Touch, Gaze, & the Heteropenetrative State

This chapter examines the role of the sensorium—particularly touch and the gaze—in materializing the surfaces and the contours of a body’s sex. The first part shows how the institutional fixation on penetration develops specific proximities and forms of touch by the state on and in the bodies of trans women, which in turn plays a pivotal role in the institutional production of sex/gender difference and the normative regulation of sexuality, desire, and sex/gender in Turkey. I call these institutional forms of touch and proximities violent intimacies of the state. The second half of the chapter broadens the conceptual framework of violent intimacies by redirecting the attention from the medicolegal environment of the state to the role of the sensorium in everyday encounters with the sex/gender-transgressive body. It focuses on the sexual/gendered gaze as a structuring and materializing force in the corporeality of everyday life.