Vernacular Lebanese culture and the Internet abound with anecdotes about “single women.” Al-Jazeera English recently commissioned and aired the documentary “Single by Choice” whilst asking “why are so many Lebanese women single?” and the late Lebanese popular social commentator, Amal Hamadeh infamously and perhaps unintentionally popularized the expression “there are no men left.” Equally, during my PhD-related fieldwork, I came across innumerable instances of “aversion to marriage” and resolutions to remain “single by choice.” This paper views such narratives as vernacular theories of sexual anxieties that are specific to the “slow death” (Berlant 2007) that largely characterizes the rapidly deteriorating state of affairs in contemporary Lebanon. Marriage age in Lebanon, as is the case with the Levant and elsewhere around the world, is on the increase, with financial reasons and the privileging of professional development oftentimes cited as the main factors behind this shift. However, such quantitative indicators leave unattended the intricate and highly likely, yet easily effaced, negotiations between individual agency and heterosexist societal values that shape singledom by choice. This paper conceptualizes the concept of hetero-pessimism as decolonial knowledge to rethink cis/hetero singledom as a space of futurity and disruptive desire, and to challenge Eurocentric reductions of asexuality to that of identity. Celibacy and abstinence are often evoked to differentiate them from asexuality in western asexuality rhetoric. This paper challenges this differentiation by pointing out the continuity of hetero-pessimism in each. Hetero-pessimism is understood as radical desire that challenges conventional bio-political (read cis/hetero/reproductive) normalization of women’s desire. The paper is highly interdisciplinary. Theoretically, it draws on affect studies, queer feminist approaches, and decolonial praxis – notably discarding, in its conceptualization of hetero-pessimism. Empirically, it draws on vernacular knowledge and popular culture from contemporary Lebanon in order to tie intrapersonal agency to larger economic and socio-political dynamics. By showing how vernacular constructions, experiences, and stories of “refusal to sex” (Fahs 2010) have the potential to disrupt quantitative accounts of bodily autonomy, the paper seriously attempts to engage feminist theorizing from the MENA beyond the trope of MENA-as-area-studies. Keywords: hetero-pessimism; asexuality; asexual agency; singledom; Arab women

Disavowal and abandonment by the blood family is a common experience among trans people in Turkey. Familial rejection of gender recognition, refusal of financial and emotional support, and at times, denial of funeral rituals and practices at the moment of death frequently intensify the everyday conditions of trans lives that are already and constantly marked by social discrimination, urban displacement, medico-legal regulation and police surveillance. Yet these relations of violence also constitute a social field of creative living within which trans people reform, shape and invent forms of intimacies to inhabit the world. Family and kinship becomes a constant process of renewal, an intimate survival strategy to cope with everyday violence, imaginative practices that push the boundaries of belonging, and claims to a place in life and death through queer belonging and bonding. In this paper, I offer a decolonial approach to the hegemonic institutions of family and kinship in Turkey through trans women’s intimate experiments with daughterhood and motherhood. I argue that family and kinship, both as a practical and discursive repertoire of care, queer belonging and bonding, is a significant currency of intimacy that allows trans people to creatively, productively and resolutely remake the violent conditions of their everyday lives. If one of the many ways to define kinship is the role of substance in consolidating ties between persons, I suggest that maybe trans people’s kin work offers us a novel way to think about substance beyond its definition as objects and bodily fluids or parts. Here I would like to ask what if we approach this substance as violence? How can we theorize violence as the mediator, the creative substance of kin work among trans people? I claim that an immersion into the ordinary of trans lives offers us a creative angle to negotiate, contest, as well as blur the intimate boundaries between family, kinship and friendship.

This paper is part of a larger study composed of a 12-month ethnographic field research in Istanbul amongst exercising women in women-only gyms and in public parts and it focuses on the temporal aspect of desiring self-making. It argues that neither desire, nor the desiring self could be formed from scratch. Rather, it ethnographically looks closely at how, in order to diverge from existing temporalities, the present self must go through a prolonged process of reformation involving temporal recalibration. While doing so, it centralizes a two-tiered approach: the first layer develops a relational study of desire while the second layer ethnographically focuses on those relations. Although desire has long been treated as a product of pedagogy, disagreements about how it is formed continue. It has been suggested that desire can be recognized only when it escapes from control, as when dreams reveal forbidden sexual desires, or that desire is defined through its foundational negation or “lack,” again linked to systems of control. In questioning the existing models of desire, the approach carried in this paper treats desire and the desiring self as simultaneously relational and autonomous, entailing the formation of an autonomous desire concomitant with socially acceptable selfhoods. As a result, this paper focuses on relational recalibration, rather than emancipations. On the surface, the autonomy Istanbulite women gain by engaging in exercise may appear to be about reclaiming space: gyms, rooms, parks, streets. Certainly, their insistence on spatial autonomy in the desiring-self-making processes does intersect with the feminist literature on space. However, this paper suggests a more fine-grained approach. Through exercise, women regain control of their own time and movements insofar as they restructure their daily habits. This control, experienced as a form of liberation from former socially-imposed routines that I call time regimes, resynchronizes the body to a newly patterned temporality. By focusing on the changes in Istanbulite women’s time-regimes and daily routines, this paper analyses changes, and rhythms in the way they reflect women’s desire to form a new selfhood by using exercise as an “altchronic practice”. These altchronic practices alter former temporalities to form new, idiosyncratic ones suited to the new self. By examining exercise as an embodied experience with temporal patterns, beats, and rhythms, the paper studies the entangled aspect of enjoyment, how women experience exercise as desirable, and how it can alter the individual woman’s relationship with her lifestyle and her society.