Paper details

Paper authors	Rukaya Al Zayani
In panel on	Rethinking Violence in Humanitarian Research
Paper presenter(s) will be presenting	In-Person / Online

Abstract

Queer intimacies have fallen outside heteronormative socialities in the analogue world. However different scholars have mapped networked technologies that have facilitated queer intimacies in the digital world. The queer community in Turkey are transcending queer intimacies online that are perpetually forming digital networks. Remarkably during the COVID-19 pandemic, the community accelerated transnational queer intimacies transcending spatial and bodily limits. Queers in Turkey have shifted to online platforms to perform drag, sex work, film and produce ethical queer pornography.

This paper examines the underexplored digital queer intimacies in the Turkish context, it also studies the different modalities of violence, that is; the expressions of technology-facilitated violence experienced in the lives of the queer community in Turkey and how it links to their different intersecting identities, such as gender, class, and ethnicity. The other part of the paper investigates how the body becomes a site of target online. This paper uses narrative interviews as a method to narrate the lived experiences of digital embodiment, gender, queerness, and technology-facilitated violence. The material is analyzed thematically, the results are discussed in light of queering non-hegemonic and non-Western intimacies and the implications of technology-facilitated violence towards the queer individuals in Turkey.

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