Contesting Governance Platform at Utrecht University invites you to a book launch hosted by author Dr. Aslı Zengin, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University, the United States. This event will include a talk about the book from Dr. Aslı Zengin, followed by an interdisciplinary discussion. 

Dr. Zengin’s book Violent Intimacies : The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World traces how trans people in Turkey creatively negotiate and resist everyday cisheteronormative violence. Drawing on the history and ethnography of the trans communal life in Istanbul, Dr. Zengin develops an understanding of cisheteronormative violence that expands beyond sex, gender and sexuality. She shows how cisheteronormativity forms a connective tissue among neoliberal governmentality, biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, nationalist religiosity and authoritarian management of social difference. As much as trans people are shaped by these processes, they also transform them in intimate ways. Transness in Turkey provides an insightful site for developing new perspectives on statecraft, securitization and surveillance, family and kin-making, urban geography, and political life. Dr. 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 new understandings of violence and intimacy and the world-making struggles of trans people in a Middle Eastern context.

About the speakers

The interdisciplinary discussion will be moderated by Dr. Hayal Akarsu, and Dr. Marlene Schäfers and Dr. Kathrin Thiele will serve as discussants:

• Dr. Marlene Schäfers is an Assistant Professor in Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. Dr Schäfers’ research focuses on the impact of state violence on intimate and gendered lives, the politics of death and the afterlife, and the intersections of affect and politics. She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. 
• Dr. Kathrin Thiele is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. She is trained transdisciplinarily in Gender Studies, Sociology, Literary Studies and Critical Theory. Her research engages with questions of critical inquiry, ethics and politics from queer feminist, decolonial and posthuman(ist) philosophical perspectives.
• Dr. Hayal Akarsu is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht University. From her current book project on police reforms to her ongoing research on digital policing and environmental crimes, Dr. Akarsu explores how various imaginations of risk and threat securitize and police different realms of social and natural life.