Come, darling! (Gel, ayol!)

It was only online that I witnessed the Turkish government's violent crackdown of the 2013 Gezi Park protests unfolding. At the time I was studying in New Zealand, where I was living through the prologue of my PhD. I saw the protesters confronting the government, confronting me via YouTube: the garish sea of rainbow pride flags, a Prime Minister's grandstanding, foreheads bloodied by police violence, the linked arms of young queers in the streets, rocks thrown at cops, and impromptu dancing on the street. I understood that the activists were beckoning me. I felt I wielded the potential to do more than simply witness this moment (like so many passing social media causes) – to participate in it: to come, girl, because this is about being targeted by the government, the disinterest-borderingdisgust by your homophobic general practitioner, bored police whistling at you for a laugh, our neighbours and your families and the religious leaders that fantasize about our deviance and sin and sodomy and how if only they could throw us out of their world. I won a grant, bought an audio recorder, and came to Istanbul, darling.

I felt like this mattered personally and academically, but the interpellation – come, darling! – does not translate so simply into the heterodisciplinary realities of International Relations, the discipline I would write this work in. Depending on who you speak to in the field, queer work is either well established as a proper segment of International Relations or an embarrassing oversight, a footnote to an obscure conference paper on cosmopolitanism, a lift door closing on a career. I have spent, truly, a yawning expanse of energy trying to insert myself into what is expected in mainstream, Western debates about the arrangement of the international. Yet I am well aware that this is but a fraction of the labour spent legitimizing the field by those who have come before me. I found myself stuck onto the last hour of the last day of any given International Relations conference programme, like a child being disciplined, literally disciplined. I found myself justifying to publishers and editors and my peers why sexuality matters everywhere, to the common response that ‘this isn't International Relations; this is Sociology/Anthropology/Middle Eastern Studies; this is over-the-top; this is why Trump got elected’. This is Queer Studies. Queers are international.