This talk is part of the Berlin Anthropology Seminars.

In Turkey, the Law on Meetings and Demonstrations plays a central role in shaping how the courts deal with dissident groups that take to the streets in social protests. Despite the Turkish state’s capability of incarcerating political groups and keeping them behind bar for prolonged terms— as experienced by the thousands of Kurdish political prisoners—my ethnographic case contrarily shows that state attorneys frequently fail to get convictions and often lose cases against queer and trans defendants. What is the aim of the state in summoning hundreds of queer activists to court and spending significant judicial resources without obtaining any legally binding result?

My presentation argues that the state’s aim is neither to imprison nor simply to intimidate. The litigation process forces activists to come out and present themselves as political subjects before a judge. However, these defenses do more than coming out i.e., telling truth and authentic self-realization. I demonstrate how activists use litigation to reveal the state’s enduring complicity and its unwritten siege on queer politics. These trials eventually create a stage for the regime to assert itself as a punitive force and to deploy an affective minority politics, rendering ambiguous who is actually ‘coming out’ in court, and to whom.

This is a hybrid event. Online participation will be possible under the following link:

https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin/j.php?MTID=m0ae58f835583310e5c077aa2ae3364f3