Violent Intimacies, Trans Worldmaking, and LGBTI+ Organizing in Turkey
A workshop and film screening with Lalu Ozban and Asli Zengin
WHEN & WHERE
Thursday, October 31, 12:00-2:00pm
Norman Bouchard Memorial Theatre, 6138 Student Union Boulevard, UBC-V (in-person only)
Please RSVP below in advance
A light lunch will be served.
This talk is hosted by the Queer & Trans Antifacisms Research Cluster, funded by the UBC Public Humanities Hub. Co-sponsored by GRSJ, Middle East Studies, Anthropology, and the UBC Film Society.
Please join us for a workshop on transfeminist solidarity and worldmaking, featuring the screening and discussion of “The Neighbour,” a transfeminist short film directed by Cedoy and produced by Lalu (esra) Ozban, and the seminar discussion of Asli Zengin’s Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World exploring the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive.
ABOUT the Film
“The Neighbour” is a transfeminist short film directed by Cedoy and produced by Lalu (esra) Ozban. The film follows Bulut, a trans man, who moves to a new flat in Istanbul tackling with the housing struggles faced by trans communities.
ABOUT the Book
In Violent Intimacies, Aslı Zengin shows how everyday trans lives in Turkey provide an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Zengin offers the concept of violent intimacies to theorize this entangled world of the trans everyday where violence and intimacy are co-constitutive. Violent intimacies emerge from trans people’s everyday interactions with the police, religious and medical institutions, street life, family and kinship, and trans femicides and funerals. The dynamic of violent intimacies prompts the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.
Lalu Ozban Bio:
Lalu (Esra) Ozban (they/them/theirs) creates, curates, exhibits and archives still/moving images. They are currently a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Digital Media at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Lalu’s artistic, curational, and scholarly work focuses on trans, queer, and feminist theories, histories, pedagogies, and praxis. They have curated for Pembe Hayat KuirFest, bi’bak Berlin, Aphrodite Festival Athens, Cambridge University, and AWID Feminist Forum, among others. Born and raised in Ankara, Turkey, Lalu holds a BA in Economics from Bogazici University and an MA in Film and Screen Studies from Goldsmiths College, University of London.
Asli Zengin Bio:
Aslı Zengin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. Before joining Rutgers, she held postdoctoral positions at Brown, Harvard, and Brandeis Universities. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul (Iktidarin Mahremiyeti: Istanbul’da Hayat Kadinlari, Seks Isciligi ve Siddet), was published in Turkish. Her new book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World is recently published by Duke University Press. Her research lies at the intersection of ethnography of sex/gender non-conforming lives and deaths; medico-legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; politics of mourning and grief; as well as transnational feminist and LGBTQ movements in the Middle East with a special focus on Turkey.
