By Susan Gonzalez
March 9, 2021
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People attending a LGBT pride parade on June 30, 2013 in Taksim Square, Istanbul, Turkey.
When Yale faculty member Evren Savcı was writing her dissertation on queer politics in her birth country of Turkey a decade ago, she found there was little published on the subject. So she decided to expand her research into a book.
In “Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam” (Duke University Press), Savcı, an assistant professor in women’s, gender, and sexuality studies in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, illuminates the struggles of queer individuals living under Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (known as AKP), a moderate-Islamist political regime which rose to power in 2002. It’s based in part on her ethnographic research on queer activists from 2008 through the 2013 Gezi Park uprising, when thousands of Turkish