Violent Intimacies: Tactile State Power, Sex/Gender Transgression, and the Politics of Touch in Contemporary Turkey

This article is about how sex, gender, and sexuality are governed in Turkey at the intersection of intimate contact and mandated encounters with medicolegal institutions and the bodies of sex/gender transgressive people. To explore this question, it brings two institutional processes together: trans women’s gender reassignment processes in public hospitals and gay men’s medical examinations to receive exemptions from compulsory military service. In both sites institutional observation and practice are preoccupied with penile penetration as a tool to eliminate and hence regulate sex/gender transgression. I argue that this institutional fixation develops specific proximities and forms of touch by the state on (and in) the bodies of trans women and gay men, which in turn plays a pivotal role in the institutional production of sexual difference and normative regulation of sexuality, desire, sex, and gender in Turkey.