Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal IslamLGBTI Rights in Turkey: Sexuality and the State in the Middle East

Evren Savcı’s groundbreaking book and Fait Muedini’s descriptive rigor contribute to a growing body of literature in the United States and in Europe on sexual regimes and sexuality politics in the Middle East. Both books focus on the recent history of LGBTI+1 organizing in Turkey and the broader political context in which sexuality politics has taken shape; however, they depart significantly after this point.Muedini’s book is oriented toward international studies and policy, yielding a manuscript in which he employs a liberal rights-based framework to explore the various facets of LGBTI rights in Turkey including the overview of the current legal status of LGBTI people in the country, history of human rights abuses, and how nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) under a harsh climate struggle to improve the conditions for the sexually minoritized. Muedini’s extensive mapping of rights-based discourses in the LGBTI struggle in Turkey is valuable. However, there are major shortcomings and analytic weaknesses in his book, not least the lack of due attention to the growing body of feminist and queer debates on the LGBTI activism in Turkey. The second major weakness is related to this first and leaves the reader puzzled by his central research preoccupations, namely, the use of religious-based arguments to advance LGBTI rights and the question of same-sex marriage, as they appear to be projections of an outsider to the movement in Turkey rather than grounded in the fieldwork.Savcı’s Queer in Translation responds to the need to navigate such pitfalls that point to the limits of a US-centric liberal political frame. Furthermore, her book illustrates that an easy reversal of the liberal lens still leaves us with an inability to account for the complexities of sexual political movements around the world resulting in scholarly and political analyses that become counterproductive to the work of sexual liberation. Instead, Savcı offers us a theoretically innovative approach to examine contemporary sexual politics in ways that bridge on-the-ground practices with political, economic, and geopolitical analyses of the conditions in which these struggles take shape. Savcı’s work fits within queer studies, focusing on the contemporary sexual politics in relation to neoliberalism while bringing our attention to a key epistemic problem in the field. Savcı argues that studying nonnormative sexual subjectivity through the lens of anthropological difference confines the critiques of neoliberalism to US and western European contexts and situates Islam as the subjugated other of Western modernity and imperialism. Grounding her manuscript in meticulous fieldwork and years of analytic refinement, Savcı puts forth the productive paradox that Turkey’s Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (Justice and Development Party; AKP) regime presents to this lens: the marriage between neoliberalism and Islam under the AKP regime throws a wrench in queer studies’ diametrically opposed treatment of these constructs. Responding to this dilemma, Savcı provides a painstaking queer critique aimed at neoliberal Islam in ways that neither relegate the notion of freedom to liberal capitalism nor reproduce Islam as a homogeneous entity that represents radical alterity to Western liberal cultural and political economies. In an effort to do so, Savcı grounds her work in the historical and geopolitical contextualization of Islam while she also proposes translation (adopted from critical translation studies) as a methodology to study the circulation of transnational political discourses regarding gendered and sexual minorities in the so-called non-West.In Muedini’s LGBTI Rights in Turkey, Islam takes a central place largely because of Muedini’s assumption that LGBTI struggles in Muslim-majority countries are shaped first and foremost by the cultural effects of Islam. In the introduction and chapter 1, as well as to a lesser degree in chapter 2, Muedini draws links between LGBTI politics and Islam. He discusses public opinion of homosexuality in Turkey and in the “Muslim World” at large, points out homophobic declarations of governmental officials and their justification of discrimination by citing incompatibility between homosexuality and the Islamic faith, and finally draws our attention to the debates on what Islamic jurisprudence has to say on homosexuality. Assuming that it is these debates that drive LGBTI oppression as well as liberation, Muedini discusses how religion should be used to create social change through reinterpretations of Islam that foster LGBTI acceptance. Muedini notes that none of the LGBTI activists and organizations that he interviewed in Turkey had this particular strategy in their agenda and that they either found themselves unequipped to engage with matters of Islam pertaining to LGBTI issues or did not want to take the risk of a religious conservative backlash. Although Muedini argues that approaching LGBTI rights advocacy from an Islamic perspective is both innovative and politically effective (216), neither is tenable considering the limits exposed in the debates among LGBTI and Muslim activists in the first decade of the 2000s in Turkey, a brief account of which is found in Savcı’s book (49–51). Although it is understandable that Muedini’s fieldwork took place during the summer of 2015, with follow-up interviews in the spring of 2016, causing him to miss the debates years earlier, his work would likely benefit LGBTI people more had he directed his field research along with his advocacy for religion-based LGBTI acceptance to Muslim clerics in Turkey, as they seem to be the key actors in his strategy.Savcı’s Queer in Translation engages with religion by grounding (Sunni) Islam in its political-economic context under Turkey’s AKP government. In chapter 1 she turns her attention to a moment in 2008 when LGBT politics intersected with the struggle for Muslim women to wear the Islamic headscarf in public universities and offices, which was outlawed at the time. As Savcı explains, these groups came together by the simultaneous association of human rights with LGBT activism as well as the right to wear the headscarf during the debates over the AKP government’s liberalization campaign as part of the EU accession process. However, due to the particular history and political rivalry between secularists and Islamists in Turkey, LGBT rights ended up getting deployed (by those who are not LGBT activists) as a litmus test to measure, if not to provoke, the red line of democratization imagined by a pro-West, proglobalization, pro–big business Islamist government, and Muslim-identified grassroots activists. Shifting her focus beyond a limiting evaluation of the liberal human rights framework as such, Savcı illustrates the multiplicity and complexity of the responses produced during these debates that render the secular/religious binary untenable in terms of political alliance in Turkey and also point to how not only the notion of human rights but also its poststructuralist critique travels and gets translated in a transnationally linked world, further destabilizing the authentic/colonial binary in the analyses of modern political discourse.Muedini’s extensive overview of the discrimination, inequalities, and violence experienced by LGBTI people in Turkey, along with the history of LGBTI organizing vis-à-vis such disgraces, makes his book a valuable resource. Muedini reviews state-sanctioned violence against LGBTI people and the promotion of homophobia, discrimination in employment, the harsh conditions faced by LGTBI refugees in Turkey, the precarity of transgender people, AKP’s legislative attempts for gay-only prisons, and media biases and restrictions on the public discussion of these issues. In addition, he presents a detailed overview of the existing legal framework in Turkey that points to the limitations in constitutional protections. His legal overview includes a number of articles from the Turkish civil and penal codes as well as the Law of Misdemeanors, which are frequently deployed against LGBTI people in the country.The Law of Misdemeanors appears in Savcı’s third chapter, while she focuses on transgender women’s access and relationship to urban space that gets restricted and controlled through transphobic interpretations of ambiguous legislation, police maltreatment and extortion, and state-condoned vigilante intimidation in areas that come under gentrification. In this chapter Savcı examines the travel and translation of the notion of hate crime. In contradistinction to the queer-studies critique of hate-crime legislation that reflects a relatively privileged desire to be folded into respectable citizenship at the cost of further criminalization of other minoritized subjects along the lines of race and class, Savcı discusses transsexual sex workers’ demands for a hate-crime law in Turkey reflecting their refusal of the neoliberal valuation of life only insofar as it legibly serves structures of power. Through a lively discussion of her ethnographic work, Savcı narrates how trans women in Turkey theorize hate as the neoliberal logic of distribution of uneven life chances by capital, the state, and civilians who commit violence in alliance with what they understand to be national ideology.Another extensive inventory in Muedini’s book is found in his discussion of LGBTI rights-based advocacy methods and approaches. Muedini dedicates four chapters to this topic, breaking it into a survey of academic and policy literature on advocacy for same-sex rights (chap. 4); the use of press, social media, and media production in LGBTI activism in Turkey (chap. 5); electoral and legislative strategies (chap. 6); and other miscellaneous forms including provision of services by LGBTI NGOs and transnational network-building practices (chap. 7). In these chapters, although the survey of the field is helpful, Muedini’s collapsing of sexuality politics into identity politics, and his interchangeable uses of LGBTI rights, sexual orientation rights, and same-sex rights, inevitably limits his discussion. Such shortcomings lead to a mismatch between Muedini’s insistence on his primary research interests, namely, religion-based advocacy for LGBTI rights and same-sex marriage, and the LGBTI organizers’ indifference to these topics. Muedini partly acknowledges this in his brief discussion of assimilationist versus liberationist strategies; however, his discussion reflects a rather limited engagement with the existing debates on LGBTI politics and normativity, rendering him a well-meaning ally yet a largely unequipped contributor to the academic and activist responses to social injustices.The second chapter in Savcı’s book investigates the limits of neoliberal minority politics while focusing on the national and international responses to the murder of a young gay man, Ahmet Yildiz, in Istanbul in 2008. Despite the uncertainties about who committed the killing at the time, the hastened framing of Ahmet’s death as “Turkey’s first gay honor killing” by the British newspaper the Independent hurled Ahmet’s case into the middle of a disjuncture produced by the travel and translation of outness, queer families (of choice), and honor killings. Savcı traces this disjuncture to expose how the media framing of Ahmet’s murder through the lens of liberal minority politics reified outness as a gay social good, family violence and oppression as an “Eastern” form of backwardness, and politics as the right of the legible liberal subjects to individual happiness.In chapter 4 Savcı recenters the question of possibilities for political solidarities and resistance across social difference. She juxtaposes a moment of failed coalition building between LGBT activists and queer identified clients of a women-only bar in Istanbul with a moment of radical solidarity established between LGBT activists and nonactivists during the Gezi Park uprising in 2013. In the first instance, Savcı points out that the cultural capital of the activists who were informed by academic theories on gender identity and sexual orientation combined with their critical attitudes worked to alienate the mostly working-class clientele of the bar. In the second instance, Savcı discusses how the AKP regime’s dismissive treatment of protesters as unrespectable others brought together subjects from disparate walks of life in their common rejection of the neoliberal Islamic call for conservative consumer respectability. In her discussion of these cases, Savcı invites us to consider the limits of critique as a political mode of engagement for progressive politics and draws our attention to the political potential of imperfect collectivities in resisting the neoliberal disenchantment of politics and redefining life beyond its neoliberal seizure.In conclusion, Muedini’s book highlights numerous entry points that the LGBTI organizers find to intervene into the political mechanisms that impact their lives. The breadth of the topics covered makes the book a valuable resource for researchers and educators with the caveat of major gaps in the book’s analytic basis resulting in the reproduction of essentialist and reductive tendencies. Savcı’s book presents us with significant contributions in theoretical framing and methodology. She grounds religion in history and political economy and introduces critical translation studies by way of working against discursive foreclosures that haunt the queer-studies analyses of social movements. Savcı’s genealogical mapping of the current debates and analytics in queer studies, combined with her exemplary intervention into the field, will be useful for experts and novices alike. Furthermore, I believe that her work will contribute greatly to coalition building for sexual liberation with her scholarly example of how to think through the complexities and nuances that circulate under the signifier Islam and the sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.