Building on an parafictional engagement with a spectral interlocutor named Zi?an, an Armenian woman who would have lived almost a century before her, the Turkish artist ?z Öztat’s multimedia work attends to events, persons, and things that have been written out of history. Based on a short story by Zi?an recounting their experience of spending a night on a mystical island, named after its shape, which, in Arabic script, spells out Cennet (Paradise) or Cinnet (Possessed), the series "Conducted in Depth and Projected at Length" (2014) takes the form of an artist book, works on paper, and sculptural objects. Written between 1915-1917, Zi?an’s story, which imagines a non-gendered community, propels Öztat’s project to imagine an archive of queer experience that has been rendered ghostly within the exclusionary logics of the modernity in tandem with a history of community, culture, and ecology decimated through several waves of genocidal violence that extend from 1915 to the present day. This paper examines Öztat’s use of queer pedagogies to approach an impossible archive and an erased history. Queer sights and insights factor in threefold: in the spectral and untimely relationship between the two women; through the parallels between the ambiguity of linguistic signs and a non-gendered community; and in the influences that shape Zi?an as a fictional figure, based equally on the recent reparative feminist and queer historiography of women writers of the Ottoman Empire and Turkey as well as the archives of the queer, anti-fascist, French artist Claude Cahun.

In this paper, I focus on the visual spectacle of otherness and close read the representations of Armenian women in the 1960s and 70s films in Yesilçam, the large and prolific film industry of Turkey. Drawing on transgender phenomenology, critical race theory, trans of color critique, and black feminist theory, I argue that those filmic representations consolidated the ungendering of Armenian women by commodifying their bodies and casting them outside of heterosexual romance plots. I show that the category of gender presented in those films is constructed not only sexually and racially but also ethnoreligiously, which exposes the contiguous relationship between ethnoreligious status and gender positionality within the post-imperial modernity of Turkey. Critiquing the erasure of the role of ethnicity and religion in the construction of (heteronormative) gender in Eurocentric gender, sexuality, and film studies, I contend that a critical analysis of Armenian women’s ethnoreligious otherness in Turkish visual culture in the 60s and 70s reveals how the exclusions from normative gender structures have, more often than not, been determined non-biomedically. I conclude by discussing how those filmic representations tell us a different story about gender and sexuality, one whose boundaries and conditions of (im)possibility are not demarcated by the sexological archives of the West.

In this paper, I discuss French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou’s theatrical performance The Ring of the Dove (2018) which debuted in 2018 in Rouen, France. Marking a shift from his previous work in scale as it included other performers, operatic singing, and light and sound elements, for this piece, Mehdi-Georges drew inspiration from an eleventh-century treatise on love by Al-Andalusian philosopher Ibn Hazm. The performance centered on absurdity and confusion, blurring the rigid distinctions between the East and the West, the past and the present, male and female by imagining the historical memory of Islamic Spain as a queer spectacle in the contemporary space and place of France. Mehdi-Georges and French dancer Killian Madeleine dance under Arabesque patterned lights, an array of prayer rugs, and a swinging incense burner—among other elements of self-consciously orientalizing camp. Dressed at various points in red stilettos and neutral-toned niqabs, the two perform a queer, genderfluid dance of desire for the other. Adding to this fluidity and indistinction, the vocalist for the performance, Jorg Delfos, is a classically trained, Dutch opera singer. Mehdi-Georges composed the opera in Arabic, which Delfos does not speak. What I highlight in my discussion of The Ring of the Dove is how it traffics in orientalizing stereotypes but it refuses to settle into a cohesive narrative. It challenges and disrupts, confusing the boundaries between categories. Like much of Mehdi-Georges’s practice, it confuses our memory—of the past and present, of the here and there—in a queer, genderfluid act of disorientation.

As the first total war experience of the century, World War I altered the social, political, and cultural orders and structures of the warring states. The high death toll on the battlefront and people’s suffering from famine, poverty, and epidemics on the home front engendered death as a part of everyday life and a transnational phenomenon that altered the meanings attached to social categories, particularly gender, age, and sexuality, according to the sociopolitical setting of the time. This paper explores the visual and literary representations of martyrdom in the Ottoman Empire during World War I through the lens of gender and sexuality studies. By using queer theory and feminist concept-analysis, I argue that dying on the battlefront, as a personal yet highly politicized experience, had two contrasting yet interlinked functions. On the one hand, from the perspective of the wartime government and its intellectual allies, the body of martyr represented the ideal masculine subjecthood that they wanted to cultivate in and through the bodies of Turkish-Muslim youth. Besides, the heroic sacrifice that martyrdom embodied led to its deployment as an ideological tool to recruit young volunteers from high schools to fight on the battlefront. On the other hand, the experience of martyrdom and its various depictions in the early twentieth-century youth magazines, novels, and postcards bore eroticized undertones. Alongside being a religious phenomenon, martyr and the experience of dying on the battlefront were defined through but also shaped the wartime politics of sexuality deployed by the Ottoman government. In other words, alongside coining the norms of ideal masculinity, through its visual and literary representations, martyrdom also functioned as a sexualized phenomenon through which the unruly, or unmanly, masculinities were defined from the patriarchal perspective at the time. Employing death and martyrdom as my concept of analysis, this paper offers a reading of death and martyrdom in the sociopolitical setting of World War I by locating it at the intersection of religious, national, and sexual discourses of the period. By using Red Crescent postcards, as well as literary and visual depictions of martyrdom in two Ottoman periodicals for children and youth, Talebe Defteri and Konya Oksuz Yurdu magazine, I contribute to the panel through a reading of visual and literary representations of martyrdom and its significant role in constructing hegemonic and alternative masculine subjectivities.