The climate of authoritarianism and neoliberalism, increasing uncertainties, securitization of borders, and shrinking rights and freedoms pervade people's lives in the Middle East and elsewhere. These profound transformations unevenly effect queer and trans communities, marginalizing and criminalizing them, restricting their political organizing and cultural production, and controlling their bodies, mobilities, and labor. This panel offers a multidisciplinary and multinational exploration of the everyday, intimate, and resilient work of queer and trans communities to create more liveable presents and imagine more desirable futures. The papers take queerness not merely as a non-normative subject position, but as a means of understanding larger geopolitical and economic processes that shape the region's present as well as an insistence on the "potentiality" for alternative futures.
The panel begins with an ethnographic analysis of how the figure of the "homosexual" is taken up by Armenian right-wing nationalists, journalists, and politicians as a perverse subject/object. It argues that queerness produces national anxieties regarding the nation's heroic past, its fissured presents, and its potential futures. The second paper addresses the recent censorship on queer films and government bans on queer events in Turkey and Armenia. While these authoritarian measures aim to suppress queer movements, this paper illustrates how restrictions have created trans-local alliances and novel forms of collaboration between LGBTQ communities in these countries. The third paper traces the circulation of the term "queer" in different cultural venues, NGOs, and quasi-academic settings in Istanbul. Through participant observation and literary analysis, it explores the meaning(s) of queer as well as the limits and potentials of queer theory in contemporary Turkey. The fourth paper focuses on the experiences of Iranian LGBTQ refugees in Turkey awaiting resettlement to North America. It illustrates how refugees use collaborative cultural production and independent art to create meaningful lives and solidarity networks despite prolonged waiting, economic insecurity, and restricted mobility. The final paper draws on Italian leftist intellectual Pasolini's visit to Beirut in 1974 and develops an imagined itinerary of Pasolini in present-day Beirut to explore the relation between LGBT rights and neoliberal ideologies. Based on Pasolini's personal letters and Lebanese newspaper clippings, it reclaims forgotten queer histories to ponder the state of queerness in the Middle East and to offer a queer space for speculation over the future of the region. Taken together, these works explore the "emergent" practices, meanings, intimacies, and temporalities that queerness might open in an age of increasing authoritarianism and neoliberalism.
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Since independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the Republic of Armenia has faced a number of political and economic challenges that have produced national anxieties regarding the nation’s past, its fissured presents, and its potential futures. Since 2012, many of these national anxieties – especially those regarding present and future – have most cogently been expressed through the formation of what I call the figure of the homosexual. This figure has been especially prominent within the discourses and actions of right-wing nationalists, for whom he – as this figure is often masculinized – represents the ultimate signifier of national decline and futures made impossible. In this paper, I draw on ongoing ethnographic research I have been conducting in Armenia since August 2012 on the ways in which homosexuality is taken up by Armenian right-wing nationalists, journalists, politicians, and others who borrow from these discourses that have become mainstream. This paper takes up queerness not in its conceptualization of sexual and gender non-normative subject position, but rather as a means of understanding national anxiety. I borrow from queer theory’s interest in temporality (Edelman 2004, Munoz 2009, Grosz 2004) and bad feelings (Popa 2017, Ahmed 2006) to think about how queerness might be understood as an affective (anxious) orientation to the nation and its time. I argue that the figure of the homosexual, often deemed as a sexually perverse subject/object (aylaserutyun), emerged in Armenia as a way of expressing a sense of national moral perversion (aylandakutyun) – in other words, to make sense of the improper paths of the present that have strayed from the heroic past and are producing dangerous, improper futures in an era of authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and constrained geopolitical formations. While we might desire a reading that condemns these discourses as homophobic, I suggest that reading them as performatively queering Armenia instead allows us to see larger political and economic processes as they cross paths with experiences of gender and sexuality.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. 2006. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Grosz, Elizabeth. 2004. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution, and the Untimely Durham: Duke University Press.
Munoz, Jose Esteban. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: New York University Press.
Popa, Bogdan. 2017. Shame: A Genealogy of Queer Practices in the 19th Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
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Esra Ozban
In July 2017, 14th Golden Apricot International Film Festival canceled its “Armenians: Internal and External Views” program, after the Union of Cinematographers in Armenia made a call that the two LGBTI+ films “Listen to Me: Untold Stories beyond Hatred” and “Apricot Groves” to be removed from the program. As an act of solidarity against the censorship and to create a bridge between queer movements in Turkey and Armenia--where the land borders have been closed since 1993--Pink Life Queerfest, the only film festival in Turkey, offered to screen the films in their 7th edition and invited activists and filmmakers from Armenia to the festival which would take place on January 2018 in Ankara. Yet, soon enough, the Turkish state issued a blanket ban that prohibits all LGBTI+ events for an indefinite period on the grounds of threatening “social sensitivities and sensibilities,” “public security,” “public health,” “public morality”. Thus, 7th Pink Life QueerFest could not be realized in Ankara as it was planned. Although these bans and restrictions aimed to suppress queer movements and impede queer cultural production, this paper illustrates how they have created an unprecedented alliance between queer and trans communities in Armenia and Turkey. I explore how Turkish and Armenian artists and activists came together and organized the “Beyond Borders, Beyond Censorship: Armenia LGBTI+ Cinema” program with two films that were censored in Armenia as well as ?”Beyond Borders, Beyond Censorship: LGBTI+ Movement in Armenia and Turkey” panel. Based on auto-ethnographic explorations of these two events as well as the oral history interviews with participants, organizers, and the audience, I analyze the potentiality of censorships/bans to create new intimacies, trans-local solidarities, and novel alliances between Turkey and Armenia despite ongoing geopolitical disputes.
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Ms. Ipek Sahinler
This ethnographic paper investigates the meaning(s) of the term “queer” in Turkey, drawing on the talks, seminars, and workshops I co/organized on queer theory in different cultural venues and NGOs in Istanbul between 2017 and 2019. I first explore the workshops held in Boysan’in Evi (Boysan’s House), which is a non-profit event venue dedicated to shed light upon LGBT+ communities in Turkey. Established in 2016, it is a unique body that keeps a record of the collective history of non-normative identities in Turkey and does it always in memory of Boysan Yakar, the untimely deceased LGBT+ and human rights activist. The workshop in Boysan’in Evi brought together people from different backgrounds and provided a space of encounter for their varying opinions of queer. I then focus on the literary seminar series held at SPoD (Social Policies, Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation Studies Association), which traced the lineage of the “minor” within Turkish literature. Drawing on critical queer theories elaborated by Butler, Smith, Warner, Edelman and Sullivan, the seminar series investigated the anti-institutional and decolonizing stances within overlooked writings.
Through this assemblative framework, which brings together sites of cultural production, communal organizing, and academia, this paper analyzes the limits and potentials of using queer as a method of critical engagement in Turkey. I ask: How is the term queer understood? Is it a nameable category of sexual identity for most people? Can we actually talk about a queer movement in Turkey? How do these two venues act as spaces of encounter, resistance and coexistence contra the ever-mounting authoritarian climate in Turkey? Finally, what are the ways in which these events and encounters help us imagine a queer futurity, or, in José Esteban Muñoz’s words, “a horizon of possibilities” in Turkey?
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Elif Sari
Facing gender and sexuality-based violence in Iran, many LGBTQ individuals leave their home country and lodge asylum claims in Turkey. Since Turkey does not provide long-term settlement for non-European refugees, Iranian asylum seekers temporarily reside in Turkish towns and await resettlement to a third country, mostly the United States and Canada. This paper focuses on a critical time period in which this “temporary transit” has turned into a condition of “indefinite waiting.” As North American countries have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies since 2014, the prospects for LGBTQ refugee resettlement have grown increasingly dim. Even applicants who have completed necessary asylum procedures and have been formally eligible for resettlement for years are still stranded in Turkey with insecure legal status. As they face an uncertain future, Iranian LGBTQ refugees also live difficult lives in Turkey. They dwell in small towns, where they have restricted mobility: they have to “sign-in” regularly at the local immigration offices, and even a short trip to a nearby town puts them under the risk of deportation unless they secure a “travel permit” from the local immigration authorities. While waiting for resettlement, they face constant verbal and sexual harassment from local townspeople and other refugees; work insecure and heavy jobs in textile and marble factories; and are denied housing, evicted from apartments, and fired from jobs when their LGBTQ status becomes known.
Based on two years of ethnographic research, this paper explores the emergent artistic practices and collaborations in this precarious and undetermined period of waiting. Through an ethnographic exploration of refugees’ collective podcast production, exhibitions, and queer film events, I illustrate how refugees use collaborative cultural production and independent art to create more meaningful lives as well as to maintain hope for an imagined future despite prolonged waiting, economic insecurity, and restricted mobility. I argue that while waiting serves to govern, demobilize, and demoralize refugees, Iranian LGBTQ refugees turn it into an “active time-space,” in which they create new spaces of artistic expression, transform their environments, and establish new alliances and solidarities with Turkish artists and activists.
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Dr. Raed El Rafei
In 1974, Italian leftist intellectual, poet and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini visited Beirut. He screened his films, Medea, Porcile and Oedipus Rey, known for their critical stance towards patriarchy and capitalism. The screenings were held at Dar al-Fan, House of the Arts, a leading cultural space that no longer exists. In 1975, Pasolini was brutally assassinated near Rome. Some believed his homosexuality was the cause of his killing at the hands of a young male hustler. Others evoked his radical anti-capitalist views as the reason behind his assassination. Curiously, that same year, Beirut witnessed the eruption of a long-drawn-out civil war. An odd osmosis of tragic destinies linked the Marxist, queer poet to the bustling city, a laboratory, at the time, for socially and intellectually progressive ideologies.
This paper departs from Pasolini's visit to Beirut (based on letters preserved at his personal archive in Florence and Lebanese newspaper clippings) to ponder the state of queerness in the Middle East today and the relation between LGBT rights and neo-liberal realities. Inspired by Ann Cvetkovich's writing on the affective dimension of archives and Maya Mikdashi's elaboration of a fictional Arab queer historical figure, I develop an imagined itinerary of Pasolini in present-day Beirut to offer a poetic, queer space for speculation over the future of the region where the sexual, the political and the mystical overlap. In an interview with a local newspaper in Beirut, Pasolini said that, "dreaming is a form of religiosity," recognizing the need to think and dream the future, otherwise. This quote is more apropos today than ever at a time when not only personal aspirations of freedom of sexuality seem elusive but also collective hopes seem trampled by continuous wars and crippling neo-liberal policies.
Using insights from queer theory, as elaborated by José Esteban Muñoz, Sara Ahmed and Jack Halberstam in an attempt to think queerness against neo-liberal ideologies, the paper explores new academic and artistic practices involving the archives to reclaim forgotten, marginal and untold queer histories but also provide speculative futures in the current quagmire facing the region.
