Haunted Taxonomies, Converging Temporalities: Queer Ghosts on the Stages of Istanbul

Abstract

Queer ghosts are haunting the independent stages of Istanbul. Trans sex workers, fallen angels, and pop icons who lost their lives are coming back to life, and they want more than a mourning. They want to educate the living, seek redress, complain, and imagine new social knowledges for the queers of the present time. This article offers a dramaturgical taxonomy of these queer ghosts by tracing what they are trying to enact through their refusal to leave the theatrical space. It takes four plays as case studies: Ufuk Tan Altunkaya’s 80ʹlerde Lubunya Olmak (Being a Queer in the 1980s, 2013), Ebru Nihan Celkan’s Uzaydan Gelen Prens (The Prince from Space, 2018), Özen Yula’s Yala ama Yutma (Lick but Don’t Swallow, 2010), and Ahmet Sami Özbudak’s İz (The Stain, 2013). It argues that queerness on Istanbul’s independent stages reveals historical fatalities but also provides a glimpse of alternative ways of survival for the precarious.

Keywords:

• Temporality
• hauntology
• queerness
• Turkey
• queer dramaturgies

Acknowledgements

I am extremely thankful to Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier for their generosity, time, and expertise, which have helped me turn this work into what it is now. I would also like to extend thanks to the reviewer for their immensely constructive comments. I am also grateful to Francesca Stella, who encouraged this work and kindly offered feedback on the earlier drafts.

Notes on Contributor

Erdem Avşar is a postgraduate researcher at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on dramaturgies of queer grief and hope in Turkey, which was awarded the Lord Kelvin/Adam Smith PhD scholarship. He is also a playwright, poet, and translator. He is an affiliate artist at UNESCO RILA, a network of artists working on refugee integration through the arts.

Notes

1. Erdem Gürsu and Sinan Elitemiz, ‘N.K.’, in 80ʹlerde Lubunya Olmak, eds. Erdem Gürsu and Sinan Elitemiz (İzmir: Siyah Pembe Üçgen, 2012), 197–203 (201). All translations throughout the article are my own unless attributed.

2. For further information, see my discussion on page 115 of this article.

3. See queer theory and transnational sexualities scholar Evren Savcı’s, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021) for a thorough discussion of this shift.

4. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (Hoboken: Taylor & Francis, 2006), 3. See also 96–110.

5. Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 10.

6. See Clive Seale, Constructing Death: The Sociology of Dying and Bereavement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 22, 50–71.

7. Except for Celkan’s Uzaydan Gelen Prens, which is yet to be staged at the time of writing (September 2022).

8. Judith Butler, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 185.

9. I borrow the term ‘substance’ from Aristotle which denotes the formative linchpin of a given taxonomy. See Michael J. Griffin, Aristotle’s Categories in the Early Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 1–18.

10. 80ʹlerde Lubunya Olmak, 212.

11. Ibid., 85–86.

12. Heather Love, Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 29.

13. Although Uzaydan Gelen Prens has not been staged yet, it has been published twice – first as a paperback, then as an e-book. Though it restricts a more performative analysis of the play, I find it meaningful to include a non-performed piece as works of new writing often travel as books in Turkey before they meet their audiences.

14. Zeki Müren was a famous classical Turkish music singer, composer, and designer. Starting his career as a performer of classical songs, he later became a pop icon also known for his gender-bending costumes and make-up.

15. Ebru Nihan Celkan, Uzaydan Gelen Prens, (tiyatrolar.com.tr, e-book edition).

16. Cüneyt Çakırlar, ‘Unsettling the Patriot: Troubled Objects of Masculinity and Nationalism’, in Queer Dramaturgies: International Perspectives on Where Performance Leads Queer, eds. Alyson Campbell and Stephen Farrier (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 81–97 (89).

17. Sara Ahmed, ‘Killing Joy: Feminism and the History of Happiness’, Signs 35, no. 3 (2010): 574–594 (591).

18. See Sara Ahmed, ‘Complaint and Survival’, feministkilljoys, March 23, 2020, https://feministkilljoys.com/2020/03/23/complaint-and-survival/ (accessed January 30, 2022).

19. Ibid.

20. Özen Yula, Yala ama Yutma, (Yeni Metin Yeni Tiyatro, e-book edition).

21. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York and London: Routledge, 1994).

22. See Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021).

23. ‘Vakit’in hedef gösterdiği tiyatro mühürlendi’, Sendika, February 10, 2010, https://sendika.org/2010/02/vakitin-hedef-gosterdigi-tiyatro-muhurlendi-40603/ (accessed September 1, 2022).

24. Dev-Yol (Revolutionary Path) was a Marxist-Leninist political movement particularly active in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

25. Ahmet Sami Özbudak, İz (Yeni Metin Yeni Tiyatro, e-book edition).

26. See Jacques Rancière, ‘The Politics of Fiction’, Qui Parle 27, no. 2 (December 1, 2018), 269–89.

27. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 24.

28. Ibid.

29. ‘[…] a condition of Warre of every one against every one’, Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (Minneapolis: Lerner Publishing Group, 2018), 119.

30. Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind (New York: Verso, 2020), 134.

31. Jack Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York University Press, 2005), 103.