Part of a larger project dealing with queer identity and aesthetics in Turkey, this paper focuses on the discourses around a number of films from Turkey that deal with gender – Zenne (2012), Conscience (2008) and Mustang (2015) – in order to interrogate the way in which representations of gender and sexual identity are interpreted and analyzed by various critics and scholars. As films with considerable international circulation, Zenne, Conscience and Mustang can serve as excellent case studies of how “minor” films from Turkey can complicate and problematize western European and north American notions of gender and sexuality, as well as demonstrate, through their reception by foreign critics particularly, the power dynamics and orientalist impulses inherent in the act of comparison between a perceived east and west. In this paper, I concentrate on the very language employed by critics and scholars who are dealing with these films in order to think more broadly about politics of comparison within a transnational context and argue that more often than not, the way in which we go about these comparisons determine the stakes and the crux of our analysis. Rather than single-directional comparisons, which inadvertently liken cultural productions of one context to another, I propose concurrent readings of cultural productions that strive to mutually illuminate one another.