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.

Aslı Zengin is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University.

Abbreviations  ix
Preface  xi
Acknowledgments  xvii
Introduction. Violence and Intimacy  1
1. Displacement as Emplacement  37
2. Extralegality, Surveillance, and Police Violence  68
3. Psychiatric Demarcation of Sex/Gender  98
4. Touch, Gaze, and the Heteropenetrative State  130
5. Justice, Criminal Law, and Trans Femicides  151
6. Funerals and Experiments with Trans Kin  170
Coda  197
Appendix: On Method and Methodology  205
Notes  209
Bibliography  237
Index  265