MIT Anthropology • History at MIT •  MIT STS Colloquium" 

"Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday, Extralegality and Police Violence in Turkey"  Aslı Zengin, Ph.D.

This lecture examines the space of extralegality by centering trans women’s narratives of their past and present experiences of violence with the police in Istanbul over the past forty years. I deploy the concept of extralegality to discuss the sexual and gendered repertoire of security and the penal resources of the police, which, most of the time, occupy an ambiguous zone between the legal and the illegal. An examination of the changing relations (forms of conduct and contact) between the police and trans people—the disciplinary, regulatory, and punitive practices of the police regarding trans women’s lives, bodies, and sexual practices—helps us understand how sex/gender transgression, particularly transness, has constantly been a key extralegal site for the state to produce, enact, shape, and reinvent its regime of security through varying configurations of violence.