Global South Gender & Sexuality Collective: Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World

In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity, and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.

Asli Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in Istanbul (Iktidarin Mahremiyeti: Istanbul’da Hayat Kadinlari, Seks Isciligi ve Siddet), was published in Turkish. Her new book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World, was recently published by Duke University Press and won the 2024 Ruth Benedict Prize from the Association for Queer Anthropology. Dr. Zengin's research lies at the intersection of ethnography of sex/gender non-conforming lives and deaths; medico-legal regimes of sex, gender, and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; politics of mourning and grief; and transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements in the Middle East, with a special focus on Turkey.