Category: Essays

In the past months, Turkey witnessed the unlawful prosecutions of students who have been taken into custody for unfurling rainbow flags in Istanbul. Prosecutions against those who exhibit the rainbow flag indicate a pattern of state-induced political homophobia that uses LGBTQ symbols as markers of its enemy to justify state violence against marginalized groups and to delegitimize the political…

This piece has been written by the co-organizers of the conference Queer Feminist Perspectives on Political Homophobia and anti-Feminism in the Middle East and Europe;a joint project by Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin(Berlin), Brown University (Providence RI), and Heinrich Böll Foundation (Berlin).  by Tunay Altay, Nadje Al-Ali, Katharina Galor and Gökçe Yurdakul In recent years, political homophobia (Weiss and Bosia 2013)…

On 14 April 2021, a group of students from Turkey’s Middle East Technical University (Ortadogu Teknik Universiversitesi, ODTÜ) gathered at a staircase on campus in Ankara. This staircase was no different from any other staircase on the 11,100-acre campus, yet this was the third time in a fortnight that the students had met at the…

On May 25, a group of police brutally killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man who was allegedly using a counterfeit bill. Floyd’s death marked the beginning of a series of protests around the world and mobilized millions of people to speak out against anti-Black racism globally. The conversation on anti-Blackness has also made the…

After a fun night at the Toronto-based Club Quarantine, on March 28, four Turkish queers decided to start their own digital club. Naz, Ela, Akış Ka, and Efe knew each other from Istanbul’s LGBTQ scene. After spending days in social isolation and facing financial and emotional loss due to the COVID-19, they were united in one…

Travel restrictions became a global response to combat the spread of COVID-19. According to an analysis from April 2020 at least 93 percent of the global population live in countries with coronavirus-related travel restrictions. Nearly half of that proportion – some 3 billion people in all – are in countries that are almost completely closed to travel.…