Turkey’s queer times: epistemic challenges

Abstract This article suggests that Turkey’s queer times are co-constitutive with Jasbir Puar’s queer times of homonationalism. If the queer times of homonationalism correspond to a folding of some queers into life and respectability at the cost of rising Islamophobia in the “West,” Turkey’s queer times witnessed the increasing marginalization and “queering” of variously respectable subjects in the name of Islam and strong LGBT organizing against such marginalization. It discusses the epistemic challenges of studying Turkey’s queer times that stem from a theoretical suspicion that “queer” operates as a tool of colonial modernity when it spreads to the “non-West,” a suspicion that is due both to a perception of Islam as a target and victim of Western neocolonialism and to an ahistorical and rigidly discursive understanding of language. In turn, scholarship on Turkey’s queer times has the potential to truly transnationalize queer studies, both getting us out of the binaries of global–local, colonial–authentic, and West–East and reminding scholars that hegemonies are scattered.