RECONSTRUCTING THE TRANSGENDERED SELF AS A MUSLIM, NATIONALIST, UPPER-CLASS WOMAN: THE CASE OF BULENT ERSOY RUSTEM ERTUG AlTINAY Winter of 2007. Another Sunday night, a new episode of Popstar Alaturka, a Turkish version of Pop Idol. Minority and human rights activist Hrant Dink has recently been assassinated by an ultranationalist youth and Tur- key is experiencing one of the few notable instances of spontaneous col- lective action in the past two decades.1 It has been only days since tens of thousands of people marched in the streets, chanting, “We are all Arme- nians!” to express their sympathy for Dink and the Armenian communi- ty. Hence, the TV show opens with the popular Armenian folk song “Sari Gelin”—which, later in the evening, will lead to a rather long and interesting monologue by one of the jury members. This member is a glamorous lady in her fifties, wearing a haute couture dress revealing her long legs and shapely breasts. She expresses her discontent with the slogan “We are all Armenians!” Underlining the fact that she is “the Muslim daughter of Muslim parents,” she emphasizes that no one can ever make her say she is Armenian or Christian. Claiming that it would be more acceptable if the slogan had been “We are all Hrant,” she deems it intol- erable for a Muslim person to say that s/he is Armenian—and therefore Christian. But who is this glamorous woman who seems in desperate need to underline her Muslim, nationalist identity? For readers who take an even slight interest in Turkish popular culture, the answer would be quite obvious. The person is Bulent Ersoy: a self-proclaimed expert on classical Ottoman music—though a singer of the popular genre arabesk—one of the first Turkish men to undergo sex change and the very first one to ask for a female passport, and a hater of transgendered prostitutes. Ersoy has been an extremely popular public figure in Turkey since the early 1970s and is very likely to remain so. Following Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman,” in this essay I seek to trace how Bulent Ersoy [WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36: 3 & 4 (Fall/Winter 2008)] © 2008 by Rustem Ertug Altinay. All rights reserved. ERTUG ALTINAY ■ 211 has “become” a Muslim, nationalist, upper-class woman. In doing so, I aim to understand the strategies that define spaces of abjection reserved for transgendered individuals in Turkey in the post-1980s and examine the tactics for survival that are available to them.2 I will try to explore Ersoy’s personal history in the context of events in Turkey since the 1970s and discuss the cultural atmosphere and dynamics of gender in the country in the light of Ersoy’s narrative. A YOUNG, FLAMBOYANT MALE SINGER The renowned singer of classical Turkish music Bulent Ersoy was born as Bulent Erkoc in 1952 in Istanbul. Named after a soccer player, Bulent was the only son of an urban middle-class family. He was introduced to classical Turkish music by his grandfather, who played the zither, and his grandmother, who played the lute. Shown to have talent, he took private lessons with acclaimed musicians at an early age and later attended the conservatory. While he was still a student, he began singing profession- ally under the stage name Bulent Ersoy—the name Erkoc, meaning “brave ram,” was probably too masculine for this rather androgynous young man, so it was replaced by Ersoy, “brave lineage.” Ersoy is also easier on the tongue. Ersoy’s first record came out in 1971. At that time, nightlife in the big cities, especially Istanbul, mainly consisted of Greek tavernas and nightclubs called gazinos. Those nightclubs provided the middle- and upper-classes with hours-long programs bringing together several singers as well as comedians and belly dancers. There would often be one lead singer, called an assolist, who would take the stage last and sing classical Turkish music. The extremely competitive atmosphere made it difficult to become a lead singer. At the time, many established lead singers sang arabesk, a genre influenced by Turkish folk and Middle Eastern music, that had come out in Turkey in the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Stokes, one of the leading experts on arabesk, claims that it is “a music inextricably linked with the culture of the gecekondu, literally the “night settlements” which mushroomed around Turkey’s large industrial cities after the Men- deres government program of rural regeneration in the 1950s produced a large rural labor surplus” (1989, 27). To the urban elite, arabesk was a new and lower-quality musical form. In this context, Ersoy decided to use this dissatisfaction with arabesk and constructed his public image as a 212 ■ RECONSTRUCTING THE TRANSGENDERED SELF AS A MUSLIM, NATIONALIST, UPPER-CLASS WOMAN “classicist.” In other words, he appropriated Turkish classical music and made it his trademark so as to win a place in a highly competitive market. He catered to an audience that wanted to consume “authentic” or “elite” classical Turkish music as opposed to the “popular,” “commercial” vari- ety. With a singing style extremely similar to that of Muzeyyen Senar—a popular singer of classical Turkish music who at the time was at the height of her career and, in some sense, Ersoy’s patron—he became the lead singer at Maksim, the most prestigious nightclub in the country. He was the second lead male singer at that time, after Zeki Muren (1931–96)—a flamboyant queer male singer, as was Ersoy. In fact, one could argue that Ersoy had appropriated an image with which the audience was already familiar, through Zeki Muren, who maintained it until the late 1960s, when he adopted a style that was an interesting combination of Elvis and Liberace. In other words, while Muren was adopting a new image, Ersoy was taking on Muren’s previous one. After Ersoy established his name in the Turkish music scene, he started singing arabesk, for financial reasons (Tulgar 2004). This increased his both popularity and income immensely. As was customary for such singers, Ersoy, like Muren, also made a number of movies with popular female stars of the Turkish cinema. In these mainstream love stories, Ersoy would act the young, naive, maybe somewhat androgynous, yet heterosexual, man. This accorded with his public image. Even though, later, Ersoy would claim that her friends had always seen her as a woman, at the time Ersoy would be visible in the press with his fake fiancées, constructing his image as heterosexual and male. Yet, as Pinar Selek argues, Ersoy and Muren challenged the codes of masculinity in Turkey with their public personas (2007, 111). They did not have the masculinity of other male singers such as Munir Nured- din Selcuk, Orhan Gencebay, or later, Ibrahim Tatlises. Ersoy’s most sig- nificant attributes were probably his rather naive politeness and somewhat androgynous style. Thus, through a bodily and linguistic performance as a man who was openly gay in his private life, yet with a heterosexual public image, Bulent Ersoy opened a liminal sphere that challenged the codes of masculinity. According to Selek, this was why he was loved by women. In the Turkish movie Evlidir Ne Yapsa Yeridir, from 1978, women embark on a kind of feminist revolution; among their demands are male domestic help, new clothes, and listening to Bulent Ersoy. ERTUG ALTINAY ■ 213 EARLY POST-OPERATION YEARS When Ersoy was physiologically male, he would usually wear a white tuxedo or a dark suit and bow tie. Unlike Muren, at the time, he never appeared in garments or accessories that challenged established masculine dress codes, such as mini-shorts, ostrich feathers, or sequins or wore hair- styles or jewelery that were normally seen on women. It was only after his hormone treatment began that he started to appear on stage in female attire. Arguably because Ersoy wanted to claim the female body, his cos- tumes were particularly revealing. In 1980, after the military coup, when she was singing in a nightclub at the Izmir International Fair, Ersoy did not deny the audience its desire to see her newly developing breasts. Proving her femininity in this way resulted in her arrest and she served forty-five days in prison. In 1981, she underwent a sex change operation in London. This would change her life in ways that she probably never expected. Being a transsexual was not easy during the notoriously oppres- sive military regime. She had to go through several physical examinations as well as an exhausting legal case to be recognized as a woman. Her court defense was very significant for the construction of her public image as a transgender individual. She underlined that she was not an anarchist, but a loyal citizen who did not aim to do anything against the social order. By emphasizing her patriotism, she intended to avoid the fate of other victims of the military regime, during which 650,000 people were taken into custody, 230,000 were tried, fifty were executed, and 229 “died of unnatural causes” while in custody (Gunersel 2007). Ersoy was not the only transgendered person who was at risk follow- ing the coup; and in fact, the trans community had been suffering from state violence since the 1960s. Back then, the community was quite small and most of its members lived in Istanbul (Cingoz 2007). As their chanc- es for employment were extremely limited, they tried to survive by either doing odd jobs or taking up prostitution. As prostitutes working in the streets, they were always easy targets for the police.