Abstract
This article proposes a nonsecular transfeminist critique to interrogate how labels such as political, strategic, and activist are deployed in ways that reproduce exclusionary transgender archives in Turkey. It analyzes the section on religion and spirituality from the South African Gabrielle Le Roux’s activist documentary Proudly Trans in Turkey (2012) as well as Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay’s article “Reconstructing the Transgendered Self as a Muslim, Nationalist, Upper-Class Woman” (2008), which focuses on the statements and performances of Bülent Ersoy, who has been a very popular trans public figure in Turkey since the eighties and who has, to the surprise of many, publicly embraced Islam in the last three decades. Through this analysis, this article demonstrates how a Western secular framework persistently disciplines and limits trans studies in a Turkish context by foregrounding trans people whose agency can be described in terms of resistance or subversion, thus excluding those pious Muslim trans people whose approaches differ.
On a scorching summer day in the Mediterranean city of Mersin, Turkey, in the early nineties, I remember going to the biggest mosque of the city with my grandmother for a special occasion whose details I barely recall. I was young enough to be allowed entry into the women’s prayer area where I always felt both “ambivalent” and “at home” even though my official gender classification would definitively mark me as an outsider in the years to come. I felt at home since I was among other women, yet I was ambivalent since I felt that I could never fully belong in that religious space. On that day, however, I thought for the first time that I was not the only ambivalent outsider there. There was a woman praying, ignoring the inquisitive and appalled looks of other women. Soon these women’s questioning gazes turned into hostile murmurs replete with interrogations as to how this woman who “clearly” looked like a man could dare to enter into a religious space exclusively allocated to women. In what other women saw as a source of anxiety and boundary violation, I found a source of affirmation for belonging. Nonetheless, I could not help thinking about why she felt the need to come to that space. I was there because my grandmother took me there (I doubted that I would go if I had a choice) but who or what took that woman there? Why did I even feel the need to question her existence in that quintessentially Islamic space? These questions haunted me for many years and eventually led to more interrogations: Can Islam accommodate trans people? Is the figure of a pious Muslim trans person an oxymoron par excellence? Last but not least, what kind of epistemic universe, political positionality, and cultural capital allow for the possibility to pose these questions regarding Islam and pious trans people?1
In this article, I take up these questions to interrogate how labels such as political, strategic, and activist are deployed in ways that reproduce exclusionary transgender archives in Turkey.2 First, I engage the theoretical frameworks of various trans and feminist scholars who have made important contributions to the discussions on agency, embodiment, ethics, and nonsecular feminist politics. While acknowledging the significance of their contributions, I argue that the limitations of their frameworks in terms of addressing the archival politics vis-à-vis the pious trans people in the Global South point out the need to formulate a nonsecular transfeminist analysis. In light of these discussions, I move on to the close reading of Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay’s article,3 which analyzes the statements and performances of Bülent Ersoy, who has been a very popular trans public figure in Turkey since the eighties and who has, to the surprise of many, publicly embraced Islam in the last three decades. My close reading is followed by my analysis of the section on religion and spirituality from the South African Gabrielle Le Roux’s activist documentary Proudly Trans in Turkey (2012). I show that the kind of transgender religiosity espoused by activist projects and queer scholarship risks foreclosing the possibility of engaging and rendering visible the ethical self-formation of certain pious trans people in Turkey. Hence, my examination demonstrates how a Western secular framework persistently disciplines and limits trans studies in a Turkish context by foregrounding trans people whose agency can be described in terms of resistance or subversion, thus excluding those pious Muslim trans people whose approaches differ.
Given the political and cultural stakes of this article, I should clarify three points. First, by focusing on Altınay’s article and Le Roux’s documentary, I do not imply that their politics of representation and ideological commitments are exceptionally emblematic of all the significant visual and textual literature published on transness, queerness, secularity, and religion within the context of Turkey. Rather, I argue that both of these works help exemplify, in their own unique ways, a larger epistemic concern regarding how the Eurocentric and secular deployment of concepts such as resistance, activism, and oppositional politics renders invisible the complex and dynamic relationship between transness and religion. Second, the trans people and their narratives analyzed in this article pertain to a specific (and predominantly Sunni) culture and discursive tradition, namely that of Turkey, and therefore are in no way intended to be representative of all trans communities from other Islamic traditions. What one refers to as Islamic tradition is a vastly heterogeneous signifier that displays dramatically distinct characteristics depending, among others, on geography, ethnicity, culture, language, political economy, and nationality. This heterogeneity is unambiguously reflected in the multivalent ways trans people embody or distance themselves from Islam. Third, I do not intend to make the argument that pious trans people who embrace Islam and religious discourse do so necessarily with the aim of formulating a subversive interpretation within Islamic tradition or recovering the emancipatory dimensions of a nonliberal tradition. Rather, I argue that one should resist the temptation to take concepts such as subversion, emancipation, or complicity as self-evident, highlighting instead their historically and epistemically situated axioms.
A nonsecular transfeminist analysis enables one to avoid, in Max Strassfeld’s words, “diminishing the possibilities of how we understand both trans and religion.”4 It also allows one to go beyond what I term “diagnostic reading,” which can be described as an implicit replication of the medical discourse through secular5 cultural critique when the subject matter is trans. As I show in this article, even antitransphobic and queer/feminist works risk perpetuating a diagnostic reading. They enact this reading praxis by either using trans people as exceptional tropes with which to analyze cultural, religious, political, and economic transformations that a nation undergoes, or by interpreting trans people’s relationship to various forms of institutions and state apparatuses through a subversive-complicit dyad. I contend that adopting a nonsecular transfeminist methodology and going beyond the limitations of a diagnostic reading require one not to read certain trans people’s reservations about or distance from Islam as the vindication of incommensurability between Islam and trans ontology. It also entails one to refrain from reading the pious espousal of Islam and religious discourse by trans people in Turkey as a mere masquerade driven by circumstantial survival strategies.
Secular Transgender Agency and Its Discontents
While the question of agency has been one of the central points of contention among feminist theorists, it has equally shaped the critical terrain of transgender studies since its earliest days. From the antitrans radical feminist Janice G. Raymond who, in her notorious book The Transsexual Empire, blamed society “for producing the conditions that create the transsexual body/spirit,”6 to Sandy Stone, who in her groundbreaking post-transsexual manifesto asked, “How, then, can the transsexual speak?,”7 the issue of transgender agency has defined almost every scholarship published on transgender politics. Arguably, no other scholars have made such controversial contributions to these debates as Judith Butler and Jay Prosser, who have positioned themselves on the opposite sides of the discussion. As Prosser argues, “Without doubt . . . the single text that yoked transgender most fully to queer sexuality is Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble. . . . ”8 In Gender Trouble, Butler, not very “intentionally,” conceptualized drag as the privileged subject of queer theory by virtue of its potential to offer subversive forms of homosexuality that can destabilize the assumed naturalness of heterosexuality.9 Nonetheless, in the very visibility and privilege accorded to the drag and transgender body in Butler’s theorization of gender performativity in their earlier work, some transsexual scholars saw the erasure of the embodied transsexual subject whose materiality, they argued, disappears under the discursive referent of “transgender.”10 In response to queer theory’s reclamation of the transgender as the poster child, Prosser asked: “What are the points at which the transsexual as transgendered subject is not queer?”11 In Prosser’s reading, Butler appropriates the transsexual subject only to decontextualize its material corporeality and create out of this decontextualization a transgender subject with a potentially subversive politics. In other words, the figure of the transsexual with its materiality and literality constitutes the limits of queer politics represented through the figure of the discursively constructed and subversive transgender. This precarious position of the transsexual in Butler’s theory of performativity not only leads, according to Prosser, to the erasure of the transsexual agency that is now read as potentially reinscriptive and literalizing but also serves to valorize the transgender agency as the potential catalyst of sexual and gender insubordination. However, if Butler’s earlier theoretical framework erases the transsexual agency through abstraction and valorizes the subversive modalities of the transgender agency,12 I argue that Prosser’s critique is equally guilty of erasure, one that operates through the concealment of the secular and Western cultural capital that sustains the autonomous agency of the transsexual subject. In his desire to ensure that the referential transsexual subject does not disappear in queer politics, Prosser universalizes the authorial agency of the transsexual subject by locating the transsexual in the secular and sexological archives of the Global North.
When Prosser reclaims autobiography as an empowering genre central to the subjective constitution of transsexual people, he challenges the disempowering use of autobiography as the only genre through which transsexual people were allowed to speak and become intelligible to a nontranssexual audience. Prosser states that “whether s/he publishes an autobiography or not, then, every transsexual, as a transsexual, is originally an autobiographer.”13 He goes on to emphasize the centrality of the autobiographical narrative by arguing that “narrative is also a kind of second skin: the story the transsexual must weave around the body in order that this body may be ‘read.’”14 Prosser’s description of the transsexual as an original authorial subject is grounded in the transsexual’s discursive and material interaction with the clinician’s office since, as he argues, “The autobiographical act for the transsexual begins even before the published autobiography—namely in the clinician’s office where, in order to be diagnosed as transsexual, s/he must recount a transsexual autobiography.”15 I argue that it is precisely this spatial and cultural construction of transsexual agency that centers the secular trans subject of the Global North. In Prosser’s framework, transsexual agency only becomes legible and intelligible when read through Western sexological archives.16 In that sense, Prosser’s valorization of the referential transsexuality in response to the transgender’s theoretical popularity in queer politics conceals the role of the Western sexological and cultural capital in the formation of the secular transsexual subject. To the extent that Prosser’s account of transsexual agency challenges the universality of agency-as-resistance, it does not interrogate the liberal conception of the transsexual as an autonomous being, nor does it problematize the construction of the trans subject as inherently Western. Despite his nuanced critique of the erasure of the transsexual through figuration and abstraction, Prosser creates a modern transsexual archive composed of raceless, classless, autonomous, and teleological subjects whose narratives (second skins) are engendered by the Global North’s secular cultural capital.
Transgendering the Nonsecular Turn in Feminism
Prosser’s erasure of the role of colonial and sexological violence in the constitution of the secular transsexual subject highlights the lack of critical frameworks to engage the epistemological challenges posed by the pious trans subject in the Global South. One very productive analytical framework to start theorizing the embodied pious trans subject, however, comes from Saba Mahmood, who draws on Judith Butler’s nonvolitional and discursively constructed model of subjectivity to develop her own critique of neo-Kantian humanist conceptions of agency and subject.17 Butler’s theory of subjectivity, argues Mahmood, allows a broader understanding of norms as conventions that are not only consolidated and/or subverted but also performed, inhabited, and experienced in a variety of ways.18 In her desire “to expand on Butler’s insight that norms are not simply a social imposition on the subject but constitute the very substance of her intimate, valorized interiority,”19 Mahmood moves away from an agonistic framework, which, she argues, characterizes Butler’s framework due to its contextual constraints, and instead invests in “think[ing] about the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and consummated.”20 Mahmood’s theoretical trajectory opens up two possibilities to reflect on the ethical self-formation of the pious subject. First, by not necessarily locating agency in the political and moral autonomy of the subject,21 it renders intelligible and legible the ethical practices that the pious subject embodies in their self-cultivation. Second, by disarticulating oppositional consciousness from the politics of agency, it challenges the misreading of piety and docility as lack of politics and false consciousness.
Mahmood’s nonsecular conception of agency finds its resonance in Rosi Braidotti’s call for a postsecular turn in feminist studies where she stresses the need to challenge European feminism by theorizing subjectivity as “a process ontology of auto-poiesis or self-styling, which involves complex and continuous negotiations with dominant norms and values, and hence also multiple forms of accountability.”22 Braidotti also continues the project of dissociating agency and subjectivity from the production of counter-subjectivities by locating them in religious piety and/or various affirmative manifestations of spirituality.23 In that sense, both Braidotti and Mahmood view technologies of self and embodied ethical praxes as alternative forms of becoming that force the secular-liberal political capital to reckon with issues of alterity and epistemic difference.24 However, not all feminists who write on the relationship between feminist politics and religious piety feel as enthusiastic as Mahmood and Braidotti about the political implications of nonsecular agency defined as the affirmative ethics of self-formation. In “The Politics of Postsecular Feminism,” Rosa Vasilaki questions “whether this particular conceptualization of [post-secular] agency, in close synergy with religion as a matrix for subject formation, can have genuine subversive, counter-hegemonic, conceptual and political effects.”25 Arguing that the postsecular turn predicated on the teleology of cultural incommensurability engenders “a reasoning which embodies ‘the disavowal of history itself,’”26 Vasilaki states that the postsecular historical moment “does not suggest a substantial turn towards alternative spiritualities but, on the contrary, towards powerful forms of hegemonic religious conservatism” and reactionary forms of subjectivation.27
In addition to the problematic bifurcation of religion and spirituality in her analysis, which is itself a largely colonial construct, Vasilaki’s critique of the postsecular turn in feminism as disarmed vis-à-vis the historical and political ramifications of the separation between autonomy and agency28 is also grounded in her Eurocentric epistemic universe that takes concepts such as politics, progressiveness, or reactionariness as self-evident. Nevertheless, I argue that her reductionist critique can be taken to instead think about the limitations of nonsecular feminist frameworks in terms of addressing the archival politics regarding the pious trans people in the Global South. I make this argument for two reasons. First, by prioritizing the category of cissexual/cisgender woman to theorize the power relationships between secular and pious movements/subjects, non-secular feminism becomes vulnerable to the critiques grounded in historiography that suggests that the historical record of religious subjectivities “tends to weigh more on the side of repression and social control than creativity and openness.”29 This secular feminist critique can only be justified to the extent that it ignores the reversal of this historical record for trans politics within which the Eurocentric cultural capital and the Western medical-industrial complex have overdetermined the transsexual as a secular and modern category to the exclusion of the pious trans subject. Hence, a nonsecular transfeminist critique—that is, a nonsecular feminism that seriously engages the issues of piety and transness, particularly in the Global South—can show that the historical record of the pious trans subject situated within the intersections of geopolitical, (trans)national, and (neo)colonial discourses weighs more on the side of secular and political erasure than religious social control.
Second, by conceptualizing the feminist/queer constitution of transgender archives as a form of secular epistemic violence, a nonsecular transfeminist critique can push nonsecular feminist frameworks to go beyond their primary focus on the affirmative and ethical self-formation of subjects. This shift away from subjectival formation toward the archival formation that seriously reckons with the historically contingent and often illegible manifestations of transness can enable non-secular feminist methodologies to broaden the scope of their analyses and examine the ways in which the secular Eurocentric cultural capital saturates the language of trans politics, discourse, and activism. As I show in the following sections, labels such as strategic, political, and activist perform the ideological work of centering a specific trans subject in Turkey, an archival erasure that a non-secular transfeminist analysis lays bare.
Bülent Ersoy and Strategic Religiosity
In his informative article “Reconstructing the Transgendered Self as a Muslim, Nationalist, Upper-Class Woman: The Case of Bülent Ersoy” (2008), Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay, following Simone de Beauvoir, traces how Bülent Ersoy, a very popular trans public figure referred to as the diva of Turkish classical music by the mainstream media,30 “has become a Muslim, nationalist, and an upper-class woman”31 in light of the neoliberal, nationalist, and conservative transformations that Turkey has gone through since the fascist military coup d’état of 1980. Performance emerges as the key term in the article as Altınay analyzes the multivalent ways in which Ersoy has strategized and performed various hegemonic identities to carve out spaces of tolerance and acceptance in a society that defines her identity as abject. The seemingly descriptive nature of his analytical framework, however, obscures the performative politics of his queer/feminist scholarship, which, informed by secular Eurocentric cultural capital, determines the boundaries of what counts as acceptable trans religious performance in Turkey. By characterizing Ersoy’s performances as emanating from her interested desire to mirror the increasingly conservative public and political climate, Altınay’s secular queer analysis leaves little room for understanding the complexity of Ersoy’s subjectivity outside of a subversive-complicit dyad. This becomes particularly problematic when Altınay does not discuss how Ersoy embodies Islam and religion outside of her “interested” desire to be accepted. Instead, Altınay overemphasizes the tactics, performances, and strategies that Ersoy deploys to construct an image of a pious Muslim woman.32 This theoretical framework not only replicates a long tradition of diagnostic reading performed by critical theorists with its undertones of deceptive, complicit, and/or tropological transsexual33 but also suggests that the figure of a pious Muslim trans person is at best a tactical masquerade.
Critiquing Ersoy’s problematic silence on the atrocities committed by the military regime against trans people and sex workers in the postcoup political atmosphere on the grounds that she “was the only person who had the power to have her voice heard,” Altınay states that “she [Ersoy] was clearly rejecting transgenderism as an opportunity to deny established gender codes. She desired only to be accepted as a woman. She did not have any intention to fight against heterosexism either.”34 In another instance, Altınay again critiques Ersoy for not resisting the hegemonic gender norms when he argues that “Ersoy has internalized the restrictive discourses on gender and the body rather than resisting them.”35 In Altınay’s secular epistemic universe, what seems to characterize a good trans subject is ultimately their desire and radical intentionality to subvert gender norms. A subversive trans subject who resists and exercises their agency to challenge the social norms is privileged, while a complicit trans subject who embodies the norms and traditions either strategizes for personal interests or suffers from false consciousness. This characterization has been pervasive, as Prosser reminds us,36 not only in transphobic radical feminist and constructionist analyses but also in certain strands of feminist and queer theory. As Prosser points out, whether these analyses celebrate “the transsexual” as deliteralizing and transgressive or condemn “the transsexual” as literalizing and reinscriptive, “the referential transsexual subject can frighteningly disappear in his/her very invocation.”37 In Altınay’s reading, the epistemic erasure of the referential transsexual is coupled with the secular erasure of pious trans subjectivity. Ersoy’s transness that manifests through her gender expression as a pious nationalist woman is reduced to a strategic and literalizing theatrical performance on the grounds that she willingly pays lip service to Turkey’s heteropatriarchal gender norms. Furthermore, because her performance is characterized as her hypocritical and deceptive discourse, the authenticity and sincerity of her commitments, particularly religious commitments, become debatable.
Altınay discusses Ersoy’s performance of strategic religiosity once again with the secular hermeneutics of suspicion when he analyzes her decision to recite the adhan, which is called out by a muezzin (who is traditionally a cisgender man) five times a day from a mosque to summon Muslims for prayer. Altınay argues that “by reciting the adhan in Arabic, Ersoy asserted her identity as a conservative Muslim . . . This gave Ersoy the opportunity to reaffirm her faith in Islam and also have others reaffirm her gender identity as a woman.”38 This argument implies that Altınay considers Ersoy’s pious Islamic identity relevant only insofar as it enables her to gain social acceptance in Turkey’s fast-changing neoliberal landscape. Ersoy’s decision to recite the adhan in Arabic instead of Turkish and to use a vocabulary abundant in Ottoman words is read as an indication of Ersoy’s strategic rejection of modernity to perform a conservative and pious Muslim identity.39 At this juncture, one wonders why one cannot interpret Ersoy’s lexical and linguistic preferences not as performances conditioned by circumstantial necessities but rather as manifestations of her desire to embody the norms of Islam and claim a religious space that has been systematically denied to cis and trans women as well as trans men? Why does Altınay read her religious and conservative performances as ironically strategic rejections of modernity and queer/transgender identity on the grounds that transsexuality and queer theory were made possible through modern epistemologies and medical technologies,40 when one can instead read modernity and Western identity categories as an alibi for the neocolonial universalization of a particular secular Western episteme? Altınay’s diagnostic reading diminishes the possibilities of understanding Ersoy’s relationality to Islamic space and temporality by reducing her piety and religious praxes to self-interested strategic performances.
The idea that Ersoy’s conservative Muslim identity is a contingent phenomenon is further underscored when Altınay contends that “as the importance of nationalism and Islam in Turkish public discourse has increased since 1980s, the significance of these elements in Ersoy’s construction of her own identity has increased as well.”41 This argument shares a similarity with Annick Prieur’s explanation of jotas’ and vestidas’ femininity in the ethnographic research that she conducted in Mexico City in the late eighties and early nineties. In that research, drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Prieur theorizes the femininity of jotas and vestidas as emanating from these identities’ resistance to symbolic violence.42 However, as Vek Lewis insightfully argues, Prieur’s theorization of jotas’ and vestidas’ femininity renders both categories “as highly contingent phenomena which in a different set of variables would not and need not exist.”43 Similarly, Altınay’s discussion of Ersoy as a tropological trans figure mirroring the transformations that Turkey has gone through implies that in a different cultural context with different political, social, and economic changes, Ersoy would not and need not be pious. In other words, Ersoy’s pious religiosity can only be strategic and tactical, a circumstantial necessity that can be “diagnosed” through a secular constructionist queer lens.
Proudly Activist and (Ir)religious in Turkey
Designed by the South African artist Gabrielle Le Roux in collaboration with Amnesty International Turkey and two Turkish trans organizations, Istanbul LGBTT and Pembe Hayat, Proudly Trans in Turkey (2012) is an activist art project that includes eighteen videos and seventeen portraits by Le Roux. The videos include interviews with trans activists in Turkey that touch on themes such as religion, hate crimes, activism, family, and work. In this section, I do a close reading of a specific portion of these video interviews where the trans activists respond to the open-ended question “What is the role of religion and spirituality in your life?” and discuss its implications within the larger framework of Le Roux’s activist art project. As their responses reveal, the trans activists relate to religion, in general, and Islam, in particular, in distinct and dynamic ways. Their relationality is inflected by, among other things, their activism, family, class position, ethnicity, geography, lived experience, and political affiliation. While some respondents state that Islam or other religions are not compatible with their trans existence and Weltanschauung, others critique orthodox interpretations of Islam, challenging various forms of violence and marginalization inflicted in the name of religion. On the surface, Le Roux’s activist and collective art project represents the rich diversity and multidimensional aspects of trans religiosity and activism in Turkey. However, I argue that her project raises serious issues that need to be analyzed through a non-secular transfeminist lens. First, Le Roux universalizes the secular feminist conceptualization of agency and portrays a diverse group of urban political activists who speak the global and Eurocentric language of queer and feminist politics as the true representatives of trans diversity in Turkey. Secondly, Le Roux’s positionality as a white South African artist and human rights activist who created similarly engaged multimedia projects before in the Global South enables her to transform the language of resistance into the language of neoliberal consumption by tying the national trans activism to the global and universal language of human rights. Finally, by ignoring the tensions between the rural and the urban as well as the regional and the national/global, Le Roux’s archival politics misreads secular cultural capital as diversity and erases the pious trans people whose lack of “subversive” politics are deemed unfit and illegible for transnational and global circulation.
Le Roux’s use of strategic diversity and the collective nature of her project are praised by Cüneyt Çakırlar in his article on documentary LGBTQ narratives from Turkey.44 Çakırlar argues that “the ethic of collaborative ethnography, the primary address aimed at activists, and strategic diversity in Le Roux’s activist practice intervene in ‘a politics of pity . . . [that] situates the sufferer as passive and the one who observes the suffering as obliged to act.’”45 While Çakırlar is right in his argument that the contemporary rights-based ethnographic documentaries produced for the consumption by the Global North base their representational framework on victimhood46 and that Le Roux’s politics of representation is not driven by the savior complex, he does not analyze the ways in which the ethnographic gaze also manifests itself through the secular constitution of agency, language, and cultural capital.47 The project’s strategic diversity operates as an alibi for the simultaneous erasure of pious trans people whose politics are not legible and who refuse to/do not have the cultural capital to speak the language of resistance and subversion. In this context, the label “political,” as Evren Savcı argues, is structured through the logic and vocabulary of neoliberalism and perpetuates other forms of normativities and exclusions.48 The urban trans activists display their political agency and oppositional consciousness through their critical conceptualization of Islam. Their critical language, regardless of whether they embrace Islam or not, confers on them an intelligible political positionality. In that sense, diversity, which has been rightly critiqued as a tool of neoliberalism for adopting a flattened version of difference and obscuring the structural workings of racism,49 renders illegible the lived experiences of pious trans people whose ethical self-formations do not fit the parameters of secular agency and autonomy assumed to be cross-cultural and immanent to the trans subject. In other words, strategic diversity, to slightly misquote Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, preserves the secular trans subject of the Global North or the secular Global North as subject by confirming, through a “diverse” and urban trans representation from Turkey, the universality of trans people’s autonomy and sovereign agency.50
The responses in the video to the open-ended question “What is the role of religion and spirituality in your life?” indicate the multivalent ways in which the language and cultural capital of the secular Global North are translated into an Islamic national context by the urban trans activists. One of the interviewees, Destina, who identifies as a conservative Muslim, says: “I consider myself religious and conservative although I do not fulfill the religious duties perfectly. . . . Religion and spirituality play a major role in my life because I think that I have overcome many difficulties thanks to my faith.”51 Similarly to Destina, Selay also identifies as a believer in Islam. Moreover, she harshly condemns the brutalities and atrocities committed in its name: “I believe in Islam and Allah. I always pray to Allah. I believe in our prophet and other things too, but I do not believe in what they call Islam in 2011. If it is Islam, I am not a Muslim.”52 Selay’s critique of how certain radical groups abuse Islam in the contemporary world is followed by her discussion of how “her” Islam is based on tolerance, compassion, altruism, and nonviolence. One can argue that Selay’s and Destina’s discourses about Islam can be read as manifestations of the minoritized subjects’ attempts to disidentify with an orthodox and hegemonic religious tradition.53 Their disidentificatory praxes can be compared to those of Muslim feminist writers who reclaim oral tradition to intervene in the supposedly closed debates in Islamic religious literature. Fatima Mernissi, for example, describes the Islam she inherited from her grandmother as “an occasion to journey to strange countries, to spread one’s wings, and to discover love and enlightenment there.”54 Leila Ahmed also elaborates on the notion of Islam as an oral and aural heritage passed down from women to women through generations.55 In the same vein as Muslim feminists who adhere to critical Islamic hermeneutics,56 Selay and Destina understand Islam in a way that enables them to confront contemporary radical Muslims’ amnesia and re-create a world in which they can spread their wings. Their self-reflexivity in relation to their critical embrace of Islam is informed by their activist language, cultural capital, urban location, and politics of resistance. Their pious acceptance of Islam does not disarticulate agency from autonomy or oppositional consciousness.
Selay’s and Destina’s feelings toward Islam and religion seem to be, on the surface, completely different from those of Esmeray, who says: “I do not think that any religion will make me happy. I feel like religion is the opium of the people.” Having grown up in a Kurdish family in the city of Kars, a geography influenced, as she claims, by the political climate of the Soviet Union, Esmeray adopts an agnostic approach, claiming that we do not and cannot know whether Allah exists or not: “The only thing we know is that we want to be happy together in this world. That is what I believe in.”57 According to Esmeray, Islamic identity, in particular, and religious identity, in general, are not means through which her utopian and revolutionary vision can be realized. In her epistemic universe, religiosity emerges as a deterrent to the realization of that collectivist vision. In other words, for Esmeray, Islam turns out to be a category irreconcilable with her lived experience, activism, trans identity, and political objectives. Esmeray’s irreligious positionality in the video complements the religiosity espoused by the other trans interviewees and thus serves to highlight Le Roux’s commitment to strategic diversity. However, it is precisely this strategic diversity that erases the difference and re-centers the “same,” that is, secular/liberal political agency. This erasure is enacted through a misreading of secular cultural capital as (ir)religious diversity, which, in turn, overdetermines the possibilities of inhabiting a religious trans positionality. Basing the strategic diversity on the conflation of the pious Muslim trans activists who adopt critical Islamic hermeneutics with so-called noncritical (and invisible on screen) pious trans people, Le Roux’s activist project archives urban trans politics, activist language, and secular trans cultural capital at the expense of trans people whose ethical self-constitution and politics of piety dissociate agency from the language of resistance and subversion.
Le Roux’s prioritization of urban trans activists in her collaborative project also raises issues as regards the divisions between the rural and the urban as well as the regional and the national. Çakırlar states that “rather than attempting to entirely contain the trans identity under the national referent of Turkey, [Le Roux’s] project’s core aim is to work with activists and address their struggle by creating a horizontal ethnographic setting.”58 I give credit to Le Roux for creating a horizontal ethnographic setting within which the trans activists are not used as tools to provide decontextualized and generalized information about what it means to be a trans person in Turkey. The setting enables the trans activists to share their wisdom and diverse forms of activist politics without appealing to the Global North’s savior complex. However, the creation of this horizontal ethnographic space only becomes possible, I argue, through various forms of geopolitical and secular erasures, which challenges the argument that this multimedia project does not entirely contain the trans identity under the national referent of Turkey. First, Le Roux, by foregrounding the urban as the center of trans political life, conceptualizes the urban spaces in Turkey as the teleological and critical sites of modernity. The presence of a horizontal ethnographic setting conceals the role of the Eurocentric cultural capital and political language in engendering trans people’s representation as critical national/transnational activists in urban spaces. Second, Le Roux’s collaborative project couples oppositional political consciousness with urban geopolitics while privileging the critical trans public cultures of Turkey’s global cities whose representational powers gain their currency through national and global referents. By reinforcing the link between urban critical political consciousness and national/transnational forms of activism, Le Roux’s activist project leaves unquestioned how the absence of the nonmetropolitan and rural pious trans subject is central to the construction and global consumption of this horizontal ethnographic space.
In Proudly Trans in Turkey, the question of erasure is also obscured through the language of activist visibility, global human rights struggles, collaboration, and transnational solidarity. Berfu Şeker, in her interview with Le Roux on this multimedia project, defines Le Roux as a human rights activist whose work transcends boundaries.59 In the interview, Şeker notes that Le Roux created and designed a similar project with African transgender activists in 2008, titled Proudly African and Transgender, and that while she was in Turkey in 2010 to attend an exhibition on this project, she got an invitation from transgender activists to create an analogous collaborative work.60 To emphasize the collaborative and collective nature of her project, Le Roux stresses that Amnesty International Turkey and two Turkish trans organizations, Istanbul LGBTT and Pembe Hayat, will collectively own the copyrights to display the reproductions of the portraits of the trans activists in future exhibitions.61 Le Roux’s ethics of collaboration and collective work underscores her desire to avoid being seen as a white cisgender non-Turkish speaking outsider with a vested interest in looking in and extracting information from her subjects in the Global South.62 Nonetheless, Le Roux’s project’s implication in the global neoliberal systems of LGBTQ funding and international human rights discourses as well as the transnational implications of her decontextualized and analogic activist praxes raise questions about the ethical foundations of her work and the excluded subjects of her “inclusive” secular politics.
Le Roux states that thanks to the contributions of Amnesty International Turkey, Proudly Trans in Turkey has more financial support than her previous project, Proudly African and Transgender.63 This portrayal of Amnesty International Turkey as a benevolent and generous supporter of human rights activists, in general, and trans activists, in particular, sanitizes the operations of Amnesty International in the Global South as well as the political implications of this collaboration. Given that Amnesty International is an organization with a long history of biased reporting64 in Muslim-majority countries and devastated war regions in the Global South as well as exploitative labor policies that have resulted in strikes in Turkey, one needs to interrogate at what cost, to whose benefit, to whose exclusion Amnesty International Turkey funds Le Roux’s activist project and politics of visibility. What kind of cultural capital and political language are required to be visible as a trans activist in an Amnesty International–funded activist project? What political work does solidarity perform in this context? The invisibility of pious trans people who do not speak the critical language of global human rights constitutes the outer limits of Le Roux’s activist archive. In this case, solidarity emerges as a diverse network consolidated through transnational neoliberal capital and predicated on the secular conceptions of autonomous agency and resistance. In other words, solidarity works as an alibi for the concurrent merging of neoliberal financial capital, liberal cosmopolitanism, and secular cultural capital.
Conclusion
At this point, a few clarifications are in order. First, a nonsecular transfeminist critique does not romanticize the peripheral and tangential relationship of the rural and the regional to the nation-state. As Gayatri Gopinath argues, the rural and the regional can be used to decenter and destabilize the dominant nationalist frameworks by “foregrounding ‘other’ narratives that tell an entirely different story of gender, sexuality, and nationalist subjectivity.”65 However, as Gopinath also reminds, their minoritized position vis-à-vis the nation-state does not mean that these spaces are “irreducibly particular [or] self-closed” but that “they are produced precisely by the collision of the local, the national, and the transnational.”66 In other words, pious trans people who do not occupy urban spaces or who have a tangential relationship with the ideological nation-state apparatuses cannot be understood as irreducibly particular or untouched by the global/transnational circulation of ideologies. In the same vein as urban trans political activists, rural pious trans people negotiate the local, the national, and the global processes in their ethical self-formation even though this negotiation does not necessarily follow the “political” constitution of agency-as-resistance. Secondly, a nonsecular transfeminist critique does not necessarily have an epistemic investment in “unearthing” alternative cartographies of trans or queer resistance to the national and global discursive traditions that the Western secular feminism considers non-liberal. Obviously, some pious trans people’s discourses, acts, or embodied praxes might be “politically” intelligible to the extent that they fit the parameters of the trans activist language. However, it may well be that some of them embody and inhabit the politics in terms that are not easily translatable to the language of secular trans politics. Hence, I argue, the primary epistemic concern of a non-secular transfeminist critique is archival in that—rather than prioritizing how the “recovered” non-secular trans subject might offer us a new lens to understand trans religiosity and alternative forms of agency, which, as Rosalind C. Morris reminds us, would be tantamount to the replication of the masculine-imperialist ideology67—it interrogates what work the labels activist, strategic, and political perform in the vocabulary of secular trans politics as well as what kind of erasures/exclusions these labels authorize.
By focusing on the ways in which Eurocentric secular cultural capital is translated into an Islamic context to determine what counts as politically acceptable trans religious performance, a nonsecular transfeminist critique allows us to archive the transnational cartographies of secular erasure as well as the poly-vocality of trans (ir)religiosity. As I show in this article, trans people’s narratives and performances reveal not only the irreducible heterogeneity of how they embody or refuse Islam but also the role of political/activist language in their embodied praxes. Analyzing their positions on the matter of religion outside of the secular prism of diagnostic reading opens up new and productive ways of thinking through this heterogeneity. The trans woman I saw in the nineties in a Mediterranean city of Anatolia or other trans people from the peripheries of the country who frequent mosques without necessarily frequenting legible activist and political spaces are reckoned with. Such a non-secular transfeminist analysis then ensures that the referential pious trans subject does not “disappear.”
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my immense gratitude to Melissa M. Wilcox, Joseph A. Marchal, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments, feedback, suggestions, and critical engagement with the early drafts of this article.
Notes
Throughout this article, I use terms such as trans, transgender, and transsexual frequently; however, this usage does not in any way suggest that all these terms are always interchangeable or that they have similar genealogies, connotations, significations, or political implications. Rather, it mostly reflects the choices made by the scholars/works analyzed in this article. Furthermore, my use of the expression “pious trans people” does not intend to homogenize or draw a singular portrayal of pious trans people given that piety, similarly to people who embrace it, embodies different affects in different geographies/histories. Piety can be personal or public, can have a geopolitically determined relationship with modernity, and can undoubtedly be shaped by, among other things, the dominant sects or madhhab in a specific context. For an insightful discussion on gender and piety in Shi’i Lebanon, see Deeb, Enchanted Modern.
I think of archives not merely as material repositories of texts, documents, audiovisual sources, etc., but also as incorporeal frameworks and discursive systems shaped by sociocultural capital and political economy, which render certain communities, subjects, figures, events, and objects (il)legible, (un)intelligible, and (in)visible in a given geographic space/historical period.
Max Strassfeld and Robyn Henderson Espinoza build on the insights of Talal Asad and remind us that secularism is not secular and that it “functions as an unmarked (and thereby naturalized) form of white Protestantism disciplining (premodern, irrational, racialized) religion” (“Mapping Trans Studies in Religion,” 285). That the secular cannot be understood independently of the religious is further discussed by Melissa E. Sanchez’s insightful book Queer Faith, where she analyzes the theological roots of secular understandings of, among other things, sexuality and erotic accountability and demonstrates how “Christian theology has profoundly shaped Western secular descriptions of love and sexuality” (94).
Butler’s more recent work, Undoing Gender, engages with the question of transness more comprehensively and addresses some of the concerns/critiques raised by trans scholars/activists against the prioritization of subversion and drag in their earlier work.
C. Riley Snorton also critiques Prosser’s prioritization of the bodily experience understood through a sexological prism at the expense of the psychic dimension. Highlighting the invisibility of the preoperative or nonoperative transsexual in Prosser’s account, Snorton asks, “What happens when the story of the transsexual body does not evidence a clear break from a sexual ontological past?” (“‘New Hope,’” 81).
Mahmood’s non-secular conception of agency is more limited than Braidotti’s theoretical framework given that the latter acknowledges posthumanism’s relevance to the post-secular turn to reflect on the intersection between political subjectivity and biopolitical issues that are not usually categorized within the purview of the secular tradition in feminism. On the other hand, Braidotti’s use of the term “postsecular” is problematic, at best, and an epistemic violence, at worst, given that the term not only naturalizes the Global North–centric temporal prism but also preserves the codification of the secular Global North as the subject looking in.
Bülent Ersoy has an extremely important place in the collective memory of the gender and sexual minorities from Turkey due to both her hypervisibility in Turkish visual/print media and her name’s widespread association with anything that connotes gender and sexual nonconformity in the country. Like many queer- and trans-identified people growing up in Turkey, I used to get called “Bülent Ersoy” very frequently when I was bullied for my perceived femininity. Her name is used, in some cissexist and heterosexist circles of the society, as a form of insult similar to how faggot is used in English.
My critique of Altınay’s discussion of Ersoy’s religious public persona as a strategic performance should not be taken to suggest that the purity of Ersoy’s piety cannot be interrogated or that her decisions regarding public piety are never strategically influenced by local/national political forces. The fact that she has been a regular guest at the highly publicized iftar dinners organized by the AKP government and the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan no doubt raises a lot of questions about her tenuous incorporation into neoliberal Islam in Turkey. For an insightful discussion on this, see Savcı, “Transing Religious Studies.”
Julia Serano’s book Whipping Girl elaborates on the trope of the deceptive transsexual in its critique of the dominant cultural and medical representations of trans women. In “Performing Translatinidad,” Vek Lewis also examines how the trope of the deceptive transsexual operates in the dating reality show There’s Something about Miriam.
Çakırlar is careful, though, to note that the presentation of the cultural alterity on screen in Proudly Trans in Turkey “still seems to prioritize a global/transnational gaze” and that the documentary “avoids a critical look at the inner tensions and conflicts of LGBTQ activism in Turkey” (“Transnational Pride,” 54).
For more detailed discussion, see Mohanty, “Transnational Feminist Crossings”; and Ahmed, On Being Included.
Le Roux, Proudly Trans in Turkey. All the translations in this article are mine unless stated otherwise.
José Esteban Muñoz discusses in detail the concept of disidentification by which he refers to the survival strategies that minoritized subjects practice in order to negotiate and navigate phobic/punitive majoritarian spheres (Disidentifications, 4).
In terms of its translatability to secular political language, critical Islamic hermeneutics is similar to what Yolande Jansen describes as “Islamic secular hermeneutics” in her discussion on Saba Mahmood’s critique of reformist approaches of Islam (“Postsecularism, Piety, and Fanaticism,” 983). Jansen goes on to criticize Mahmood on the grounds that Mahmood replaces the secular-religious divide with a secularity-piety divide (977–98). I should note, however, that it is not my intention to replicate a pious-secular binary within the context of transness in this article. Rather, I am interested in interrogating what forms/kinds of pieties are translatable to, as well as legible in, the lexicon of secular trans politics. For a more detailed discussion on this topic, see Jansen, “Postsecularism, Piety, and Fanaticism”; and Mahmood, “Critiques of Secularism.”
For instance, citing Elora Chowdhury, Lila Abu-Lughod reminds us of how the local campaigns, organizations, and efforts of dedicated Bangladeshi feminists to resolve the complex issue of acid violence were erased in the award given to the American documentary “Faces of Hope” by Amnesty International (Do Muslim Women Need Saving?, 14). Abu-Lughod’s analysis also reveals the ways in which Amnesty International’s fact sheet on honor crimes, titled “Culture of Discrimination,” actively contributes to the stigmatization of the Muslim-majority countries and trivialization of complex moral systems by characterizing the women living there as victims who have no moral agency (116).
