The terminology and representations used in order to negotiate transgender identities in the 1980’s Turkish Press.

Tuesday 8th Feb: Seda Karanfil,  Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona.

Transgender individuals consist of one of the most vulnerable groups in Turkey which records the highest rate of hate crime in Europe (Balzer, LaGata, and Berredo; 2016), including murders that on many occasions are not penalized. In addition, transgender subjects can experience adverse life conditions, such as unemployment, poor accommodation, and health care issues. Apart from going through the abovementioned adversities, transgender subjects also face segregation in institutional discourses shaped by judicial bodies, religious affairs, and state institutions. Furthermore, the legislation that defines disorderly social behaviours commonly targets sex workers and transgender women (sexualrightsdatabase.org; 2016).

Drawing on queer linguistics, queer theory, and critical discourse analysis assisted by corpus methods, this research takes a stance in favour of transgender subjects in Turkey and explores how transgender identities are enacted and negotiated in media in order to disclose the marginalized positions of transgender individuals in discursive domains that are constitutive to the unequal life conditions faced by them. With a focus on the variation of terminology, I look at how specific linguistic choices construct transgender identities, with what consequences, and for whom.

This talk comprises of a bundle of corpus data from 1980s, which is part of the large database consisting of three segments of news articles from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. The data foregrounded here is centred on Bülent Ersoy, the most famous transgender idol in Turkey, whose gender affirmation coincided with the 1980 military coup in Turkey. The military junta banned her public performances and refused to recognize her gender identity/status (Ertür, Lebow; 2014), which was then widely reported in newspapers. As a result, the visibility and representations of transgender subjects in the press became remarkably augmented, and the variation of terminology used to negotiate transgender identities came into sight. Showing this process, I argue that the concept of identity is negotiated and operationalised in the social world as a language-mediated product constituting real-life complexities, which also leads to the perception of non-normative identities as being crafted and problematic in the press (Bucholtz and Hall; 2004, 2005).

References

Balzer C., LaGata C., Berredo L., 2,190 murders are only the tip of the iceberg- An introduction to the Trans Murder Monitoring project: TMM annual report 2016, TvT Publication Series Vol.14, October 2016.

Bucholtz M., Hall K., Language and Identity, In: A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology (pp. 369-394), Chapter 16, Blackwell, November 2004.

Bucholtz M., Hall K., Identity and Interaction: A sociocultural linguistic approach, In: Discourse Studies Vol 7 (4-5) (pp. 585-614), Sage Publications, 2005.

Ertür B., Lebow A., Coup de Genre: The Trials and Tribulations of Bülent Ersoy, Theory& Event 17.1, 2014.

Sexual Rights Database https://sexualrightsdatabase.org/map/21/Adult%20sex%20work