States of Exception: Legal Governance of Trans Women in Urban Turkey
| Published date | 01 June 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663920924780 |
| Date | 01 June 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
States of Exception: Legal
Governance of Trans
Women in Urban Turkey
Ezgi Tas¸cıog˘lu
Keele University, UK
Abstract
Based on life-story narratives of trans women, this article aims to shed light on the role
of the law in their exclusion from public spaces in urban Turkey over the last four
decades. In the light of Giorgio Agamben’s work on the sovereign exception, I argue
trans women in Turkey routinely find themselves in the position of homo sacer: the bare
life that has been rendered politically disqualified and consigned to death. Unlike in
Agamben’s account, in which subjects are turned into homo sacers in a singular gesture
of the sovereign, my analysis directs attention to the myriad ways states of exception can
be created. The experiences of trans women in urban Turkey demonstrate that
exceptional legal regimes can be generated by suspending – or by simply not enforcing –
the law, as well as, conversely, by establishing an overwhelming presence of the law in
daily life. Rather than opposing legality to sovereignty, I argue closer attention needs to
be paid to the interfaces of law with negative forms of power and to increasingly
sophisticated ways of articulating biopolitical concerns to legal practices revolving
around sovereignty.
Keywords
Legal governmentality, misdemeanour law, sex work, sovereignty, state of exception,
trans women, trials, Turkey, violence
Trans women’s lives in Turkey are marked by a stark contrast between invisibility in
legal texts and overwhelming presence of law in their daily lives. Lesbian, gay, bisexual,
transgender and intersex (LGBTI) identities and p ractices have never been formally
Corresponding author:
Ezgi Tas¸cıog
˘lu, School of Law, Keele University, Keele, ST5 5BG Staffordshire, UK.
Email: e.e.tascioglu@keele.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2021, Vol. 30(3) 384–404
ªThe Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0964663920924780
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criminalized under Turkish laws, but neither have they been offered any formal legal
recognition or protection, except for a clause regulating sex reassignment surgeries
inserted into the Civil Law in 1988. However, trans women are usual targets of the law
in the form of police surveillance, fines, trials and arrests as documented in reports by
LGBTI and sex worker organizations (Kaos GL, 2007; Lambdaistanbul LGBTI Asso-
ciation, 2010; O
¨rdek, 2014, 2016), and a number of academic studies that have focused
on their lived experiences (Berghan, 2007; Selek, 2006; Tas¸ cıog
˘lu, 2011, 2015).
Based on life-story interviews with trans women, this article examines the interac-
tions of social and legal dynamics in their lives to shed light on their routinized exclusion
from public spaces. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2005) work on the sovereign
exception, I argue that trans women of Turkey routinely find themselves in the position
of homo sacer: the bare life that has been rendered politically disqualified and consigned
to death. I will show the ways through which their gov ernmentalization by the law
(Foucault, 1991; Rose and Valverde, 1998) leaves trans women in an exceptional legality
that strips them of their most fundamental rights.
To understand the constitution of this exceptional legality, my analysis starts not from
abstract rules or legal norms but from the everyday experiences of people who are
subjected to its force on the ground. Law in everyday life literature has been important
in showing ordinary people’s tactical use of the ambivalent spaces between the formal
and the informal in their daily engagements with law (Ewick and Silbey, 1998). Not-
withstanding this resistance potential, this article will demonstrate how the ambivalent
spaces embedded in the law can also be sources for repressive practices. A web of laws
and sociolegal conventions unfolding in the everyday lives of trans women in Turkey
enable the creation of zones of am bivalence, in which their trea tment is left to the
authority in question. As such, they are turned into homo sacers in the most mundane
daily matters.
My analysis aims in particular to draw attention to the multiplicity of governmental
measures that oust trans women’s bodies from public spaces. While force and coercion
have long been used in their management, in recent decades, new governmental strate-
gies have been put into place that rely largely on deployments of the law, such as fines
and prosecution. Despite differences in form, I argue the same heteronormative logic of
exclusion transfuses throughout these different practices that constitute trans women’s
governance in urban Turkey (cf. Valverde, 2014). Although some of these exclusionary
measures can be more easily classified outside normatively drawn boundaries of lawful
action (namely, in a legal vs. illegal dyad), the web of governmental strategies encircling
trans women points to the plural interfaces of the law with negative forms of power. This
analysis complicates the understanding of state of exception as an aberration from or
abandonment of the normal (legal) order. It goes ‘beyond the drama of the sovereign
suspension of legality’ (Sarat, 2010: 6) towards appreciating the ways through which
exceptional legal regimes can be created at the intersections of exceptionalism and legal
regulation.
The article is organized as follows. After discussing my meth odology, I offer an
analysis on the state of exception as a concept that can be mobilized for researching the
operation of sovereignty in the field of legal governmentality. This is followed by a
discussion on the regulation of sex work in Turkish laws, which is the foundation on
Tas¸ cıog
˘lu 385
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