This panel engages with the way that border crossing complicates gendered embodiment, rights, and belonging in a transnational context. We analyze forms of precarity that unsettle the normative notions of citizenship, religiosity, intimacy, and space. How would disrupting binaries of public/private, citizen/refugee, secular/religious, man/woman, and pure/impure change our understanding of gendered embodiment, rights, and belonging? How does crossing affective, discursive, and material borders simultaneously challenge and reify the unyielding boundaries that produce and regulate proper gendered subjects? What can be said about the spectacle of border crossing in relation to vulnerability, disposability and rights? What are the temporal and spatial politics and economies of crossing when democratization, settler colonial, and empire-building projects deploy gendered subjects?
Our panel analyzes forms of embodiment that unsettle the boundaries of life and death, online and offline, secular and religious, and refugee and citizen. We tackle a range of issues that include the politics of life and death in relation to the Iranian transgender and queer refugee applicants in Turkey, private and public embodiments of Muslim womanhood in the Egyptian digital sphere, Sunni mourning practices and the intimate economies of touch in relationship to transgender bodies in Turkey, and the relationship between empire, law, gender, immigration, and Palestinian activism in the U.S. Through these ethnographic and historical accounts, we seek to complicate uncritical notions of border crossing and belonging in the Middle East.
"Queer Times: Refugee Rights and Its Discontents" explores the way that Iranian queer and transgender refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition, where rightfulness and rightlessness come to a temporal standstill. Moving to an online space, "#Hijababes: Performing Muslim Cool on Instagram and Facebook" explores embodiments on online platforms as networked performances that give rise to a new concept of Muslim womanhood. In a different context of activism, "Law and its Gendering of Palestinian Activism in the LA8 Case" evaluates the gendered construction of Palestinian male activist by the law, highlighting the concomitant erasure of the Palestinian women activists. Lastly, "Mortal Intimacies: Transgender Funerals, Mourning and Caring for the Dead in Turkey" discusses the relationship between mourning, intimacy and gender/sex transgression by focusing on transgender people's funerals and burial practices in Turkey. Together, the papers on this panel highlight the capacities and limitations of gendered and sexed performances of belonging, in a time when claims to rights and rites become less certain in the in-between zones of embodiment.
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Sima Shakhsari
According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), between 2011 and 2017, Turkey has received over 387,000 non-Syrian asylum applications, mostly from Afghanistan, Iraq, and Iran. The significant surge in the number of non-Syrian asylum applications in Turkey in recent years- in comparison to 77,000 applications received between 1995 and 2010- is mainly due to sectarian violence in Iraq and the economic sanctions on Iran. The second wave of migration of thousands of Afghani refugees from Iran and the increased number of refugees from Iraq have resulted in a backlog of pending cases in the UNHCR offices in Turkey, which in turn has significantly lengthened the bureaucratic process. The harsh living conditions for many queer and trans refugees and the long waiting period without access to basic rights have resulted in several suicides and health-related deaths among queer and trans refugees.
Using ethnographic data from interviews with the Iranian queer and transgender refugee applicants, the UNHCR, and NGOs in Turkey, I explore the way that refugee rights as a temporally and spatially contingent concept normalizes queer and transgender refugee subjects, while managing the lives and deaths of different populations. I ask, how does the productive tension between security and precarity come to demarcate rightfulness and rightlessness? How does transitioning from the naturalized domains of sexuality and citizenship to zones of indeterminacy complicate notions of rights and choice? How do regimes of transnational governmentality that include NGOs, multiple states, internet technologies, diasporas, and medical and psychological institutions come to regulate transgender and queer refugee lives? How do transgender and queer refugees navigate "risk" as they transition across national boundaries, sexual norms, geopolitical terrains, and neoliberal economies? By approaching these questions, I point to the inconsistencies in the universality of human rights and its chronopolitics. The Iranian queer and trans refugees in Turkey are suspended in an in-between zone of recognition, where rightfulness and rightlessness come together in a temporal standstill. The 'protection' of transgender and queer refugees under the rhetoric of rights in this in-between zone is tied to the management of life and death of populations in biopolitical, necropolitical, and geopolitical realms.
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Dr. Sonali Pahwa
A pharmacist in Dubai by day, and global marathon runner/mountain climber on holiday, Manal Rostom played different roles as a transnational Egyptian woman. She performed a more specifically Muslim identity in her digital homes – a personal Instagram account, and the secret Facebook group Surviving Hijab, which she administered. On Instagram, Manal showed off the Nike Pro Hijab, and her sporting adventures won her fitness fans globally. On the Surviving Hijab Facebook group, Manal appeared in live videos with simple headscarves and no makeup, explaining how members should support one another in order to keep wearing hijab despite cultural pressures. My paper analyzes her embodiments on these platforms as networked performances, toward a concept of Muslim womanhood as a dynamic digital symbol.
Approaching Muslim womanhood along spatial lines of private and public embodiment has often meant making hijab a simplified marker of religious affiliation. By looking at Manal’s performance with hijab in different venues online, I complicate the idea of women’s dress as a sign of public piety. The Facebook support group was private, and could only be joined by women. Its discourse of pious beauty overlapped verbally, but not visually, with that of Manal’s Instagram page. Different audiences for the two styles of embodying what I call Muslim cool, shaped her complementary image-voice hybrids. The affordances of each digital platform also served as different performance spaces. My ethnographic research with focus groups of young Egyptian women, showed that Manal’s audiences accepted her fragmented persona as a familiar way of performing womanhood flexibly. A preliminary hypothesis is that Manal’s digital embodiments of Muslim cool, like her portmanteau hashtag Hijababes, point to an emerging culture of piety as spectacular practice.
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Ms. Nina Farnia
U.S. imperialism in the Middle East has never been so widespread. This paper examines the foundational role of the law in the modern American empire in the Middle East. To understand the role of law and policy in empire, I conduct a case study of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee cases (commonly known as LA8), brought by activists challenging the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952. Seven of the plaintiffs were Palestinian men, and one plaintiff was a Kenyan woman, a Palestine solidarity activist who was married to one of the more prominent plaintiffs. The plaintiffs were initially targeted by the government on the basis of their political activities challenging the U.S. role throughout the world, and specifically because of their alleged ties to various political organizations in Palestine, Lebanon and Iran. They responded with an offensive lawsuit, called the LA8 case.
In this paper, I seek to evaluate the gendered construction of the Palestinian male activist by the law, highlighting the concomitant erasure of the Palestinian woman activist, and the interplay between the two dynamics. Why, when targeting a movement with a strong history of women leaders, did the state choose to exclude Palestinian women activists from its ambit of repression? Why was a Kenyan woman targeted instead? How did the role of prominent Palestinian women activists shift as a result of the lawsuit?
I argue that much like the empire itself, this case lies at the intersections of gender, race, migration, and ideology as they travel between the U.S. and the Middle East, establishing that law and policy are critical vehicles in advancing empire. As part of the project to justify empire, the law participates in the construction of the Palestinian man as violent terrorist, even in the absence of any real evidence, while at the same time erasing the history of Palestinian women’s activism and involvement in the Palestinian struggle.
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Dr. Asli Zengin
Family, gender, and sexual difference play a significant role in the organization of Muslim rituals of death, practices of mourning, and discourses of grief in Turkey – in ways similar and dissimilar to other Muslim majority countries in the Middle East. In these ritual practices, members of kin and family hold the obligations and rights to the deceased, such as washing, shrouding, burying and praying for the dead body, which I characterize as “care for the dead.” The practices of care represent the deceased body in strictly gendered ways. For instance, the coffin design, the prayers at the mosque, the washing ritual prior to burial and the rites of inhumation are different for women and men. However, when the deceased is a transgender person, their/her/his body may open an intimate social field for negotiating and contesting these practices of care.
Focusing on Sunni Muslim transgender people’s funerals and burial practices in Turkey, this paper discusses the relationship between mourning, intimacy and gender/sex transgression through the lenses of care for the dead. Specifically, I examine the intimate economies of touch that take place while preparing the deceased body for a religious afterlife. Bringing together the accounts of two Sunni Muslim corpse washers and those family members who denied to touch the sex/gender transgressive body of the deceased, I show the limits of gendered and sexual belonging in the family and the practices and discourses of mourning and grief in Turkey.
