Join us for an evening with Aslı Zengin, celebrated author of the recently published and award-winning book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World.

Zengin’s groundbreaking research delves into the lives of trans, queer, and gender-transgressive communities, exploring the intersections of ethnography, scientific and legal frameworks of sex and gender, critical studies of violence and sovereignty, and the politics of death, funerals, and afterlives. Her work also examines the transnational dimensions of LGBTQ and feminist movements in the modern Middle East. This evening, we celebrate the launch of Violent Intimacies with a thought-provoking panel discussion on the entanglement of trans lives, extra-legal state violence, and resistance in Turkey. Guided by Zengin’s deeply ethical research and poetic prose, the conversation will explore how these politics are lived and felt, highlighting the collective experiences and shared histories that shape contemporary struggles for justice and liberation. Through this dialogue, we aim to deepen our understanding of the interplay between intimate and political dimensions of gendered/sexed experiences in the Middle East. The panel will not only illuminate the resilience and agency of marginalized communities but also inspire new ways of thinking about gender, activism, and social change in the face of enduring and evolving forms of violence and oppression.

Get your free ticket here. Please note that a ticket does not guarantee entry. All LSE events are over-ticketed.

Meet our speakers and chair

Emrah Karakuş is an LSE Fellow in Gender and Human Rights and a sociocultural anthropologist whose work explores affective politics, queer intimacy, and political violence in the Middle East. He is currently working on his book project, Feeling Debt: Affective Politics of Security and Intimacy in Kurdish Turkey, and his work appeared in peer-reviewed journals including American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, and Kurdish Studies.

Aslı Zengin is Assistant Professor in Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul, was published in Turkish in 2011. In this book, she examines the regulation of licensed and unlicensed sex work at the intersection of state power, law, medicine, and violence. Her second book, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the (Un)Making of an Urban World was published in 2023 with Duke University Press. This book examines how everyday troubles with sex/gender nonconformity in social and institutional life shape the organization of state power, the social production of family and kinship, the religious order, and the trans lives, deaths, and activism in Turkey.