Queerness is an index of the things people say about us, our personal traumas, sexual experiences, the institutions that help us and harm us, the movies that make no effort to represent us, the politicians that inspire majorities to assault us. How do we talk about queer politics if the power relations we find ourselves in are so diverse, so dramatically different across the board? It is not simply that the state confines us. It's everyday life, public encounters, banal objects, subjective and physical experiences that result in unique power relationships between queers and institutions. What's more, we shape these politics as much as we are shaped by them. In this work, I demonstrate the diverging, fluctuating ways queer and trans people are governed in contemporary Turkey.

I draw upon archival and interview data to explore the ways that queers are materialized and the political consequences of these constructions. Chapter 1 explores the genealogy of heteropatriarchal state-making, historically situating the embeddedness of homophobia within Turkish institutions. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the processes and components which give rise to the idea of queer and trans bodies, focusing on how institutions interact to define and marginalize queer others. I consider how the family, the state, Turkish Islam, and the media assemble negative understandings of queer bodies. I also explore how queer resistance emerges from this experience of marginalization. In Chapter 4, I explore the particular ways trans identity is codified, both by marginalizing processes and by trans people themselves. This is demonstrated in my final Chapter 5, wherein I consider the Gezi Park uprisings of 2013 as a kind of ‘queer common’, or a renegotiation of the queer assemblage. The queer common exemplifies the possibilities for resistance created alongside institutional acts of power. An assemblage itself, this text foregrounds the fluctuating relationships between queer others and local, national, and international processes.