PhD thesis defence by Ezgi Güler
This research is about a repertoire of collective practices of a community of transfeminine sex workers in urban Turkey. Part of the practices discussed in this thesis involve building a community, communal spaces, social codes, and relationships which enable sex workers to support and protect one another. Others could be read as commitments and expressions that challenge violence and marginalisation. The research is embedded in the broader debates on urban marginality. While some studies on this topic have focused solely on the constraining effects, others have overemphasised the enabling potential of margins, romanticizing solidarity and political agency emerging at these spaces. Building on a middle position between these two perspectives, my research primarily focuses on the possibilities created at the urban margins, though structural factors are central to my analysis.
Based on participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and online sources, I begin by explaining the political, legal, and economic environment in which trans sex workers in contemporary Turkey live. I argue that the ambiguous nature of marginality facilitates their alignments and informal means of organising. I then investigate the shared spaces, relationships, collective subjectivities, social codes, and labour organisation of a community of trans sex workers. Forming the basis of their support exchanges and community mobilisation, these structures help them to address their common challenges. Further, I analyse how this population creates a range of struggles, namely, collective protests and individual confrontations, against violence and marginalisation. Finally, I explore the defying and community-building roles of the humour, joy, and laughter that permeate everyday social interactions among sex workers.
This thesis brings three contributions to the literature. It shows that the urban marginality, though less focused, is a critical component of the lives of trans feminine sex workers in Turkey. It also proposes that gender and sexuality, while largely overlooked in urban studies, are relevant and significant analytical categories to both urban subordination and politics. Finally, the thesis suggests that urban margins, while facilitating alignments and informal means of organising among people, are also the spaces where tensions and ruptures can form, and solidarities and struggles can be fragile. In this sense, my research offers a nuanced understanding of urban agency by explaining both the material, relational, and discursive possibilities urban agency can create and the complexities and ambivalences it can involve at the margins. Despite their limitations, the collective practices detailed here support the material and social persistence of sex workers to establish communities and friendships, care for one another, claim visibility, earn their living, and have joy in the face of relentless violence, discrimination, and stigma encircling their lives.
Ezgi Güler is a PhD researcher in the Department of Political and Social Sciences. Her broader research interests centre on gender and sexuality, urban ethnography, sex work, structural violence, migration, and qualitative research methods.