I Lived and Learned': Violence, Survival and Knowledge in Trans Women's Lives in Turkey

Abstract

This article examines life story narratives of trans women in an effort to understand how violence produces and shapes their lives and subjectivities in Istanbul, Turkey. After delineating the main forms of violence that target them, it looks at the ways through which trans women negotiate, challenge and transform the parameters of their life-worlds through an engagement with their violent experiences. I especially focus on trans women's production of a particular kind of knowledge which enables them to claim an authoritative voice and construct themselves as subjects who have access to the hidden realities of life that are not accessible to others who did not go through these experiences. Next, turning my attention to trans women's creative work on their subjectivities, I show how they actively work to cultivate themselves as ethically good, disobedient and struggling beings, as individuals and as a collective, and how the transmission of this construction forms and transforms their selves and relationships. Underlining the intricate ways in which processes of oppression, exclusion and violence affect and inform gendered lives and strategies of survival, this discussion highlights the interconnections between power, subjectivity and resistance, and the productive tensions inherent to the positions of marginality and the potentialities of survival in dire times and places.