Lubunya Assemblages: Queer Networked Resistances in Turkey

From a multi-sited ethnographic perspective, I analyse the impacts of digital technologies on queer activism in contemporary Turkey with a focus on networked resistance practices such as Pride activism and queer knowledge production at the digital level. By so doing, I aim to explore how queer spaces of resistance and practices of sexual citizenship are (re)articulated within a context of heteropatriarchal oppression. Turkey forms one of the major spaces for queer activism and public protest, where the community since the 1980s has been claiming their right to public assembly through civil society actions and street protests. The queer movement in Turkey has a strong culture of spatial resistance, their struggles for supporting the existence and growth of queer spaces and neighbourhoods in major cities including Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir being particularly visible. Today, the AKP government and their right-wing populist coalition in Turkey are depoliticising public spaces and targeting the queer community by policing the streets or producing hate speech on social media, and has taken even a legislation focused action by withdrawing from the Istanbul Convention. Under these circumstances, the understanding of spatial and political contestation on the queer movement and emerging resistance cultures in Turkey becomes increasingly important. My methodology for exploring queer resistance in this highly volatile, turbulent context challenges the ontological hierarchies between online and offline with an investigation of their entanglements. With an assemblage thinking, I look at how subjects, spaces and affects interact in forming and sustaining queer resistance against political and epistemic violences.