One of the most frustrating things about researching the governance of queer lives is that queerness itself means something different to everyone. It is hard to demonstrate that ‘LGBTQ’ is a coherent category, especially when you start talking to people and realize that their priorities are entirely contradictory to those with whom you last spoke. To say something resolute about how governance occurs for queers and what is to be done is, I think, difficult. This is why queer assemblage thinking has been so useful. It allowed me an ‘in’ to understanding the governance of queer lives in terms of the institutions that participants identified as being oppressive or enabling. Suddenly, the assembled nature of queer identity in Turkey became very apparent to me: queerness is produced all the time between the interactions of queers and the state, the government, the police, the media, the family, medicine, the internet, and so on. Queer assemblage thinking demonstrates that all of these institutional interactions impact people's lives, maybe not in indicating quantifiably to what degree for each person but that they shape understandings of queer identity, nonetheless.

I believe such an approach confirms what Weber (after Enloe) refers to as ‘queer intellectual curiosity’ as a focus on how sexuality and gender is defined, attached to bodies, and performed in global politics, as opposed to sexuality constituting a kind of ‘special interest’ (Weber, 2015, p. 11). As queer assemblage thinking shows, placing sexuality at the front and centre of political research underlines the breadth of institutional marginalization upon other bodies. It also demonstrates how strategies of resistance grow in the cracks of a marginalizing governmentality.

As part of the queer assemblage, I found that my own feelings and social encounters shaped my fieldwork and research outcomes. I believe that including these here in the final text are a crucial part of thinking queerly and disturbing some of the disciplinary norms regarding the conduct of political research. If anything, my experiences during my PhD felt more like an assemblage of unforeseen, ambiguous, and anxiety-provoking encounters than a straightforward plan. It is only after the fact that I have formulated these irrationalities into something meaningfully coherent.