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BiGS Event: The Political Economy of Visibility

When: —
Venue: Birkbeck 28 Russell Square

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'The Political Economy of Visibility: Critical Reflections on the Human of Rights and the Vicious Circle of Desire, in the Case of LGBT Activism in Turkey'

Speaker: Eirini Avramopoulou, post-doctoral fellow at the ICI Berlin (Institute for Cultural Inquiry)

This paper draws from my ethnographic research in Istanbul during 2008-9 and seeks to explore the relation between the demand for legal recognition and the desire for visibility as negotiated and claimed by different LGBT activists while facing the effects of prohibitions, exclusions and displacement.

I will focus on an ethnographic moment when a person who refuses to be named and self-identified with a certain gender (man, woman, or other) goes to a police station to report a street assault exercising the right to be seen as a human of rights. The incident I will describe occurred few days after the 17th Pride Week of 2009 while accusations of harming the morality of Turkish society and family structure aimed at the closure of the LGBT organization Lambda and when Pride March was being marked by police's sovereign presence and by the recent death of several transsexual people. At the same time, this attack happened in a street that is claimed to feel like 'home' by some LGBT activists who are fully aware that 'home' is not only a space of comfort and familiarity, but it is also haunted by discomfort, uneasiness, inequality, violence, even a death threat.

In this sense, I am interested in exploring desire within the 'political economy' of visibility that I define both in terms of the effects of neoliberal processes of commodification affecting identity claims and gender performances and also as a psychic process affected by the cultural and legal regulations working to discipline bodies and legitimise civic and social policing of genders, sexualities, pleasures and satisfactions. Reflecting on what it means to seek political presence and visibility in the affective economy of a public sphere, I argue that the right to be able to claim that you can be seen as the 'human' of rights should be perceived as a mechanism that sustains a melancholic attachment to the vicious circle of a person's unfullfilled desire for recognition and justice.

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