Extralegal Sex/Gender: Transness, Surveillance and the Police Violence in Turkey

Aslı Zengin, Rutgers University

Extralegal Sex/Gender: Transness, Surveillance and the Police Violence in Turkey

October 8th, 5pm-7pm on Zoom. Register here .

Speaker: Aslı Zengin, Rutgers University

Chair: Sophie Chamas, SOAS, University of London

This talk is part of my forthcoming book, Violent Intimacies: Trans Lives, State Power, Kinship and Urban Geography. It examines extralegality in Turkey through centering trans women’s narratives of past and present experiences of violence with the police in Istanbul. I deploy the concept of extralegality to discuss the sexual and gendered repertoire of security and penal practices by police. Most of the time these practices occupy and produce an ambiguous zone between the legal and the illegal. Examining the changing forms of conduct and contact between the police and trans people—disciplinary, regulatory, and punitive practices —helps us understand how sex/gender transgression, particularly transness, is a key extralegal site for the production and enactment of regimes of state securitization.

Speaker Bio:

Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral and teaching positions at Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis Universities. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul, was published in Turkish. In this book, she examines the regulation of licensed and unlicensed sex work at the intersection of state power, law, medicine, and violence. Her second book, Violent Intimacies: Trans Lives, State Power, Kinship and Urban Geography is forthcoming from Duke University Press. Zengin has widely published in edited volumes and peer-review journals, including Cultural Anthropology, Allegra, Anthropologica, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies and Transgender Studies Quarterly. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of gender non-conforming lives and deaths; Islamic and medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; as well as transnational aspects of LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.