Toward a Local Queer Aesthetics: Nilbar Güreş's Photography and Female Homoerotic Intimacy

Focusing on photographs by Nilbar Güreş, a visual and performance artist, this article analyzes how her images deconstruct and reimagine the various identities of the Turkish nation and Western discourses of homosexuality at once. By depicting seemingly conventional women in traditional settings (such as the living room and the mosque) and imbuing them with a queer currency of desire, Güreş calls into question the stability of national and cultural narratives about these women's lives as well as the stereotypes of an increasingly globalizing queer culture. Through close readings and cultural and political contextualization, the article positions her work vis-à-vis the tensions between global and local, rural and urban, traditional and marginal, and argues that her images form a visual archive of local queer aesthetics that positions itself in opposition to both national discourses of gender and sexuality in the contemporary Turkish context and Western-centric discourses of queerness.