Violent Intimacies

Violent Intimacies looks at how trans people in Turkey redefine ordinary ideas of kinship in order to survive efforts to define and repress sex and gender. State, family and religion are all cis-heteronormative institutions that shape trans lives, yet trans people also act on those institutions and change them. Aslı Zengin calls this process the "trans every day."

Zengin argues that transness in Turkey invites us to rethink violence, intimacy and the relationship between the two. In the tangled world she describes, family members, police officers, religious figures, and medical and legal personnel deal with trans people in a setting where violence is one currency and intimacy is the other.

The book combines a historiography of the Turkish trans community with ethnographic fieldwork among trans activists in Istanbul. It traces how trans people form alliances with other marginalized groups, how they contest the spatial hierarchies of the city that entrench gender and class norms, and how they push back against medical control, violence and surveillance.

Zengin is committed to theorizing trans subjectivity beyond the West. She shows how the trans every day can create moments of collective fugitivity, temporary worlds of suspension and transcendence, and spaces for restoration and recovery.