Fieldwork

In the planning phase of my fieldwork, in the Vice News articles I read about Turkish LGBTQ activism, I felt empathy and hope that I could participate and that my work would help bring visibility to struggles we take for granted in other parts of the world. The reality is simply more complicated. This endless trend in both media and academia of dropping into the strained political climate of far-flung minorities feels, upon reflect, rather orientalist. Can we really do things to help mitigate queer suffering in other places? I still don't know the answer to this: it's either that that very impulse is reductive imperialism or, in the halls of the disciplinary conference, it's of utmost importance to get your story of them out there, preferably in an esteemed-enough press. Queer people are never one single thing; the best generalization I comfortably make about queers is how readily we are essentialized, even by ourselves.

Despite my rosy intentions, my own prejudicing of Turkish queers could not be planned away before I arrived. I do think it was important to experience being somewhat a part of this community for some time. Some of the queers I met in Turkey (and yes, many of them used the English word ‘queer’) said problematic things about other queers, about people of different classes, about women, about trans people, about different ethnic groups. However, I hope we can allow them to be problematic – allow them to be people with dynamic lives, with successes and failures and room to grow – instead of wholesale victims of an oppressive regime and culture. I’m queer, and I’m a white American and have been physically assaulted and I went to Oxford and got a tenure track appointment right out of graduate school and have been called a faggot by some asshole in a passing car at least once every month for the last five years and my student evaluations consistently condemn me for being too feminist and it will take me 30 years to pay off my student loans. To think of queer others without preconception is, I believe, something that we all have to work on continuously, especially in a climate where grand narratives about injury and injustice resonate so strongly.