Remembering Hope: Politics of queer hope during authoritarian times in Turkey
Monday, December 9, 2019 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm EST/GMT-5Bard College Berlin Cafeteria, Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow
Guest lecture by Dr. Yener Bayramoğlu (Free University of Berlin)
Going against the widespread assumption that hope can only flourish in good times, this contribution traces how hope can emerge least expected times and places. It proposes to think back to some of the events that took place in Turkey as a result of the military coup in 1980, and consider them alongside what has happened since the coup attempt in 2016. Drawing on a rich array of visual and textual material from tabloids, magazines, newspapers, and digital platforms, it inquires how queer hope manages to make its mark upon general discourse and queer activism even in times when the present appears dismal and hopeless due to authoritarianism. By exploring an archive of queer activism in Turkey, it illustrates how queer hope has always persisted in times of despair, even within discourses of hopelessness and despondency. It argues that queer hope not only helps to map out possible future routes for queer lives in (and beyond) Turkey, but also operates to legitimize and justify the articulation of political demands in contexts in which that might seem to be a futile exercise.
Yener Bayramoğlu received his PhD from the Institute for Media and Communication Studies at Free University of Berlin. He is currently a postdoctoral fellow at Free University of Berlin. He has taught Gender and Queer Studies at Alice Salomon University in Berlin since 2015. His research interests include gender and sexuality, discourse analysis, cultural history, history of sexuality, migration studies, and queer theory. In his PhD thesis, he analyzed the historical transformation of queer representations in German and Turkish tabloids since the late 1960s. His work has been published in several books and journals.
Date & time: Monday, December 9, 2019, from 12:00pm
Venue: Bard College Berlin Cafeteria
Waldstr. 70, Berlin - Pankow
Email: [email protected]