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State University of New York Press - Serkan Görkemli

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149 pages

English

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Winner of the 2015 Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship's Book Award presented by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC)

Grassroots Literacies analyzes the complex issues surrounding lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender representations, technology, and grassroots activism in international contexts through the lens of Legato, a collegiate lesbian and gay association that engaged in activism in colleges and universities in Turkey from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Using the Internet and digital media, Legato enabled students to connect with each other on campuses across the country and introduced them to new (i.e., lesbian and gay) identity categories and community activism. Serkan Görkemli presents historical, cultural, visual, and interview-based analyses of Legato members' "coming out" experiences and uses of digital media. Members emerged as sexuality activists with the help of the Internet and engaged with negative representations of homosexuality through offline events such as film screenings, reading groups, and conferences in the challenging context of burgeoning civil society efforts in Turkey. Bridging transnational and literacy-based studies, the book ultimately traces the contours of a "transnational literacy" regarding sexuality.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

1. Legato in Turkey: Literacy, Media, and Global Sexualities

2. From Queer Empire to Heterosexual Republic: Modernity, Homosexuality, and Media

3. Coming Out and Legato Members’ Narratives of Sexual Literacy

4. Paper Tigers in Digital Closets? Lesbian and Gay Activism, the Internet, and Community Literacy

5. Literacies, Sexualities, and Transnational Rhetorics

Appendix A: Interview Questions
Appendix B: Informed Consent Form

Notes
Works Cited
Index

Sujets

Gay Studies

Informations

Publié par	State University of New York Press
Date de parution	08 mai 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781438451848
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1648€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Grassroots Literacies
SUNY series, Praxis: Theory in Action

Nancy A. Naples, editor
Grassroots Literacies
Lesbian and Gay Activism and the Internet in Turkey
SERKAN GÖRKEMLI
“Double Self-Portrait” (1915) by the Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890–1918)
Published by STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS Albany
© 2014 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press www.sunypress.edu
Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Kate McDonnell
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Görkemli, Serkan.
Grassroots literacies : lesbian and gay activism and the Internet in Turkey / Serkan Görkemli. pages cm. — (SUNY series, Praxis : theory in action)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-5183-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Gay rights—Turkey. 2. Gay liberation movement—Turkey. 3. Gays—Political activity—Turkey. 4. Internet—Political aspects. I. Title.
HQ76.8.T9G67 2014
323.3 264—dc23
2013025958
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To LGBT activists in Turkey
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
1 Legato in Turkey: Literacy, Media, and Global Sexualities
2 From Queer Empire to Heterosexual Republic: Modernity, Homosexuality, and Media
3 Coming Out and Legato Members’ Narratives of Sexual Literacy
4 Paper Tigers in Digital Closets? Lesbian and Gay Activism, the Internet, and Community Literacy
5 Literacies, Sexualities, and Transnational Rhetorics
Appendix A: Interview Questions
Appendix B: Informed Consent Form
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Illustrations 2.1 “Türkiye’nin ‘Gay Ikonu’: Hande Yener” (“Turkey’s ‘Gay Icon’: Hande Yener”) on the front cover of the November/December 2007 special issue of Kaos GL. Note: Permission courtesy of Kaos GL . 2.2 Legato, an Intercollegiate Lesbian and Gay Association (Promotional Flyer 1) . 2.3 Legato, an Intercollegiate Lesbian and Gay Association (Promotional Flyer 2) . 2.4 Legato Web Page: “May My Son Become Gay When He Grows Up!” 2.5 Legato Web Page: “Am I a Lesbian?” 2.6 LEGATO, a Homosexual Fanzine, the front cover of the Legato fanzine featuring a drawing titled “Double Self-Portrait” (1915) by the Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele (1890–1918) . 2.7 “When Two Women Get Together” (from the Legato fanzine) . 3.1 A collaged graphic manifesto on the back cover of the Legato fanzine: “Come, small insect, out of your closet! You will see then that living in apprehension is preferable to hiding or taking refuge.”
Acknowledgments
First and foremost, I would like to thank the former Legato members for participating in this study and devoting their time for the interviews. I would also like to thank Kaos GL for providing me with access to its publications during my visit to its office in Ankara in summer 2009, as well as the vast archive of articles and other information on its Web site. The image of the front cover of Kaos GL ’s November/December 2007 issue on Turkish gay icons was included in this book with Kaos GL’s permission (permission does not imply endorsement by the organization). In addition, I would like to acknowledge that small portions of chapters 2 and 3 were published in the following academic journals and were included in this manuscript with their permission: Reflections: A Journal of Public Rhetoric, Civic Writing, and Service-Learning (2010); Enculturation: A Journal of Rhetoric, Writing, and Culture (2011); and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (Indiana University Press, 2012). The following grants supported my research for this book in 2003, 2004, and 2009: the 2003 and 2004 Summer Research Grants from the Purdue Research Foundation at Purdue University and the 2009 Junior Faculty Summer Research Fellowship from the UConn Research Foundation at the University of Connecticut.
A friend from Boğaziçi University, my alma mater in Istanbul, invited me to join Legato by subscribing to its online mailing lists in spring 2001. Since then, my interest in LGBT history and my enthusiasm about Legato’s status as the first nationwide collegiate lesbian and gay association in Turkey have fueled my research and writing about its online and offline activism. I would like to acknowledge the following people who have supported my scholarly efforts and provided encouragement during the journey that culminated in this book: Patricia Sullivan, Margie Berns, Samantha Blackmon, and Dino Felluga (my dissertation committee) and Deb Rankin and Claudia Hoffman (my buddies from graduate school) at Purdue University; Andrea Lunsford and the members of the Lecturers’ Writing Group at the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University; and my colleagues Pamela Bedore, Margaret Breen, Pamela Brown, Ellen Carillo, Morgne Cramer, Kathy Knapp, and Frederick Roden at the University of Connecticut. I would also like to extend thanks to the following friends for assisting with this project during my field research: Akın Tek for putting me up in his apartment in Istanbul during the data collection process and helping me find people for interviews; and Mehin Akhun for patiently going over each interview question with me and meticulously instructing me in the fine art of interviewing and for hosting me during my archival research in Ankara. Last but not least, I offer eternal gratitude to my family for their love and support and to my partner Jeremy Hall for his loving presence and support during the years I worked on this book.
1
Legato in Turkey
Literacy, Media, and Global Sexualities
In summer 2003, while collecting data for this research project in Istanbul, Turkey during the globally celebrated Gay Pride Week, I joined a screening of Stonewall (1995), a feature film about the 1969 riots at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, New York City. For many, the Stonewall riots marked the beginning of the gay rights movement in the United States. The screening took place at the headquarters of Lambda Istanbul, an LGBT 1 advocacy organization, on the fifth floor of a building tucked away on a bustling side street in Beyoglu, a crowded, labyrinthine district of Istanbul. A sturdy cast-iron door, on which—before the doorbell was activated—people knocked fiercely so that those inside could hear, opened that day into a room full of white plastic chairs neatly organized in rows facing a TV and a VCR that played the film in English, with Turkish subtitles. The room was brimming with people who watched the film as they ate, among other items, delicious dolma (stuffed grape leaves) and börek (savory pastry) ordered for the occasion. Most of the attendees had learned of the screening through announcements on various community media, including the mailing lists of Legato 2 ( Lezbiyen-Gay Topluluğu [Lesbian and Gay Association]) 3 . As an Internet-based collegiate student group, Legato engaged in activism from the mid-1990s to summer 2008 to establish officially recognized LGBT student clubs, similar to those in U.S. institutions of higher education, in Turkish colleges and universities.
This moment is a fitting opening for this book’s examination of grassroots literacies, lesbian and gay activism, and the Internet in Turkey because it exemplifies the many community literacy events co-organized by Legato. As a literacy event 4 , the screening exposed participants to multiple representations of homosexuality, community, activism, and discourses of gender and sexuality, through an audiovisual text that exercised, in this case, their sexuality-related literacy. In addition, the screening strengthened attendees’ community literacy and bolstered their participation in Legato, a collegiate Internet-mediated lesbian and gay student association, and Lambda Istanbul, a noncollegiate LGBT advocacy organization.
Founded in 1993, Lambda Istanbul was one of the two major noncollegiate LGBT advocacy organizations established in Turkey in the first half of the 1990s. The other, Kaos GL (“kaos” is the Turkish spelling of “chaos”), was founded in 1994 in Ankara. Both organizations are still active and influential today, and they have been strongly engaged in creating an LGBT community and advocating for LGBT rights in Turkey. The inception of Legato in the second half of the 1990s can be traced to efforts by Kaos GL to recruit college students to initiate activism on college campuses in Ankara. These efforts included literacy events that were eventually replicated by Legato on university campuses across Turkey, such as film screenings, discussion groups, and initiatives and demonstrations criticizing negative representations of homosexuality and demanding recognition for lesbian and gay student groups. Consequently, in this book, I focus on Legato from the perspective of literacy and explore the centrality of the rhetorics of sexuality to its collegiate, Internet-mediated lesbian and gay activism in Turkey.
The following overview covers the period from Legato’s inception in 1996 to Kaos GL’s September/October 2010 publication about collegiate lesbian and gay activism and illustrates Legato’s origins and history as an Internet-mediated collegiate group. Legato’s development was inextricably intertwined with not only the local LGBT advocacy organizations and their legacy of community organizing, but also the Intern