Queer Activism Between Demands and Desires

Reflecting on what it means to seek political presence and queer visibility in the affective economy of a public sphere, this chapter engages with the language of rights used by LGBTQI+ activists to answer back to interpellation and to legal accusations of harming the morality of Turkish society and Turkish family structure. It explains how their claims for rights reveal differing LGBTQI+ visions and desires for visibility and social inclusion. The main concern is with unpacking the dilemmas that activists face when confronted with the language of rights, which entails compromises. It addresses the relation between the demand for legal recognition and the desire for visibility as it mediates the political activism of LGBTQI+ people in Istanbul, and as they try to resist legal prohibitions, social exclusions and psychic displacement. To do so, it situates the analysis of desire within the ‘political economy’ of visibility that is defined both in terms of the effects of neoliberal processes of commodification affecting identity claims and gender performances and in terms of psychic processes affected by the cultural and legal regulations that discipline bodies and legitimise the civic and social policing of genders, sexualities, pleasures and intimacies.