the word “ban” with feelings that are also stuck to other state signifiers, such as honor and respect. However, sticking that state signifier, “ban” with “ayol” also sticks all the affect “ayol” brings to the “ban”, consequently to the structures of feeling. This, therefore, is the work of affective disidentification. Queering normative affective economies, consequently, is the work of (re)claiming discursive agency, which forms the bedrock of talkback. It rests in disrupting what consistently “sticks” to the symbols that signify that normativity—and whatever else symbol exists within the same structure of feeling. The way in which these competing affective economies circulate among bodies in a given context creates new ways of associating with signifiers of the state. It is vital to recognize that discursive agency does not appear out of nothingness. There are enabling factors as well as disabling factors for agency. Disabling factors consist of structures of feeling and affective economies that push for normative affective orientations aligning with the ideological elements and symbols of the state and the nation. While physically being in a public park might not look like the space for oppressive or normative affective economies, the park exists within a particular spatial, cultural, and social context. The context imposes a normative orientation that encourages silence, obedience, shame and guilt in the face of disobedience. At the same time, Gezi Park is a space where gay men and trans women go cruising, where they meet others for various levels of intimacy—it is a space where they can readily defy the established normative structures of feeling. Cruising is a great example about how an antinormative act can have layers of effects and can form the backbone of talkback and agency. As cruising challenges the moral geography of a given space as mentioned in the previous chapter, it also subverts the feelings associated

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with that space. LGBT individuals have another set of affective economies associated with Gezi Park and it is not farfetched to argue that it is indeed one of the factors that enables the agency of talkback. As such, this is another example that shows talkback is not merely talking back—it is an assemblage of various factors that work together to enable a discursive agency, which, in turn, challenges the assemblage of factors that seek to disable the agency of a given group or individuals. Only when this assemblage gets to be expressed in the form of discursive agency, it becomes talkback. In terms of affect, talkback can reveal as well as help form alternative structures of feeling that do not rely on normativities.

Notes 1. Love, Feeling Backward, 1. 2. Love, Feeling Backward, 1. 3. Hemmings, Invoking affect, 551. 4. Jackson and Meiners, Fear and loathing, 270. 5. Seigworth and Gregg, An inventory of shimmers, 1. 6. Leys, The turn to affect, 437. 7. Hemmings, Invoking affect, 551, 549. 8. Seigworth and Gregg, An inventory of shimmers, 6. 9. Leys, The turn to affect, 443. 10. Jackson and Meiners, Fear and loathing, 272. 11. Cvetkovich, Depression, 4. 12. Ahmed, Happy Objects, 38. 13. Ahmed, Happy Objects, 29. 14. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 187 15. Jackson and Meiners, Fear and loathing, 274–275. 16. Rodriguez, Queer Sociality, 335. 17. Sointu, Discourse, Affect and Affliction; Poynton and Lee, Affect-ing Discourse; Gilbert, What does democracy feel like? 18. Wetherell, Affect and discourse—What’s the problem? 19. Hart, Event-Frames affect blame assignment and perception of aggression in discourse on political protests; Wetherell et  al, Settling Space and covering the nation. 20. Halliday, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 211. 21. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 187. 22. Ahmed, Affective Economies, 120.

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23. Ahmed, Affective Economies, 120. 24. Althusser, Lenin and philosophy and other essays. 25. Hayasi, Gender differences in modern Turkish discourse, 120. 26. Zeyrek, Politeness in Turkish and its linguistic manifestations. 27. Seçkin et al, Construction of queer characters in the new Turkish cinema, 480.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

During Gezi Park protests, random interviews with the protestors became an expending area of citizen journalism. An anonymous YouTube user by the name “Charlie Chapuling”—paying homage to Charlie Chaplin but changing the last name to the Turkish translation of “looter”, a word that was reclaimed by the protestors and became symbolic after PM Erdogan used it as an insult when referring to the protestors—uploaded 207 very short interviews with Gezi Park protestors when the protest movement was taking place. These interviews ranged from 30 seconds to 2 minutes, they were shot mid-June when the protestors were occupying the Park, and were uploaded promptly on June 14 2013. Out of all the 207 videos, a 41-second long video is of an LGBT protestor. In the video, we see a close-up of a smiling activist seated in what we presume to be somewhere in Gezi Park. The background is busy with what we assume to be other activists sitting, moving around, and talking each other and a gentle wind rippling a white tent on the left. He starts talking with a certain sense of hesitation: “I am one of the LGBT ‘looters’”. He keeps on talking, answering questions that we cannot see or hear as the audience of the short interview. At 13-second mark, he says, “my demand—the problem is not a tree anymore; it is not even Gezi Park—our demand is for people to live in a better environment, we want [people] to freely express themselves with their free will…” Shortly after that statement, the interview is over. This brief interview is a microcosm of the problems as well as triumphs that I pointed to in this book. One of the most pervasive problems, which © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7_6

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is not unique to Turkey but it tends to come up whenever a group of progressive-minded individuals interact with minorities, is treating the minority either as a token or as the concerns of the minority being peripheral to the overall struggle. The fact that there is only one interview with an LGBT person points to how mainstream protestors see not only LGBT activists, but other minorities as well: a token, a periphery to boast numbers but whose voices should not take over the norm, nor should be taken as the norm. There are similar patters with how mainstream protest publications treat not only LGBT activists, but also women, anti-capitalist Muslims, Kurds, communists, and other minorities within the larger protest movement. Of course, by looking at which individuals and groups get treated as a minority, silenced, and pushed to the peripheries show one of the core problems that permeated the Gezi Park protests: the ‘norm’ of the protest movement very much reflects the ‘norm’ that the movement is claiming to challenge. The norm is European looking, middle class, man, cisgender, heterosexual, centrist democrat that clings to a notion of nationhood and proper morality informed by years of statist-ideology centered education system. The main difference between the protestors and the state is state’s insistence on openly existing a tad more on the authoritarian-­right in the spectrum of ideology. But as we have seen in Chap. 2, the assumptions that enable the state to exist the way it does and the assumptions that keep the normality of the mainstream protestors saturated and centered are one and the same. Challenging those assumptions would also undermine the very structures that give power to the mainstream protestors to exert on others. For that reason not only perhaps they cannot see those assumptions but also in a more cynical reading, they deliberately do not engage them because that would mean they would stop sharing existing power structures with the state and their concerns would not be central to any large-scale protest movement. However, in a more hopeful note, as the token LGBT activist sums up in a few seconds, the notion that “our demand is for people to live in a better environment, we want [people] to freely express themselves with their free will” points to a drive to claim agency by those who are double-­ marginalized: not only by the state but also by those who claim that they are opposing the state. This book aimed to flesh out the discursive mechanisms through which LGBT activists claimed that agency. In other words, the purpose of this book has been to get a better understanding of the ways in which LGBT individuals and groups resist normativity through discursive disidentification in the context of 2010s Turkey. I have

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examined Gezi Park Protests in 2013, Pride Parade ban in 2016, and indefinite ban of all LGBT events in Ankara in 2017 centering the perspectives and narratives of LGBT individuals and groups. In this context, I framed normativity not merely as state’s institutions, but it also as fellow protestors, during Gezi Park Protests, who opposed the state but exerted the very normativities that form the basis of state’s function and grasp on power. In this sense, LGBT individuals and groups struggled not only against the state but also against those who they thought were resisting the state but who were instead supporting the sustenance of the normativity that enabled state and cultural oppression. This sense of fighting on multiple fronts is quite the everyday story of an LGBT individual. Not only official state structures as well as institutions make everyday life difficult because they do privilege normative bodies and identities, but also other enforcers of normativity—individuals anywhere on the spectrum from well-meaning or ignorant strangers to family members who maliciously disown or kick their children out, or strangers who simply wish that LGBT individuals were dead—make day to day existence a threatening and anxiety-ridden struggle. As this research shows, queer being-in-the-world has a different relationship to space, time, and affect compared to normative being-in-the-world, which reflects how queer resistance differs from non-queer resistance. This further problematizes and questions what resistance means when we move the perspective of LGBT individuals and groups to the center, rather than to accept them at the margins where normativity pushes them to be. This chapter takes several steps in this direction. First, I review and reassess what “talkback” means—what it means to resist discursively when existence itself becomes an issue of struggle and contention. How do queer experiences within the largest protest movement in Turkey’s history, as well as in other oppressive contexts formulate ways to talk back against the state and against others? Second, I discuss what this means for our understanding of agency and re-read Lacan in the light of empirical analysis. Third, I recap what it means to take space, time, and affect together in a single analysis. Finally, I expand on what LGBT activists can take away from this research and lay out some lingering questions for scholars.

On Talkback and Talking Back Warner, in his article Ideology and Affect in Discourse and Institutions, reflects on talking back as such:

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The political ecology of talkback is shaped and sustained by the individual identities of contributors and thereby constitutes a productive basis for analyzing the psychodynamics of subjectivities in discourse in institutions… Talkback is always an active process of discursive negotiation, an achievement of purposes that is not measured by goal-oriented outcomes but only, as it were, by the word of ‘another caller on the line.’ It is within these constitutive gaps in discourse, in the parapraxic space of talkback, the propitious conditions for the emancipatory movement of the subject-in-process leave their trace.1

Warner suggests that talkback is not a single moment in time. It does not start and end with an individual’s utterance. Instead, he sees talkback as a process in an ongoing conversation in a terrain where groups and individuals do not have the same privileges of access in shaping the conversation. “Political ecology” is a rather engaging way to frame talkback because in an ecological system exists in relation to other things in the system. This metaphor is apt since talkback is a framework that enables that ecology to exist. Oppressive discourses rather not have a conversation—they rather shut the door to dialogue, empathy, and mutual learning. The fear is losing control over power. Through talkback, however, Warner implies that an individual or a group engages with an ongoing conversation—even if the involvement of certain groups and identities was not meant to exist in the first place by those who controlled who could contribute to the conversation. Talkback creates this space, exposes and questions the existing power dynamics and problematizes the assumptions regarding access to the ongoing conversation. In this sense, talkback does not intend to end a conversation—it aims to expand it. This certainly seems to be the case when we take into consideration the discourses of LGBT protestors and activists in this study. When LGBT activists were engaging other protestors during Gezi Park Protests to use a more appropriate language, they were not intending to silence them— on the contrary, they were trying to provide better tools of discursive dissent; tools that did not other certain groups and identities while engaging the state. On the other hand, it is in the interest of normative discourses to close the door on conversation and dialogue. Normative discourses are normative because they are saturated as the perceived normal in a given context. A discourse that challenges that status also challenges, by definition, normativity. For that reason, normative discourses that favor the way things are, that wish to conserve the status quo do not wish for open

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dialogue, freedom of speech, or an ongoing conversation. This can range from statist or otherwise normative historiographies that did not mean to include LGBT voices and concerns in their narrative to the ways in which protestors chanted in the streets to display a particular kind of masculinity in order to outperform the masculinity they perceived from the law enforcement. In either case, the implied point of these rhetorics was to make a point about the public space—to whom the public space belongs, who can comfortably exist, and who should not be in that public space in a given moment. These assertions were not invitations to an ongoing conversation about who should exist on the street or in other public spaces, they were not about fostering a sense of understanding between various groups and individuals who were there. Rather, it was an effort to claim the masculinity of the street—that should have been it, that should have been the end of the conversation. However, LGBT activists talked back and where they intended to be a full stop, there was instead a comma. In other words, when LGBT activists were engaging each other and the public through their online and offline discourses, they were placing themselves into an ongoing conversation regarding moral geography of a park as well as that of an increasingly authoritarian nation-state that regards LGBT lives as immoral and disposable. When LGBT activists were organizing by dispersing in their response to the ban of pride parade in 2016 in Istanbul, they were emphasizing the importance of their existence in public space against a state that did not wanted them to exist in public space. They were actively challenging, with their bodies, the moral bankruptcy of building a national and cultural morality at the expense of the marginalized groups—which historically has been a proud tradition of nation states. When LGBT activists were finding ways to engage in public life and organize in the midst of an ‘indefinite ban of all LGBT events’ in Turkey’s capital, they were trying to make sure that those who felt erased from public life because of their marginalized identity had channels to reach out and still had networks of solidarity. These examples of talking back engaged the state control of public space and public discourse and public morality to make space for those who were oppressed by that very control. The aim was, as Warner put it, to leave traces for ongoing attempts at emancipation from various forms of oppression at the hands of the state as well as the culture and society. These instances of talking back took the shape of disidentification. As I have expanded in the introduction, disidentification is a response to recruitment attempts of apparatuses of dominant ideology. Disidentification

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responds by stepping outside of the subject position for that instance, which the dominant ideology imposes on a group or an individual. This stepping outside of subject position is not a permanent state of being—it is not a stable non-subject position and the possibility of such existence is debatable at best. Rather, sidestepping the subject position, just like disidentificatory performances or rhetorics, is a temporally limited phenomenon. Talking back through disidentification, or talking back as disidentification leaves the dominant ideology and its apparatuses in an unfamiliar territory—since they know how to deal with groups or individuals who occupy either good or bad subject positions but are not equipped to deal with innovative ways people remove themselves from that binary. Talking back inserts the voice and concerns of a marginalized group in a conversation in which they were not meant to participate—or most likely they were meant to be actively erased from conversation—but also talking back as disidentification attempts to shape the course of the conversation by shifting the expectation of the subject location in the conversation. However, the cases in this book show that sidestepping the imposed subject position and inserting oneself into a conversation in which one is meant to be erased by those who exert their power to shape the conversation does not necessarily mean one’s voice will be heard or effect the power structure. For instance, finding innovative ways to sustain activism in the face of indefinite events ban in Ankara in 2017 did not mean to upend the ban or challenge the nationwide state of emergency—a sociopolitical context that cannot be considered separately from the ban. Rather it was meant to be circulated among those who are either LGBT activists or who want to support LGBT activism in their lives in a less organized manner—as long as it did not seep into ‘events’ territory. While walking that thin line is the essence of disidentification and sidestepping the subject position, sometimes, such as it is in this case, talking back is directed to the choir, to one’s echo chamber—not to limit the conversation but that is the only way a group or individuals can survive in a hostile context. In other cases, on the other hand, talkback as disidentification did shift the focus of the conversation. During Gezi Park protests, for instance, when LGBT activists talked back against the homophobic and transphobic slurs of other protestors, they did change the focus of the conversation from ‘protesting the state’ to not sharing the same heterosexist discourse that forms the basis of statist oppression.

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Social movement scholarship notes that attempts as defining a movement as successful will inevitably fail because not only the definition of success is not stable, but also who gets attributed as successful under what conditions depend on how other people—most of whom were not part of the movement—perceive what took place. Instead, it is more meaningful to look at various outcomes or intended or unintended consequences of a given movement.2 In that vein, we cannot classify these instances of queer talkback as successful or unsuccessful. For instance, looking at how pro-­ protest publications after Gezi Park completely ignored LGBT activists might be an evidence of how LGBT activism was not successful. However, exploding numbers of local LGBT activist groups or organizations in tens of different cities in Turkey, increased numbers of pride parade participants in 2014, and the experiences of non-queer activists being made aware about their language by LGBT activists are not signs of lack of success either. Rather, these are consequences; material social impacts of LGBT activism and activists during Gezi Park Protests. As such, it is impossible to measure or properly document the effects of social media messages by KAOS GL during indefinite LGBT events ban in Ankara, nor the effects of organizing through dispersion during 2016 pride parade ban on the local population, or on the activists themselves. However, similarly, it would be naïve to suggest these actions and instances of activism do not have social consequences. I have alluded to this same problem in the introduction section when I described the interaction between Hayaterkegi and the police officer. From one hand, and from a rather cynical perspective, one might suggest that interaction did not change anything for anyone, his attempt to seduce a police officer failed, and at the end of the day, the state apparatus kept on hailing subjects. However, the truth is, not only we do not know—that is, we do not have any empirical data to suggest that interaction had no effect—but also our understanding of human interaction gives us reasons to be more hopeful than cynical. Perhaps, we can consider that interaction might have planted seeds of doubt in the mind of the officer or that it signified an important point of agency for Hayaterkegi or it provided some courage to those who read for challenging state apparatuses in innovative ways.

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Reclaiming Agency In any case, LGBT activists established or exercised agency through their talkback—and understanding the conditions in which agency can flourish, perhaps, is one of the most important points in this work. In the introduction, I suggested that agency has two legs on which it stands: contextual and psychological. While the contextual side of agency is best explained by Ahern’s conceptualization of “socioculturally mediated capacity to act”, one of the issues I took with that definition was that it did not expand on what sociocultural further meant. I have argued that we need to think of this sociocultural mediation as an assemblage that examines space, time, and affect as inseparable factors in formation of that assemblage. For the psychological side of agency, I have turned to Lacan and his concept of jouissance. Doing so, my endeavor was to explain the fusing the sexual and the political in the anti-normative drive in queer being-in-the-world that builds itself on the excess and its transgression of ‘normality’. What did the cases mean for agency? How can we understand the juxtaposition of the contextual assemblage and jouissance in the face of the analyses presented in the previous chapters? Indeed, we have seen a persistent will to act, react, and transgress—vis a vis jouissance. In different contexts, this drive to transgress manifested itself differently, as it was the function of the available sociocultural assemblages that mediated that jouissance. During Gezi Park Protests, for instance, the context of an already existing protest movement in a public park that was considered familiar and like a second home to LGBT activists impacted how they were able to engage not only with the state power but also with the normalizing force of mainstream protestors. The assemblage of oral geography and affective economy of a home turf in which they were used to being promiscuous enabled them to live out their agency and engage in talkback. LGBT blogs and other media outlets enabled them to tell their side of the story, share what they have felt during the protests. If different parts of this assemblage was missing, the drive of jouissance would manifest in a different way. This was the case in other moments of resistance. During the ‘dispersing’ that grew as a response to pride parade ban in Istanbul and the indefinite ban on all LGBT events in Ankara, we see a rather restricted assemblage of the sociocultural. During the pride parade ban, while the space was familiar, it belonged to the state—it was saturated by the police and there was not much, if any, contestation on whose morality was dominant on

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the street; whose morality allowed who to exist. This called for a different transgression—through dispersing, through being visible by other means, through competing or challenging that morality in a disidentificatory way. This also challenged the structures of feeling that state set forth about its rules, regulating its rules and what should normalized citizens do in a moral geography in which they control. While the shorter period of the event—a day—allowed for rather limited expression of their story through various outlets, they still used their voices as much as they could. Likewise, during the indefinite ban on all LGBT events in Ankara, the available assemblage of sociocultural context shrunk even further. The state claimed complete control over the space, therefore over the morality of the space. This further aimed to limit who talks, who shares or does not share what kind of narratives are circulated. With these limitations, the state aimed to sustain an unchallenged status quo on existing structures of feeling that privileged the existence of normalized citizenship and criminalized those who felt differently—or who expressed their being-in-the-­ world in non-normative ways. Still, however, within the limited sociocultural resources that existed, the jouissance persisted as calls to action that aimed to challenge who owns the space, its morality, whose stories are circulated, and who feels safe in a given context. Talking about queer in terms of the non-normative is not new—it is the foundation of queer theory. What I would like to is to understand that drive towards non-normativity as the psychological location of agency. However, as we have seen, this drive is channeled through the available context. The contextual understanding agency that I attributed to Ahearn throughout this work makes the point that when we examine agency of groups or individuals, we are thoroughly misled if we prime things like freedom of choice or individual freedom or individual capacity to act. Individuals never have and never will exist in a vacuum. We are not solitary beings and framing agency simply as a choice is a way to, in turn, blame those who cannot make the right choices. Agency and capacity to act is a matter of contextual set up and interdependence. Looking at the sociocultural as an assemblage helps us understand what enables agency to flourish, or what disables it, in a given situation. Through understanding the sociocultural in smaller but indispensable parts, we can further understand what is available and what is lacking. This will help—if I may be hopeful for the sake of the argument—queer scholars and especially activists on identifying areas that might attention to enlarge the circumference of this assemblage in order to engage in more impactful scholarship and activism.

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Moreover, it can aid in preserving resources and redistributing efforts to maximize the increase in agentive context. This is vital since most LGBT activist groups—especially in Turkey and in other countries where funds for marginalized groups are not as readily available compared to Western Europe and North America and these groups work under state’s open scrutiny and pressure—work with limited human and material resources to begin with. That being said, even under dire circumstances, the jouissance have historically persisted and LGBT groups and individuals found ways to claim a sense of agency. What matters now is to figure out strategies to extend this sense of agency to those who are even further marginalized, othered, ostracized due to an extremely limited or non-existent sociocultural assemblage, which, in worst cases lead to murders and suicides of LGBT teens and adults alike. On the Historical Moment 2010s was a historical decade around the world. The decade began with Arab Spring and protests that demanded human rights spread all through the globe—from #occupywallstreet to umbrella protests in Hong Kong to #metoo and #blacklivesmatter in the US to series of protests in Turkey, Brazil, Greece, Armenia juxtaposed with one of the worst refugee crises the world has ever seen, horrible human rights violations, immense displacement, and thousands of refugees dying in the seas because countries wouldn’t take them in. These were happening all the while far right and totalitarian governments enjoyed a resurgence and hegemonic status across nations big and small. What then, if any, is the significance of the activism of a handful of LGBT groups and individuals in Turkey in such grand scheme of things—or at least within the historical moment that I have explained in Chap. 2? Based on my findings, I argue that the significance is twofold: First, it matters that LGBT groups and individuals persist against erasure because that is the only way to keep existing in the face of such blatant oppression. That is important in the flow of queer history of Turkish republic and perhaps the most important moment in addition to the initial wave of liberation during the 90s and early the 2000s. Second, LGBT activism in this case enables us to think beyond individual acts of activism but helps us construct talkback as a collective framework of agency. There is a lot we can learn here and apply to other contexts and struggles.

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In regards to the first point, we need to revisit the state of current social, cultural, and political climate in Turkey. In general terms, 2010s have witnessed the ruling party, and more specifically ‘the ruler Erdogan’ solidifying themselves as the only legitimate rulers in Turkish political arena. More specifically, there has been several moments which increased Erdogan’s rule of power—starting with a referendum in 2007, where he first began suggesting anyone opposed to him was associated with PKK, a Kurdish militant group that is assigned a terrorist group status by the Turkish state. Every election or referendum these associations were repeated until the coup attempt in 2016, where the declared state of emergency. Using a moment of crisis in order to consolidate power in a way that makes the ruling person or party beyond reproach has been the staple practice of totalitarian regimes, cults of personalities, and dictatorships throughout history—and Turkish government at hand did not veer off this tradition. The state of emergency ended at the start of 2019. However almost three years of nonstop repression and jailing of critics and making anything or anyone illegal without any consequence solidified the power of the ruling party and Erdogan in a way that is now virtually impossible to challenge. Not to mention, Erdogan and AKP have been in leading the country since 2002 and in the last two decades they had ample time to shape social, cultural, legal, and political landscape in the way they saw fit. Without a doubt, and again in the tradition of totalitarian regimes, the consolidation of power has not happened despite of public opinion. On the contrary, from its inception, AKP’s political movement and Erdogan’s rule has appealed to a sense of populism and gained country-wide support—especially when coupled with the ruling party’s meticulous control over media and popular culture and banning, jailing, or otherwise silencing publications or voices that dared to dissent. The amount of social and political repression, consolidation of power and rule around a cult of leadership, and scrutinizing and silencing dissenting voices all have a social function—they are meant to end the conversation regarding questions such as who is Turkey, who lives in Turkey, what do Turkish people want or believe in, and so on. These questions are just regular questions most countries deal with over time in different ways. Especially after the spread of nationalism, constant wars, changing domestic and international political landscape, changing understandings of culture and society, intermittent refugee, economic, health or otherwise public crises puts these kinds of questions at the forefront in most countries. Arguably, in the presence of rule of law and democracy, the way to

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deal with such questions that arise often is to channel appropriate public debate through political representation. Where democratic institutions are strong, these questions do not necessitate a threat to the fundamental existence of the country and they do not need to be perceived as such. However, Turkey proved itself to fall into a category of a country where these questions are perceived as a threat or crisis against the very foundations of the country. Through this consolidation of power in the last decade, the totalitarian regime not only ossified its rule but also decided to answer such questions in a way that closed the door for further conversation. Through social, legal, political, cultural, and other means of regulation and censorship, by making certain voices or ideas illegal, or by the virtue of silencing those who did not fit into their worldview in the pursuit of gaining more power, AKP government also left no space to think of Turkey in different terms. Now, the questions about identity, belonging, and citizenship only have a single answer and that only goes through allegiance to the ruling party and the lose ideology of authoritative neoliberal Islamic conservatism. As I explained in Chap. 2, there was an initial wave of liberation, with the proliferation of neoliberal sense of individualism in the 80s and early 90s, that allowed LGBT groups and individuals to raise their voices and be heard and organize openly for the first time in Turkey. That was the spark that initiated the growth of the LGBT movement in Turkey and for that reason alone it was incredibly significant. This time around, the voices we have witnessed throughout this book are struggling to make sure that initial wave of liberation persists and keeps on existing. The struggle that is implied in talkback is to take a firm stance against the aforementioned consequence of totalitarianism—the struggle is to make sure the conversation does not end about who lives in Turkey and who gets to claim the categories of citizenship and belonging. Whenever there is an attempt to end the conversation through erasure, talkback emerges as a means by which those who face erasure reclaim agency and sustain those conversations. Indeed, many of the answers to those questions, either overtly or covertly, police particular erotic or romantic desires or gender expressions. Answering questions about the identity of a Turkey under the current regime ended up as policymaking that privileged a patriarchal, heteronormative, and misogynist sense of the country and society. For these reasons, I argue that the talkback I have analyzed in this book is also extremely significant regarding its place in the history of LGBT activism in Turkey. These series of talkbacks occupy a moment when

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despite numerous attempts, LGBT groups and organizations found ways to creatively disidentify and subvert the imposed repression and indeed kept on existing. While it is impossible to tell if such ritual of attempted erasure and talkback will remain in 2010s and if 2020s, as a decade, will see different historical trajectories regarding the status of LGBT groups and individuals in Turkey, it is safe to say that this moment exemplifies how can LGBT groups and individuals in Turkey can sustain their talkback. The hope is that such sustenance lasts until a future time where that energy that kept talkback alive can once again be turned into organizing and effecting social change. This brings me to the second point: talkback is an important framework of activism for the decade we have lived in and has some vital lessons that can be applied to various contexts and social discord that we have witnessed around the globe. We have indeed witnessed a decade of activism, movement, protest— overall, an outpouring of frustration with the way things are all over the globe. We have seen this with the Arab Spring at the start of the decade in the Middle East. While there was no single cause of Arab Spring, combination of factors that provided a structure and substance for the status quo proved to be unbearable for the populations of the countries such as Libya, Egypt, Bahrain, Tunisia, and others where uprisings took place. Similarly, in the US, we have seen #occupywallstreet, #metoo, #blacklivesmatter throughout this decade and they all targeted the way things have been and the slow, sluggish pace of social change that was not satisfactory for those who wished to see the world in a better place. Protests in Turkey, the cases I have covered in this work, protests against yet another austerity measure in Greece, and protests against corruption in Brazil point to a similar conclusion: the assemblage of historical, social, economic, cultural, and political factors that led up to the zeitgeist is unsustainable and needs to be at least challenged with care, tact, and nuance and replaced by ways of being in the world that are sustainable, equitable, and fair to those are marginalized the most by these systems of governance. When we deconstruct these assemblages, we face various clogs of all shapes and sizes—instead of perceiving the entire rather complicated machine that sustains itself by making us align with its being in the world as a means of sustaining ourselves in its totality. In other words, our quest to sustain ourselves, reproduce our social value, and exist in the world as we want to exist are designed in such a way that it ends up reproducing the conditions that produce the inequalities that breed the system that we protest. From big to small, from

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the food we eat to the political process we participate to how we understand the labor market and how we perceive our fellow laborers to how we perceive those who are marginalized are shaped by how we feel about the world, by how we are told to feel and made to feel about the world by various means, by how we organize our day and our schedules, by how we assign value and function to various spaces, by praising or demonizing various wants and desires. Understanding how this machine works with its entire complexity might seem like a difficult task at a first glance; however, it is vital in order to produce a talkback that is not reductionist, that does not simplify to problems to a single issue at the cost of others, and in doing so, that does not reproduce at least part of the oppression it argues to be working against. In many ways, scholars in Frankfurt school, and French neo-Marxist tradition have been making this very point for decades. This work and the framework of ‘talkback’ adds to those critiques by suggesting the following: just as we can deconstruct the assemblage of the status quo and examine its various parts—such as its construction of space, time, affect, desire, and other impositions of normativity—we can think of talkback in the same vein: an assemblage that disrupts these various modes of the status quo by intentionally or unintentionally (but hopefully intentionally) coming up with ways in which one challenges the existing one by presenting alternatives or counters. Instead of talking back to a single façade of the status quo, talkback seeks to challenge assemblage as a whole. For example, when we talkback against nationalism in Turkey, we need to engage not only the ethnocentrism embedded in nationalism, but also how nationalism feels, how that feeling permeates into rituals, spaces, how temporal constructions of traditions, repeated celebrations, how the past and the future is sustained in public memory, how nationalist rhetoric constructs space and time, how it constructs how subjects interact in that space and time, and how they should feel as they are interacting in space and time—these and other intersecting constructions of who one should be, feel, how one should exist, work, live, talk, eat all contribute to the assemblage that sustains the status quo. Consequently, critiquing a single part of this assemblage, while important, might not help with producing a talkback that substantially threatens the system at large. In other words, constructing a talkback that considers the status quo as a whole is as important as deconstructing the assemblage that sustains it to better understand it in the first place.

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In this sense, talkback, as a framework, posits agency as the central node to which all these different elements and assemblages connect. Since our capacity to act is mediated by the context, which also is constructed by the assemblage of the status quo, our capacity to act is constantly limited by our own being in the world. Consequently, in order to challenge the status quo, we need to understand how our agency is intertwined to the context, how the context is a function of all the different parts coming together as aforementioned, and how, if we want to construct a nuanced and complicated sense of talkback that truly challenges the status quo in its entirety, we need to rethink and reimagine our context in a way that enables different kinds of actions, a context that enables the kind of agency that leads to the kind of world we want to see—not the one we end up reproducing because that is merely what we have in front of us. In other words, context and agency is inherently linked, indeed. And in order to create social change, we need to talkback in a way that presents a new kind of context that enables different kinds of actions and disables the kinds of actions that contribute to the status quo. Moreover, we cannot do this one aspect of the assemblage at a time—talkback, as a framework, argues that we need to engage the assemblage in its totality and present a new assemblage. History, Temporality, and Agency Writing history, and particular versions of history is consequential for agency and for constructing talkback as a social and political strategy for activism. History provides the rhetorical tools to construct particular images of the past, and based on those images, expectations, hopes, dreams, and images of the future. It helps people make sense of the present and understand whatever lead to the current moment, how it can be understood, avoided, or repeated. If the historical perspective one has about the present excludes the self, if a group or individual cannot see themselves or their own perspectives in the written history, then it is fair to say that they do not have a rhetorical resource to pull from in order to define what they have learned from the past, how they can understand the present, or the ways in which they can imagine the future. This was the case with LGBT persons and organizations in Turkey. In regards to Gezi Park protests, there were two historical narratives that were written, shared, and disseminated widely. State’s narrative argued that the protestors were enemies of the state, they were terrorists who either received funding from foreign enemies or they were consciously or unconsciously

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being manipulated by foreign enemies in order to destabilize Turkey. This indeed was a continuation of a political plot and animosity that could be traced back to the war of independence between 1919 and 1923. This historical narrative equated protestors with enemy soldiers, overtly as well as implicitly, and made a clear binary distinction between the patriots and traitors. Those Europeans who waged war, who invaded us were not able to defeat us. Now, they are using our own people against us, they manipulate the youth in order to attach the state and make the state look bad in the international arena. What they were not able to achieve overtly, they are trying to achieve covertly. The second historical narrative about the Gezi Park protests that was disseminated far and wide was the narrative from the perspective of the protestors. While the state’s narrative had a single source—the ruling party—the second historical narrative did not have a single source but they did repeat the same narrative. In a nutshell, this narrative repeated the simplistic and reductionist rhetorical structure of the state: protestors are good, the state is bad, protesters are a monolith and smaller groups either do not exist or should/do assimilate with the larger imaginary construction of the ‘protestor’. This construction overlooked any ways the imagery of the protest could be made more complicated, nuanced, and in many ways, improved. Reduction focused on the binary and ‘good’ and ‘bad’ as definitive categories that cannot be pluralized in any way. Unsurprisingly, when the pride parade was banned in Istanbul, when LGBT events were indefinitely cancelled in Ankara, when LGBT organizers were arrested and LGBT organizations were closed, the only perpetuated and disseminated narrative belonged to the state. Those who were protesting against the state during Gezi Park protests were neither aware nor cared about nuances and complexities of the flexible and sometimes fragile alliances that formed the umbrella of ‘protestor’ imagery—it was far easier to follow the state’s rhetorical example and deal in absolutes and binaries. Meanwhile, the erasure of LGBT voices and concerns from the nuances of the constructed historical narratives meant two things: First, for LGBT groups and individuals, this was yet another instance of a well-known and repeated pattern whereby they cannot find a place for themselves in the ongoing conversation about social and political issues and they are seen as a mere collateral of the real conversation. LGBT groups and individuals weren’t able to see themselves involved and included in the imagery of the ‘protestor’—their existence was not taken seriously or perhaps it was a threat also those who considered themselves protestors since a queer being

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in the world challenged the normativities that sustained the normative social reproduction from which the imagery of the ‘protestor’ also benefited. Nevertheless, not being a part of the historical narrative meant that they were excluded from the constructed past, which also meant that they were most likely not imaged as a part of the imagined future. This meant a second point: LGBT groups and individuals ended up writing their own histories about the events. However, these histories did not comprise a historical narrative per se, they were experiences, moments, memories from these different protests and events. There was a magazine, there was a documentary, there were blog posts, social media posts and discussions. One of the main reasons of writing a queer historical narrative of these three events is to offer a narrative where LGBT groups and individuals see themselves in history, and consequently, imagine a future whereby the lessons of this history can be carried forward. Moreover, writing a queer history offers an alternative and thereby disrupts the hegemony, as much as it can, of existing historical narratives. In other words, identifying LGBT groups and individuals as subjects in history implies their subjectivity in an imagined future, and therefore, provides a part and parcel of the discursive context whereby agency is possible—since only subjects can be agents. Another aspect of agency and its connection to temporality is the issue of futurity and the ways in which it was addressed by the discussions on social media. The function of agency or exerting a sense of self—claiming that queer being-in-the-world is meaningful—is meditation on the future. Since any criticism of the present, any attempt to reclaim agency, any dissensus with the status quo rests on a longing for a change that has either the possibility or the dream of becoming a facet of reality, it inevitably is a mediation on the future. In the examined cases, this research showed that agency that wants to change or challenge the future and the will to reclaim that agency manifests itself in discourse as an attempt to reclaim and shape the past. This is consistent with the desire to write a historical narrative where LGBT individuals and groups can see themselves reflected in a way that gives them a discursive context whereby they can claim a sense of agency. Of course, it is important to mention that discursive constructions by LGBT individuals that frame the past in a way that constructs LGBT groups and individuals as victims do actively strip agency away from themselves by denying themselves the subject position. Consequently, temporality and agency revolve around finding and constructing a sense of subjecthood in historical narratives or retellings,

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discussions of the past and in the imagined future. Objects cannot act, they do not have and cannot have a sense of agency. When LGBT groups and individuals are erased from history, they cannot have a sense of subjecthood from which they can construct agency. Similarly, when LGBT groups and individuals position themselves as constant victims, they place themselves in the position of objects, thereby denying themselves subjecthood and consequently agency. These are the main ways through which temporality and agency are connected. Moral Geography and Agency Another aspect that constructs, limits, or enables agency is constructions of space and spatiality. All three events I have analyzed take place in rather small spaces: a public park, a street where pride parade takes place, Ankara, Turkey’s capital. However, they are embedded in larger spatial contexts which gives them a particular meaning. That larger context, in Turkey, is the nation state. It is difficult to understand the impact of being a spatial subset of the nation state without invoking the sense of morality that comes with that association. In this sense, the framework of moral geography is especially useful. For instance, Beyoglu street, the street where pride parade would take place in Istanbul, is embedded within various geographical moralities: Istanbul, metropolis, Turkey—to name a few. Some of these moralities are contradicting. Istanbul has a history that goes back thousands of years and the city itself is an example of how different faiths and people can coexist over the course of empires and republics. Moreover, it is a metropolis. Like others, Istanbul hosts people from all walks of life and offers the heterogeneity that comes with being a metropolis urban space. However, ultimately, the city and the street are in the political borders of Turkish republic. Flags, maps, slogans and other means of imposing meaning to a space loom large and override competing constructions of morality of Beyoglu street. This was also the case in Gezi Park and Ankara as a city. Nation state, as a function of being the political expression of dominance of a group of people over others, seeks to impose homogeneity within its borders. This homogeneity aims to secure the position of the already dominant group and eliminate whatever perceptions of threat might exist to this position of power. As such the moral geography of the nation state depends on a sense of boundary and distinguishing who is inside and who is outside of these boundaries. These boundaries can be

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physical, psychological, social, political, or cultural. In any of these cases, the morality of the nation state depends on making a clear, binary distinction between the inside and the outside of the boundaries, define subject positions based on difference, and impose homogeneity to those who are inside. This homogeneity can be physical, cultural, and ideological. It can be about who we desire and how can we desire them, how can we dress, how can we talk, how can we act, what we can value and what we definitely cannot value or desire. The utopic expression and the ultimate desire of the nation state is an absolute sense of sameness within its borders and among its subjects. This imposition of homogeneity is often accompanied by an urgent elimination of the other, a relentless sense of seek and destroy of the enemy within and without—and one shall not rest until the perception of threat is completely gone. Needless to say, such a utopia is impossible to achieve by design and its impossibility is actually a part of imposing homogeneity—making sure there is always a sense of the other and, by its virtue, a necessity to be vigilant and ideologically committed to the sustenance of the nation state. Any other ideological commitment is an existential threat to the sense of homogeneity the nation state wants to establish within its boundaries. Such construction of moral geography, in turn, defines the subject of the nation state in such a limited way, establishes the spatial context of the subject in such a salient sense of binary that those who are interpellated by the nation state only have a single course of agency. In other words, the subject position imposed by the nation state makes the agency only work towards fulfilling the utopic mission of the nation state. This was the case in Gezi Park and it was apparent not only in the historical narrative offered by the state but also in the discourses of the protestors. The state’s aforementioned historical narrative offered a single solution for dealing with the protestors: violence. This violent agency was fulfilled by the police on the ground and civilians who grabbed machetes or clubs and embodied the subject position in state’s rhetoric. Protestor’s narrative also operated in a similar vein. Through their historical narratives, their chants, slogans, discussions—in short, through their rhetoric— did not, in fact, challenge the moral geography imposed by the nation state. Their opposition to the nation state did not contest the morality of who or what is included in the physical or psychological boundaries of the state. This is evident in their use of patriarchic, sexist, classist discourse, which aligns with homogeneity the Turkish nation state imposes within its borders anyway. In that sense, protestors’ demands to keep the park merely

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revolved around the access to a public space for only particular individuals alongside their discontents with Erdogan’s rule, instead of defining what public space means or redefining public space in a way that challenges the meaning the Turkish nation state imposed on it. As we see from the ways in which LGBT individuals felt alienated from the rest of the protestors, using violent language that aligns with statist constructions of boundaries and categories does not change or challenge the state in any significant way. Queer discourses, on the other hand, had a different framework: their discourses were heterotopic. Different from Foucault’s definition that only takes heterotopia to be a spatial phenomenon, based on the use of personhood and identity associations I suggested heterotopia can also be understood from the perception of identity and identification. The data showed that the use of universal personal markers by queer discourses meant that different and often contradicting identity positions could exist in a single space, giving it different meanings and moralities. The only boundary, in a manner of speaking, was the nation state’s homogenizing discourse. In other words, as long as an identity position did not seek to dominate over others, did not seek to be the only identity that homogeneously saturates itself among a group of people, every other boundary could be crossed—in fact, every other boundary should be crossed and that trampling of such boundaries is the essential tool to challenge, redefine, and subvert the morality imposed by the nation state. Consequently, since queer discourses did not adopt the subject position imposed by the nation state but focused on defining their own boundaries that subverted the nation state’s boundary framework, the agentive possibilities were far greater. Queer discourses did not have to abide by ‘self, good; other, bad’ framework, they did not align with violent rhetoric and the subjectivity it demanded, and since such discursive context provided more expansive sense of agency, they were able to disidentify, they were able to have agency that did not merely reproduce state’s subject position. In other words, morality imposed on a space creates or defines the contextual subject position that enables and disables certain actions and acting capacities. When individuals and groups do not challenge the morality of a given space, they do not challenge the subjectivity imposed by being in that space. On the other hand, when they subvert the morality of a given space, it enables a sense of agency that does not depend on statist impositions of morality and subjecthood. Just because a group of people is protesting the state, it does not mean they are challenging the state or subverting the state’s impositions. It might very well mean that their

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apparent protest is concealing all the ways in which they are not, in fact, challenging the statist spatial and moral meanings in any substantive way. Affect and Agency It was the summer of 2019. I was in Turkey for what came to be my annual family visits. Inevitably, I made my way to Istanbul. During the week I have stayed there, I was able to stop by Gezi Park, stroll around and reflect on what that park meant. After researching the protests, hopes, and heartbreaks that became associated park for close to a decade, I wanted to try to grasp how I felt inside the park, what it meant for me, and what might it have meant for everyone involved in it becoming the symbol for the largest protest movement in this country one more time before returning to the US and finalizing my book. I walked up from Istiklal street to Taksim Square. In a way everything was different and, in a way, everything was the same. People rushing up and down through the street and the park, some people sitting at the sidewalk—either peoplewatching or playing an instrument or two to make some money. There were tourists, locals, those who are apparently just passing through. It felt familiar and it felt different—but, to be fair, this simultaneous feeling of familiarity and difference has been with me from the moment I had left Turkey to study and live in the US. However, as I left Taksim behind and entered Gezi Park, the sense of familiarity slowly diminished. Being there felt uneasy, tense, and unsettling. Part of me wanted to leave the park as soon as I could, meanwhile some other part of me wanted to explore the park as well as these feelings of unease and tension. I stuck with the latter voice. I thought about what the protestors might have felt as they were setting up barricades. Or the police, as they were rushing the barricades with their weapons. But I also knew that this binary was the mirage that was the root of so many issues Turkey was facing. It was weekday, early afternoon. The park was rather quiet. There were people passing through and I spotted only a couple of people sitting around. Upon reflection, the biggest factor that made strolling through the park an uneasy experience was the numerous police cars parked next to each other at the entrance of the park with officers hanging around and gazing at everyone who were passing. Earlier that week, as I was walking in a different part of Istanbul, I was randomly stopped by undercover police—who wear civilian clothing and meant to survey the population— and asked for my identification and had to answer random questions.

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Although it felt jarring to me, this was expected in Turkey, it was just another day. This experience molded with the heavy police presence openly carrying assault rifles in the streets, and around certain buildings. These experiences and images created a sense of tension and urgency. While I stayed in Istanbul for a short period of time, this was indeed a daily experience for the people who live there and it is not hard to imagine the ways in which police as a social semiotic invoking a sudden sense of terror or alarm. The intimidating presence the police vehicles and officers imposed a particular meaning as well as a sense of temporality to Gezi Park. Both meanings were clear at a first glance: the park belonged to the state, protestors were no more and state was going to keep a vigilant presence in the park just in case. The presence of state’s agents, vehicles, flags, uniforms imposed the nation state’s homogenizing morality on to the park. And it also meant, in a way, that they were imposing a temporality. This was the end of the historical narrative: park belonged to the state and that was it. There was no future and the consequent desire was to make the past irrelevant by the overwhelming police force. Imposing a public memory through imagery in a way that made the past seem like a mere accident or a small bump in the road. It also imposed the moral boundary and enforced the binary of either aligning with the state or standing against it. Since any act of disobedience at the park would be immediately shut down and possibly treated as a criminal case or a terrorism case, the police presence left no middle ground to negotiate. Affect is a consequence of structure. How affect travels and moves around is a consequence of existing within this structure. Because the way in which we make meaning is not a solitary venture. We exist inter-­ relationally with humans and symbols and the relationships as well as the symbols around us gives a meaning to things that we do or do not do— enabling or disabling agency not only through material means but also through psychological means. This was my way of combining Raymond Williams and Sara Ahmed. Theorists who suggested affect could exist in a pre-linguistic, pre-cultural, and pre-social way did miss the ways in which power structures shape affect for the purposes of governmentality. Because of how we are made and taught to feel around symbols of the state, we tend to behave in particular ways. Because of how we are taught particular histories and internalized specific temporalities, we tend to feel certain ways on certain days or months. A priori explanations lack this perspective despite their desire to juxtapose the social with affect.

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As such, one can engage how affect moves among objects and people if one can challenge the context that gives rise to such affective outcomes. Challenging the context, as far as this work is concerned, comes in the form of challenging the moral geography of a given space, historiographies, temporalities, and their manifestations in discourse. The use of Ayol as a way to subvert aforementioned meanings and consequently the affect of being in the park exemplified how this can be achieved discursively. Similar to previous points that argued how temporal and spatial context enabled particular kinds of agency, affect suggests the same point. Burdened with the weight of nation state’s symbolism, the way one feels in particular times and spaces enables and disables certain actions. A person is far less likely to dissent towards national symbols due to the amount of guilt and shame associated with actions towards national symbols— they are boundaries that determine who is in and who is out. Or, they will face immense backlash from those who associate national symbols with such boundaries—as it has happened with Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest during the US national anthem. Consequently, when the nation state saturates everything it can with the meaning of national boundary, it becomes that more difficult to find something to subvert without facing intense feelings from the self or others. However, subverting and challenging the context and structures that shape these affective economies opens up space to contest the very associations between agency and affect. Revisiting Agency and Talkback This leaves us at the crux of the relationship between agency and talkback. Talkback is a form of subversive agency—but not any form of subversive agency. It is the kind of subversive agency that actively deconstructs the contextual cues, symbols, discourses, or meaning structures that disable such agency to exist while simultaneously imagining ways to challenge, restructure, or give new meanings to those discourses or symbols so that talkback can keep happening. A sense of agency that is not contextual, that does not consider the interdependency of individuals, groups, their contextual relationships, and how these contextual relationships assemble on the axes of temporality, spatiality, and affect cannot adequately talkback to

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the existing structures that encircle our capacity to act and the meanings we give to our actions. On the flipside, one can apply this framework to alleged moments of subversion, activism, resistance to see if that moment can be understood as talkback—if it indeed opens up conversation by enabling subversive forms of agency or if it is merely talking within the dominant contextual structures.

Questions for Queer Scholarship and Activism There are two main issues I would like raise as possible points of expansion both in scholarship and activism. The first issue is about exploring possibilities of further explanation of activism that has already happened. The next issue is applying the lessons of the talkback to future activism and scholarship. In either case talkback as a framework necessitates an ongoing understanding and conversation between activism and scholarship and does not see a difference between the two. Talkback as a scholarly framework of explanation can be applied to other cases of activism. This would be particularly interesting to pursue in different cultural contexts where the perceptions of time, space, and affect are constructed differently. What would talkback look like in the US, in Hong Kong, or in Brazil? How would social, political, or cultural climates of these places influence the way in which a group engages in talkback against the status quo, and what would influence the impact of that talkback? Moreover, to cases where the rationale behind activism is different. This study was about establishing talkback as a framework to understand queer activism in Turkey. How would it be same or different if this framework were to be applied to activism on race, labor rights, climate justice, or disability activism, just to give a few examples? On that note, this work did not work towards measuring, or evaluating in any shape or form, the impact of talkback. That might be a worthwhile pursuit—specifically to compare the impact or consequence of activism that has a comprehensive framework such as talkback versus activism that does not. This brings me to what can we take from the framework of talkback for activism. I would be especially curious to know or find out if any activist initiative would use talkback as a rhetorical strategy, consciously, to consider various dimensions they might not have considered before? How would that change, if it does, their activism, their discourses or actions.

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In both cases, I cannot imagine talkback—either as a scholarly or as an activism framework—exist in isolation without the other. It is my hope that talkback will be a framework that helps the bridge the gap between activists and scholars while informing both about each others’ practice.

Notes 1. Warner, Ideology and affect in discourse in institutions, 294. 2. Gamson, The strategy of social protest.

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Index1

A Affect, 116 Affective economies, 121 Agency, ix, 3, 4, 7–11, 20–22, 24, 25, 52, 57, 70, 73–75, 77–80, 82, 83, 85, 86, 110, 112, 117, 120, 130, 131, 134, 135, 139–142, 144, 147, 149–152, 154, 155 Ahmed, Sara, 118 AKP, 36 Althusser, 16–18, 20, 27n32, 27n39, 55n46, 122, 132n24 Anti-normativity, 2–10 Ayol, 124 B Berlant, Lauren, 8, 13, 21, 26n2, 26n9, 26n10, 26n21, 27n33, 27n41, 27n47, 91,

112n6, 112n7, 113n10, 113n29, 113n33 Butler, Judith, 13, 14, 26n22, 59, 89, 112n3 C Chicago Boys, 35 Chrononormativity, 5 Critical discourse analysis, 23 Cruising, 4, 7, 63, 64, 90, 96, 97, 104, 109, 130 D Discursive agency, 3, 21, 85, 86, 130, 131 Disidentification, 15, 16, 18–20, 68, 106, 110, 111, 118, 128, 130, 134, 137, 138

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 A. E. Erol, LGBTQ Activism in Turkey During 2010s, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69097-7

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168 

INDEX

Disidentificatory, 19–21, 59, 60, 107, 111, 112, 120, 124, 125, 127, 128, 138, 141 Disidentifying, 15–22 E Edelman, Lee, 14, 15, 26n26, 26n27, 57, 58, 85, 119 F Foucault, Michel, 91 Freeman, Elizabeth, 61 G Gandy, Matthew, 92 Gezi Park, vii, 4–9, 22, 30, 32, 38, 39, 41, 43, 50, 54, 57, 60, 63–68, 70, 80, 81, 83, 84, 90–98, 100–104, 124–126, 128, 130, 133–136, 138–140, 147, 150, 151, 153, 154 H Halberstam, Judith, 58, 59, 86n1, 86n2, 86n3, 86n4, 90, 112n4, 113n32 Halperin, David, 60 Heteronormative space, 95 Heteronormativity, 95 Heterotopia, 91 I Ideological affective apparatus, 123 J Jouissance, 10, 13, 14, 140–142

K KAOS GL, 69, 70, 79, 80, 94, 97, 106, 139 L Lacan, Jacques, 10, 26n7, 26n13, 26n14, 26n15, 26n16, 26n20, 135, 140 Leap, William, xi, 27n45, 27n51, 94, 113n18 Leys, Ruth, 117 M Marshall Plan, 32 Massumi, Brian, 117 Modan, Gabriella, 89 Mont Pelerin Society, 34 Muñoz, Jose E., 12, 14, 19–21, 58, 119 N Neoliberalism, 34–39 Neoliberal space, 95 O Occupygezi, 39 Ozal, Turgut, 36 P Pêcheux, Michel, 15 Q Queer futurity, 8, 13, 58, 59 Queer historiography, 60 Queer linguistics, 24 Queer theory, xv, 3, 4, 8, 14, 21, 27n46, 57, 83, 141

 INDEX 

S Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 60 Structures of feeling, 121 T Talkback, ix, 1–4, 8, 9, 15–17, 19–22, 25, 29, 57, 59, 60, 68, 85, 86, 92, 93, 98, 110–112, 115, 116, 119, 128, 130, 131, 135, 136, 138–140, 142, 144–147, 155–157 Tekyön, 64 Traub, Valerie, 60

169

Truman Doctrine, 32 Turkish nationalism, 31 W Warner, Michael, 8, 21, 26n2, 26n9, 26n10, 27n40, 59, 91, 112n6, 112n7, 113n10, 113n29, 113n33, 135–137, 157n1 Williams, Raymond, 118 Z Ze’evi, Dror, 72