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Efendilik: Civility, Urbanity, and Homohistoricism in Contentious Istanbul
Abstract
This paper investigates homohistoricism as a platform on which political claims are articulated, debated, and contested in contemporary Turkey. By historicism, I mean to mark the mode of thinking about a given state of affairs as an historically developing entity that is to be understood in some sort of a (time and space contingent) narrative totality à la Chakrabarty. By homohistoricism, I mean to distinguish the kinds of articulation which see in the past a meaningful and developing narrative of queer desire that culminates in a present state of affairs. Through this lens, I analyze two sets of primary materials about queer contention from amidst Istanbul's Gezi Park Uprising: Protest records (fliers, brochures, zines, pictures, pickets/banners/posters) from Kislak Center's "Gezi Park Protests 2013" collection at the University of Pennsylvania as well as the meeting minutes from 657 neighborhood meetings kept by Gezi protestors and compiled online at Direnis Forumlari (Resistance Forums). I suggest that queer homohistoricism (as opposed to other forms of homohistoricism) developed in Turkey as a contentious repertoire that combines romanticized visions of Ottoman cosmopolitanism, a rejection of Republican militant masculinity, and a claim to an explicitly non-Western (therefore, authentic) source of historical urban civility. I argue that queer homohistoricism as contentious strategy may do the work of articulating certain political translations of authentic civility for the sake of avoiding accusations of Western influence during moments of political crisis, but would do so at the expense of perpetuating just as authentic mechanisms of oppression that make up the ossified texture of permanent crisis in the city.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None