Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World

This book is about creative and constructive tensions between violent efforts to define and disambiguate sex/gender transgression, on the one hand, and trans people’s incessant everyday negotiations with these efforts, on the other. As much as trans people are shaped by the cisheteronormative powers of the state, the family, and religion, they also act on these powers to transform them. The book argues that everyday troubles with sex/gender transgression in personal, social, and institutional life shape trans lives and deaths, as well as state power, family and kinship, regimes of sexuality and gender, urban geography, and feminist and LGBTI+ activism in Turkey. In order to understand this entangled world of the trans everyday, the book offers a novel concept, violent intimacies, and shows how transness in Turkey theoretically makes us rethink the notions of violence and intimacy and the relationship between them. Violent intimacies exposes the connective tissue of a cisheteronormative social order that is intertwined with neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical order, and authoritarian management of social difference. Incorporating intersectional aspects of the trans everyday in a single framework, each chapter illustrates a specific site of violent intimacy from which violent manifestations of intimacy or intimate manifestations of violence emerge: the street, the police, the medical institution, the legal domain, the family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals.