Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam

Perverse Modernities

by Evren Savcı

In Queer in Translation, Evren Savci analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savci shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savci traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savci turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

Genres: Nonfiction, Islam, Queer, LGBT, Politics, Academic

248 pages, Hardcover

Published January 29, 2021

Reviews

[~Akweley♡Mazarae♥~★☆★oblivion★☆★~I CAN'T BREATHE~ · Rating 4 out of 5]

The beginning/introduction was a bit hard for me to get through, but I'm glad that I did because I ultimately did end up understanding most of it. I read this while in a psychiatric hospital, so I didn't have access to google/the internet, and I really wished that I had. I'm a gender studies major, and so a lot of the people referenced I remembered reading at some point in time during my first year years of college, but for the life of me I couldn't remember what ars erotica meant, or why Foucault came up with the concept in the first place (*oops* sorry Evren. Read Foucault in your class for the first time lmfao)

I think that when I reread this book in like, grad school, a lot more of it will make sense to me. I still have a significantly hard time reading "academic" writing and it all feels so inaccessible to me.

That being said, I know that my rating is biased because Evren is a professor I have taken many classes with and whom I dearly love, but I feel like this was a good read! I think she talks about Islamic studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and queer/LGBT studies with an authentic transnational approach. I think also because I've taken classes with her before, some of these ideas were familiar to me, which was helpful in my general understanding of the text. I think her use of translation studies is a helpful framework for what I would like to do within the major, focusing on LGBTQ activism in Ghana.

This would've taken me much longer to read if I hadn't been in the hospital, however. Can be discouraging for folx who also struggle with reading academia.

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is very informative, and this is the kind of book that keeps me alive. the best advice is to read each chapter at least 2 times. however, i'd like to investigate whether chapter 2's "complication" is safe to share before i'd recommend it to others.

I also want to mention that the references were kind of hard to use. The chapters use superscript numbers to mark citations, but then the bibliography doesn't use that & instead combines all the chapters together & lists them all in alphabetical order by author (as opposed to being in numerical order by chapter). What has to be done instead is take note of the cited author's name, look them up in the index, and then look for pages listed with an "n" involved, and then go to the bibliography page listed. (For quicker doing this, take note of the page range of the bibliography. If you're using a digital copy, use the printed page #'s not the file reader's page #'s.) -- It didn't have to be this hard, and I resent them for making this more inaccessible when a big chunk of the book is talking about inaccessibility.

i also want to mention this review isn't comprehensive summaries, and further that i only read chapter 1 & 2 like once, so i'm not as thoroughly understanding of those chapters.

So I guess I'm going to try writing this as a sort of bullet points because that's what I can handle right now. Also I'm excited about this translation studies methodology.

Chapter 1: this is the one that focuses on people wearing headscarves & lgbtqia+ people being at one point able to be side by side, but ultimately not being able to come to a coalition. in interviews this author gave she says by 2016 wearing a headscarf & supporting lgbtqia+ rights & being opposed to neoliberal islam under Erdogan wouldn't be legible. this came from interviews & meeting notes she got elsewhere, but still. / the part about haq meaning both rights & a religous name of god, was interesting.

Chapter 2: basically focuses on a hate crime where Ahmat Yildiz got murdered. the author offers another interpretation that the store & the store owner might've been the target. basically the media decided to label it as a gay honor killing. the problem is that the media is capitalist & colonial, so since honor killings aren't usually applied to "white" "european" murders, it made things more about pinkwashing/rainbowwashing. that being said, it'd be cool to hear about how the local turkish lgbtqia+ community feels about this chapter, because she acknowledges this chapter is controversial. // like i've heard people offer that the matthew shepard case was about a drug deal instead about him being gay, but those people were fascists who were trying to say that it therefore wasn't a hate crime, which would be an argument that erases structual oppression. / and due to the information in chapter 3, i know this author is trying to avoid that argument, but again, i'd like to see whether the local lgbtqia+ people are okay with this or not.

Chapter 3: Trans women & trans people activists introduce us to the concept of Hate having a material reality. We get to see how communal lives develop, how precarity is seen as a material impact of hate & is also taken as a given to the point that their material developing of communal care for each other takes place. work under capitalism involves violence, and whether it's sex work or mining work, it's still violent conditions. // i discussed this with someone & they compared that violence to the story of lot in the quran (it wasn't about lgbtqia+ people existing, it was about violence, pushing aside the orphan, forbidding others to feed the needy, forbidding common kindnesses, etc.)

Chapter 4: this is the intersectionality chapter & the gezi park chapter // This was one I read like 2 or 3 times, even though I got the plot. That being said, I'm going to write here a summary of what I said when I was in a support group for survivors of torture & we were talking about how we have to use different terms sometimes due to how others can be triggered. / Cultural appropriation applies not only to African American English, but also intersectionality frameworks. This then exports internationally among the colonizers, in this case in the non-profit & NGO sectors. / so this means organizations with access to intersectional theory, end up acting like white supremacists who don't want to interact with black people. The privileged gave cop shit when their prestige is based on theories developed by the criminalized. / Since in USA, Black Feminism centered the imagery of the plantation, and in Turkey the way colonialism made it self visible was gentrification instead of chattle slavery, this meant the vocabulary that developed among the activists who were doing intersectional praxis organically, (though maybe lacking the wisdom from other experiments such as in USA) discussed a politics of love instead of hate. by the way, this makes a lot of sense because of how real estate values in USA developed with eugenicism AKA "Hate" in mind. (eugenicism & evopsych goes back to the plantation as well, because "seasoning" etc, but still.) / Point being, these nomenclatures need to exist side by side because of how colonizers weaponize the words of liberation activists. / also i really need to find ways to translate "bonapartism" because even among english speakers it's inaccessible.

Conclusion: where the author shows she knows the academic jargon she was kind of fighting against throughout the book. i feel like that's oversimplifying it. / as i'm going over it more carefully, it seems the chapter has to do with the 2-spirit project, but as a white settler in usa trying to decolonize i don't know for sure where her stance is yet.

Appendix: this part gives a formal analysis of how this book was made, and it was so cool to read! because i'm passionate about this sort of work. i actually read this chapter before i read chapter 1 because i had heard the author talk about this chapter in an interview, and i thought it was super important to read this in order to have a sense of where this author is coming from.

[Melina]

Evren Savci’s “Trans Terror, Deep Citizenship, and the Politics of Hate,” from Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam disrupts interpretations that consider activism for hate crime laws as legitimating and participating in neoliberal politics. Savci’s chapter begins by contesting the assumption that economic violence did not replace the previously more visible physical violence against trans women, but rather, economic violence was superimposed onto physical violence. In this sense, economic and physical violence can be read as co-constitutive, a reading that foregrounds the rest of Savci’s chapter. The rest of the piece develops the argument that trans women’s demands for a hate crime law are based in a desire to render legally visible the “structural and affective conditions of life” experience under neoliberal capitalism (81).
Savci argues against the typical theorization of hate crime law advocates as racially and economically privileged gay or lesbian subjects, and opens space to consider trans women’s investment in hate crime laws not as seeking participation in neoliberalism, but as a move to expose the sutures connecting physical and economic violence that are so often considered as distinct to what is criminalized, but which are nonetheless pieces of the same fabric of neoliberal violence. Problematizing the definition of citizenship and exploring how it is used to pair presumed state ideological violence with individual violence by what Savci calls “deep citizens,” the chapter contextualizes the push for hate crime laws within a practice of vigilantist hate crimes that stem directly from the co-constitution of neoliberalism and the state around hate—Hate here understood not as random and individual, as a structuring principle of the neoliberal state, with structural and affective effects.
Savci rounds out the chapter’s argument by critiquing the tendency to consider hope a “bad object” in queer studies, arguing that the tendency to think of hope as “uncritical and normative” is confronted and resolved by the trans women activists pushing for hate crime laws. In this example, hope is a part of refusal, and a practice of making visible the structural and affective consequences of hate.

[Javier · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very dense but gratifying read. What drew me to this book was the promise of a non-western approach to queer theory, and it delivered. This book introduced me to a lot of new concepts, ideas and events that were unknown to me before. It can be easy to see queerness as a global lived experienced, while in reality it has many shades and nuances. At the same time that the book challenges some western approaches to queerness, it invites us to not simply reject concepts and ideas for being western. I found it refreshing that the book admitted to the weakness of translation when speaking of lived experiences and identities, because often times "foreign" languages cannot captured the reality of a given people. It took me a while to get through it but I thoroughly enjoye dit

[Sunjay · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is due tomorrow so I haven't had much of a chance to process the conclusion, but I learned a lot from the different case studies. I was moved by a lot of the echoes, both with the structural forces at play (Erdoğan and Trump and Modi and the movements they represent have a lot in common) as well as with the ways queer people discussed and thought about themselves. It also was nice to check back in on Evren's work - I took her class over a decade ago now, and then heard her on a New Books podcast and had to check it out.

[oomfiyye]

Even though I was able to learn a lot about the Turkish queer scene through this book, I think the book wasn’t able to achieve what it set out to do. Still a good read though.