Operations of Law and Citizenship from Below: The

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Operations of Law and Citizenship from Below: The OPERATIONS OF LAW AND CITIZENSHIP FROM BELOW: THE POWER OF LAW AND SURVIVAL IN TRANS WOMEN’S LIVES IN ISTANBUL, TURKEY A dissertation presented by Esen Ezgi Taşcıoğlu to the “Renato Treves” International PhD Program in Law and Society in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Law and Society Università degli Studi di Milano Milan, Italy September 2015 Supervisor: Professor Angela Melville Co-supervisor: Professor Paola Ronfani TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION ....................................................................................................... 1 Transgender Studies ................................................................................................... 4 Transgender Citizenship and Law in Everyday Life ............................................... 10 CHAPTER 2 SETTING THE CONTEXT ..................................................................................... 15 Modern Law and the Making of the Turkish Nation-state ...................................... 15 The Woman Citizen of the Republic ........................................................................ 20 On Non-Normative Sexual and Gender Identities in Turkey .................................. 25 CHAPTER 3 THEORISING THE POWER OF LAW.................................................................. 29 Towards a Comprehensive Understanding of Legal Governmentality .................... 32 CHAPTER 4 METHODOLOGICAL FRAMEWORK ................................................................. 36 Field entry ................................................................................................................ 38 Listening to the life stories of trans women ............................................................. 41 A Brief Look into Trans Women’s Life Story Narratives ........................................ 46 ii CHAPTER 5 RECOGNITION THROUGH REGULATION: THE LEGAL REGULATION OF SEX REASSIGNMENT SURGERIES IN TURKEY ...................................... 55 The Emergence of Transsexuality in Turkish Laws: The Case of Bülent Ersoy ..... 60 Critiques of the 1988 Law and the Current Law of 2002 ........................................ 69 Sex Reassignment Surgeries as a Disciplinary Practice .......................................... 73 Experiencing Institutional Time .............................................................................. 79 Conclusion ............................................................................................................... 83 CHAPTER 6 BANISHED FROM THE CITY: TRANS WOMEN AS HOMO SACERS OF POLICE PRACTICES .............................................................................................. 88 Exclusion of Trans Women from Regulated Sex Work Spaces ............................... 92 Collective Displacements and Exclusions from Neighbourhoods ........................... 98 Exclusion from Public Spaces ............................................................................... 104 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 112 CHAPTER 7 ‘LAW FROM ABOVE’ AND ‘LAW ON THE GROUND’: EXPERIENCES AT THE COURTHOUSE AND CONSTRUCTIONS OF LAW ................................. 117 Law from Above .................................................................................................... 122 Law on the Ground ................................................................................................ 138 Navigating Law ..................................................................................................... 144 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 157 iii CHAPTER 8 ‘I LIVED AND LEARNED’: NARRATIVES OF SURVIVAL, SELF-MAKING AND ALTERNATE MODES OF CIVIC SUBJECTIVITY ................................ 161 The Poisonous Knowledge .................................................................................... 164 Reclaiming Life ..................................................................................................... 174 Practices of Care .................................................................................................... 181 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 188 CONCLUSIONS ...................................................................................................... 192 REFERENCES……………………………………………………………………..203 iv CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Sex change operations were legally recognised as early as 1988 in Turkey which allows trans women to have sex change operations and make the necessary changes in their official documents. This recognition on the legal texts, however, does not reflect on the real lives of trans women. Their lives are shaped by several forms of stigmatisation, marginalisation, abandonment, injury, and even death. They are stigmatised as sexual deviants, and it is hard to get employed outside the sex industry even if they are university-trained. Many have come to pick up a livelihood through sex work, earning money through sex service to male clients. The connection between trans women and sex work even becomes established in the Turkish language, where transvestism means simply prostituting.1 A quantitative survey called “Dog doesn’t bite dog” (2010) conducted by Lambdaistanbul LGBTI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, Intersex) Association in Istanbul laid bare the problems of trans women of the city. Almost ninety percent of the participants were detained at least once and seventy percent were brought to the court following a detention. Only three percent stated that they were not teased, humiliated or insulted by police officers, and less than eleven percent that they were not subjected to their physical violence. The problems that they experienced with the judiciary displayed similar results. Twenty percent was denied service by judiciary officials and almost 1 “Travestilik yapmak” 1 sixty-eight percent expressed distrust of courts. These examples make clear the prevalent role of the law and legal institutions in the everyday lives of trans women and show that their lives necessitate an analysis which goes beyond the legal texts. This study looks at trans women’s relations to the law in Turkey with a focus on its effects on their everyday experiences and practices. I analyse legal texts and trans women’s life story narratives with the aim of disentangling trans women’s marginalisation by the law in everyday life, and their resistance against this process. I deploy the term ‘trans’ as an umbrella term to refer to people “who have undergone hormone treatment or surgery to reconstruct their bodies, and to those who cross gender in ways which are less permanent” (Hines 2007a, para. 1). As such the category denotes a wide range of diversity and difference of gendered embodiment and experience, including transgender, transsexual, cross-dresser, queer gender and other gender non- conforming identities (Whittle 2006, p. xi). ‘Trans woman’ addresses any male to female (MTF) person who has gone or goes through these varying degrees of sexual or gender transition. Although the term ‘trans woman’ is transported from western globalised discourses of gender identity in Turkey, it complies with trans women’s current usage of the term to identify themselves and is increasingly replacing local forms of addressing people experiencing gender transitioning.2 Legal debates about the status of trans women began in Turkey in 1981, during the early years of the 1980s dictatorship, when Bülent Ersoy, a famous singer and post-operative trans woman, submitted a petition to the Turkish courts for a change of her birth and civil records. Her demand was rejected by the Court of Appeals in 1982, the same year 2 This thesis focuses only on male-to-female trans people because they have more public visibility in Turkey and more importantly, because the dynamics of the relationship of female-to-male trans people to law and other disciplinary institutions are likely to be rather different. 2 all trans woman entertainers were banned from performing in the country. It was six years later on May 4, 1988, that the parliament reformed Article 29 of the Turkish Civil Code permitting trans people to change their legal gender on formal documentation after sex reassignment surgery. This legislation then attracted the attention of legal scholars (Kocayusufpaşaoğlu 1986, Öztürel 1980, Öztan and Will 1988) and similar discussions followed with the amendment made in the Civil Code in 2002 (Sağlam 2004, Atamer 2005). This line of scholarship, however, did not go further than a formalist analysis of legal texts, pointing out the deficiencies in the existing regulation and possible ways of overcoming them according to the ideals of democracy and human rights. More recently, a limited number of empirical studies on trans people in Turkey focused on trans women’s everyday practices in the urban area (Kandiyoti 1998, 2002) and their relationship with patriarchy (Berghan 2007). In one of the most comprehensive works in the field, Selek (2001) explicated the multiplicity of exclusionary measures that gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transmen and trans women face in Turkey. Using Gramscian and Althusserian perspectives, she underlined the common features of hegemonic patriarchal practices targeting these groups. She also emphasised the counter-hegemonic potential of the
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