Before President Erdogan's repressive politics took hold, queer cultures were more visible than ever in Turkey. Queer Turkey offers a broad range of reflections on queer Turkish cultures within a transnational, Euro-American context. Based on his experience in Istanbul, Ralph J. Poole shares his impressions of queer desires between Muslim tradition and global pop, observes what goes on in the hamam, and wonders about Arabesk culture. The book features discussions of queer travel writers, poets, playwrights, and film directors. Their multifarious works manifest the subtle and subversive ways in which artists crisscross the cultural borders of East and West. With its many facets of Turkish-Euro-American cultural interactions, Queer Turkey outlines a kaleidoscope of transnational poetics.

In Queer in Translation, Evren Savcı analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savcı shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savcı traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savcı turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West—thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

This volume brings together a selection of discussions on LGBT that are presented from different points of view and from different disciplines. This compilation consisting of nine chapters, focuses on the perspectives on LGBT in Turkey, in a broad range from NGOs to cinema, social policies to theatres. All chapters discuss Turkey and the studies of LGBT in Turkey and presented in two parts. First part is about the theoric and empirical studies which takes over Turkey experiences from a structural perspective. Still, in this first part, there are two chapters which explain the comparison of UK and EU experiences with Turkey. The second part has more of text analysis which indicates cultural studies.

Turkey's hostile approach to the LGBTI community leads Muedini to document the history of LGBTI rights, rights abuses, and activist strategies to secure LGBTI rights in Turkey.

Despite its some of its more liberal and democratic characteristics - when compared to many other countries in the Middle East - the more conservative elements within Turkish politics and society have made gains over the past decades. As a result, like many others in the region, Turkish society has multiple standards when naming, evaluating and reacting to men who have sex with men. Cenk Ozbay argues that overall, self-identified gay men (as well as men who practice clandestine same-sex acts) are most of the time marginalised, ostracised and rendered 'immoral' in both everyday practices and social institutions. He offers in this book an analysis of the concept of masculinity as central to redefining boundaries of class, gender and sexuality, particularly looking at the dynamics between self-identified gay men and straight-acting male prostitutes, or 'rent boys'. A result of in-depth interviews with both self-identified gay men and rent boys, Ozbay explores the changing discourses and meaning of class, gender and queer sexualities, and how these three are embedded within urban and familial narratives.

Winner of the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship's Book Award presented by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Grassroots Literacies analyzes the complex issues surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender representations, technology, and grassroots activism in international contexts through the lens of Legato, a collegiate lesbian and gay association that engaged in activism in colleges and universities in Turkey from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Using the Internet and digital media, Legato enabled students to connect with each other on campuses across the country and introduced them to new (i.e., lesbian and gay) identity categories and community activism. Serkan Görkemli presents historical, cultural, visual, and interview-based analyses of Legato members' "coming out" experiences and uses of digital media. Members emerged as sexuality activists with the help of the Internet and engaged with negative representations of homosexuality through offline events such as film screenings, reading groups, and conferences in the challenging context of burgeoning civil society efforts in Turkey. Bridging transnational and literacy-based studies, the book ultimately traces the contours of a "transnational literacy" regarding sexuality.

Drawing on the words and stories of queer Turkish activists, this book aims to unravel the complexities of queer lives in Turkey. In doing so, it challenges dominant conceptualizations of the queer Turkish experience within critical security discourses. The book argues that while queer Turks are subjected to ceaseless forms of insecurity in their governance, opportunities for emancipatory resistance have emerged alongside these abuses. It identifies the ways in which the state, the family, Turkish Islam and other socially-mediated processes and agencies can expose or protect queers from violence in the Turkish community.

During the 2010s in Turkey, LGBTQ activists, groups, and individuals persisted against social, political, and legal adversity. Erasure during the Gezi Park Protests in 2013, a Pride parade ban in Istanbul in 2016, and an indefinite ban on all LGBTQ events in Ankara in 2017 directly aimed at ending the activities, visibility, and existence of LGBTQ organizations in the two biggest cities in Turkey. This book examines the ways in which LGBTQ activists engaged in talkback against restrictions that impacted the lives of LGBTQ individuals and how said individuals endured such adversity. Focusing on the elements of discourses used by LGBTQ activists, this work argues that oppositional discourses need to address as well as remedy the various elements of normative discourses-constructions of space, time, and affect-in order to be deemed a talkback, instead of merely perpetuating the normativities of oppressive discourses. Ali E. Erol is an Assistant Professor in the Communication Department at Boston College, USA. His research on the intersections of the politics of desire, sexuality, and space have previously been published in International Journal of Communication, Sexualities Journal, Investigaciones Feministas, KAOSQ+, and others.

LGBTI Politics and Value Change in Ukraine and Turkey focuses on the impact of European Union promotion of LGBTI rights in Turkey and Ukraine, offering a re-evaluation of the mechanisms used by the EU and the domestic and external conditions that result in different outcomes. With the protection of LGBTI rights becoming one of the core principles of the EU, the last two decades have seen a consistently growing commitment of the Union to defending the human rights of LGBTI people, not only in its member states but also internationally. Drawing on rich empirical data, this work uses the cases of Turkey, a candidate state, and Ukraine, a state in the European Neighbourhood, to evaluate the ability of the EU to promote tolerance and diversity in countries where the population has not experienced a radical shift of attitudes toward LGBTI people. Examining the export of 'European values', politics of LGBTI rights in the enlarged European Union, the development of LGBTI rights in Turkey and the transformation of its political system, competing normative powers and LGBTI rights in Ukraine, Maryna Shevtsova traces the ‘Europeanization’ of rights beyond Europe. This book will be of interest to researchers in LGBTI Studies, Eastern European Politics, the European Union and Gender Studies.

LGBTI Politics and Value Change in Ukraine and Turkey focuses on the impact of European Union promotion of LGBTI rights in Turkey and Ukraine, offering a re-evaluation of the mechanisms used by the EU and the domestic and external conditions that result in different outcomes. With the protection of LGBTI rights becoming one of the core principles of the EU, the last two decades have seen a consistently growing commitment of the Union to defending the human rights of LGBTI people, not only in its member states but also internationally. Drawing on rich empirical data, this work uses the cases of Turkey, a candidate state, and Ukraine, a state in the European Neighbourhood, to evaluate the ability of the EU to promote tolerance and diversity in countries where the population has not experienced a radical shift of attitudes toward LGBTI people. Examining the export of 'European values', politics of LGBTI rights in the enlarged European Union, the development of LGBTI rights in Turkey and the transformation of its political system, competing normative powers and LGBT rights in Ukraine, Maryna Shevtsova traces the ‘Europeanization’ of rights beyond Europe. This book will be of interest to researchers in LGBTI Studies, Eastern European Politics, the European Union and Gender Studies.