Third Space Masculinities: Unnamed Sexualities in Turkey

Grounded in everyday life, the practice of male same-sex relations is neither uncommon nor a dominant trend but rather a renegotiated space for many young men in Turkey today. This unnamed practice creates a “third space” that forms and transforms young men’s alternative sexual subject positions. My conversations with young men revealed that in this third space the male body comes to terms with a new form of masculinity and male sexual pleasure that destabilizes both heteronormativity and homosexuality. I conducted fieldwork in Ankara, Turkey, between 2003 and 2005 to study the rhetorical uses of language in the context of virginity examinations. My study was based on participatory action research methods, and my field sites included a squatter settlement, a village, and an upper-class neighborhood. While there is a large literature on homosexuality and same-sex relations in Iran and the Arab world, this essay adds to the emerging scholarship that...