Derived from Persian, can in Turkish is broadly used to denote the feelings of love, being loved, living-ness, and soul. It is deeply ingrained in poetry, the vernacular, and the religious traditions of Alevi people, a Muslim minority in Turkey. The companions of the Alevi spiritual path (Turkish: yol) are called can (soul). The path is a learning process to worship and reach God, often called ‘Hakk’ or ‘Truth,’ as a journey toward selfhood—an inner and deep spiritual being beyond the physical form. When people enter cemevleri, Alevis’ places of worship, they are no longer women and men but become can (soul). In my talk, by situating can as an organizing trajectory of the Alevi life, I focus on the ways it is expressed, from everyday talk to religious/cultural rituals, such as the funerals of transgender people in cemevleri. By centering ethnographic accounts from my research with Alevi communities, including queer and trans Alevis, I discuss how they re-interpret, connect with, and act upon can as a spiritual, humanist, and genderless entity for treating human and body without sexual and gender hierarchies. I suggest that this holds a potentiality to challenge the normative conceptions established by the Turkish state that has historically associated Alevi, queer, and trans populations with “deviant” and “uncivilized” ways of living. It also invites us to rethink, from a minoritized Islamic perspective, the naturalized version of gendered modern humanness that hinges on the Western conceptions of liberal humanism on which Turkish nation-building continues to rely. What, then, do the Alevi practices that honor “can” teach us about queer forms of belonging and worldmaking? I contribute to this roundtable by engaging with linguistic, material, and affective resources of the Alevi lifeworld to demonstrate that the idea of ‘becoming can’—while it is not always mentioned by name and not marked as “queer”—potentially help us develop nuanced understandings of queerness, human-ness, and body. In addition, I also focus on the ethical conundrums of and discursive politics behind this term. I attend to the deployment of can in the widespread rhetoric of gender equality among Alevis, such as ‘we are all cans (souls) and therefore equals,’ and juxtapose it with the lived experiences of queer/trans Alevis. I consider what it is like to embody the teachings of can without forgoing ethical practices—in relationships and social action within and beyond language.

Lubunya, a queer/trans vernacular term in Turkey, historically encompassed trans women, trans femmes and feminine gay men, as well as individuals occupying liminal positions between the three. However, since 2019, lubunya has seen a broader adoption and acceptance within the wider LGBTI+ community in Turkey. This expanded usage now includes non-trans lesbians, queer women/femmes, trans men/masculine people, and non-binary people. This shift in the use of lubunya reflects intriguing stories about the porosity of categorical borders, as much as the interconnectedness of word-making and world-making practices of queer and trans people. I argue that the recent inclusivity of lubunya towards a broader spectrum of LGBTI+ people is linked to the formation of new alliances among feminist, queer and trans groups around transfeminism. These alliances emerged especially in reaction to the local forms and discourses of anti-trans politics in Turkey, which have intensified within a global context of increasing anti-trans sentiment and political backlash. To support this argument, I will examine two specific scenes that underscore the existing tensions between trans-exclusionary feminists and a coalition of activists, including trans, queer and non-trans women. The first scene is the International Women’s Day March in 2011, which marked the beginning of a series of contentious debates surrounding feminist gender essentialist claims that positioned certain feminist women as gatekeepers of the category of “woman.” The second scene is the intensification of the trans-exclusionary feminist discourse in 2018 concerning the use of puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy among trans children and youth. Both scenes ignited deep-seated biases, particularly against trans women, manifesting in the form of transmisogyny, which continues to persist intermittently to this day. As disputes unfolded primarily on social media platforms, they garnered attention from a broader audience, leading to growing support for trans and queer people among academics, journalists, human rights lawyers, NGO workers, some political parties, in addition to feminists and members of the LGBTI+ community nationwide. Consequently, I argue that the recent reclaim of lubunya is a product of this stimulating environment, characterized by the burgeoning coalitional world of queer, trans and feminist activists.

Gender-inclusivity is often imagined and theorized in the narrow framework of gender-inclusive language, which is then further reduced to gender-inclusive pronouns. Without reifying linguistic and cultural difference, my contribution reflects on the affective dimensions of language in order to interrogate the “inclusive” in the term “gender-inclusive.” More specifically, I ask: What role does language and linguistic relationality play in various subjects’ feelings of intimate belonging beyond the “inclusivity” pronouns may or may not provide? How do terms of ungendered endearment, such as “aşkım” (Turkish: my love, lover), “canım” (Turkish: my soul), “hayatım” (my life) or “habibi” (Arabic: my love) create affective worlds in which queer and trans subjects feel at home and in their gender, without being necessarily gendered? How are we hailed in intimate ways by these terms that feel linguistically and culturally specific, and is it possible to respond to such affective interpellation without reifying cultural and linguistic difference? Much ink has been spelled on the injurious qualities of language, especially in late modernity. This project turns to the capacity for language to intimately hold subjects beyond gender. Reflecting on ways our existence already happens in contexts of “intimacy beyond gender,” including linguistically, opens up room to imagine models of belonging beyond inclusion.

Arabic Trans-gender Metaphysics, Some Notes on Language, Materiality and Morality This submission considers the metaphysics of the Arabic language as a potentially fruitful site from which to theorize trans and gender-queer subjectivities in speech and writing. I open by meditating on the ways in which the Divine is invoked in quotidian Arabic parlance and on God’s role in the creation of the Arabic language in order to couch broader claims related to the potential for trans, gender-queer, non-binary and otherwise gendered people to speak and be spoken about in more capacious and creative terms. I turn to queer and feminist theorizing, namely the works of Judith Butler, Ife Amadiume and Oyeronke Oyewumi. Specifically, I delve into an exchange that remains foundational in African gender studies, one between Nigerian anthropologist and poet, Ife Amadiume and Nigerian sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi. Both scholars worked though the absence of gendered pronouns in Igbo and Yoruba respectively, and they pointed to the material ways in which gender was made manifest without subject pronouns in property disputes, inheritance claims and other relational and material structures. In lieu of the seemingly fundamental building blocks of gendered language, gendered subject pronouns, sexual difference and gendered subjugation emerged socially, in other words and worlds. The recent turn to more capacious terms to address and refer to trans and gender non-conforming people merits a critical re-examination of the dynamics that Amadiume, Oyewumi and others have sketched out in their problematization of the circulation of “Woman”, “Third World Woman'' and other categories. Ultimately, I argue that describing languages as more or less “gendered” may obfuscate the ways in which gendered inequalities manifest within and without pronouns and, I theorize the materiality of language through Arabic in order to signal some of the challenges and possibilities of thinking, speaking and writing trans* in Arabic.