Gender Studies Seminar: “Justice Beyond Secular Protections: Harmful Structures of Judiciary and Queer Activism in Turkish Courtrooms”

The Gender Studies Seminar Series invite researchers to share their insight on key issues for gendered and sexualized lives and knowledges, and to engage in critical discussions about the development of gender studies as an interdisciplinary and intersectional research field. Bringing together scholars from various research fields and theoretical traditions, this seminar series offers a platform for critical reflexions and new insights. Seeking to provide a space for intellectual exchanges around the role of knowledge production in turbulent times. 

The fall 2024 Gender Studies seminar series put the focus on critical contributions and interventions into conditions for knowledge production and struggles for social justice – in the court room, in everyday enactments of situated knowledge, in intersectional modes of protest, and within contexts of emergent authoritarianism. 

Berkant Çağlar is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and currently a visiting scholar at Humboldt University in Berlin.

Abstract: 

Neither included in the state’s inclusionary recognition nor criminalized by the penal code, Turkish queer and trans individuals face confounding forms of legal ambiguity and sexual governance in Turkish courtrooms. Often considered as the disorder of authoritarianism and political Islam’s inherent homophobia, policy suggestions rely on law and legality as the primary protective mechanisms against the oppressive regime’s treatment of sexual minorities. However, the Turkish state complicates the binary reading between inclusion and exclusion. 

What if the law is the primary site of harm, and the courtrooms become places of intimidation rather than spaces for justice? What transpires in these courtrooms and how does the authoritarian state govern dissident sexualities? 

Debunking stereotypes in Turkey and the broader Middle East—where sexual governance is seen as arbitrary and unlawful— my research sheds light on how authoritarian governance mobilizes secular channels of the judiciary and uses courtrooms to intimidate queer and trans activists. Drawing on my 15-month-long ethnographic dissertation research, my presentation focuses on two types of litigations as a lived experience: the right to protest and legal standing. While the former is significant in discouraging activists from the legitimate use of public places as the primary site of politics, the latter demonstrates the court's refusal to recognize queer kinship claims over blood-family ties. When queer claimants are not recognized as next-of-kin, cases like murder trials often result in impunity. After observing the diligent efforts of pro-bono lawyers and the state’s failure to incarcerate queer and trans activists—despite summoning over five hundred activists to court in a single calendar year—my presentation invites us to contemplate these legal encounters not only as expressions of the state's disciplinary power but also as moments where the state comes out to its supporters as a charismatic regime and a binding element of reactionary minority governance.