Queer-trans-feminist dissents, struggles, and coalitions are urgent and essential to any anti-fascist organizing and any revolutionary claims toward futures of freedom. For longer than a decade now, significant sociopolitical changes have taken place among queer and trans communities in Turkey and around the world. In response, the growing alliances between queer, trans, and feminist movements have become increasingly essential for creating new chances for survival and flourishing. Since 2015, Turkey has been experiencing rising fascism, heightened national securitization, and economic decline, which have had a strong, destructive effect on queer and trans lives while reshaping the very fabric of daily life in the country. Similar state-led attacks on queer and trans people have emerged globally, including in the United States, Brazil, India, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Uganda, and Senegal. Each of these countries has effectively weaponized anti-LGBTQ agendas to strengthen its own power and to build international alliances with one another.

What does dissent look like under such a nationally and globally crumbling sociopolitical environment? For this short piece, while recognizing the common image of dissent as public protest and organizing—which are highly prevalent in the queer-trans-feminist world in Turkey—I will instead trace how queer-trans-feminist dissent unfolds in the ordinary, such as in the ways people sustain life, cultivate intimacy, or refuse the terms under which they are asked to appear or live. These practices rarely register as dissent because they do not conform to dominant expectations of political expression.

Dissent is most often imagined as rupture, a visible break from the normative order, staged through protest, speech, or collective mobilization. In this dominant frame, dissent must be legible as opposition. Yet this understanding relies on a limited conception of the political, one that privileges visibility and publicity. It also risks overlooking the quieter yet creative ways in which power is unsettled in the texture of everyday life and in which alternative futures are imagined as much as experimented with. I place the sites of the everyday, the ephemeral, or the intimate at the heart of dissent and ask the following questions: How do affective practices (desire, attachment, joy, exhaustion) participate in dissent? Can maintaining pleasure, intimacy, or care under constraint be understood as a political act? How do alternative forms of relating (care, solidarity, intimacy, mutual aid) constitute dissent? In what ways does dissent reorganize obligation, accountability, and responsibility? How do practices of endurance (care, intimacy, routine) unsettle systems that depend on exhaustion or erasure?

I have long been exploring everyday registers, traces, formations, and relations of intimacy in feminist-queer-trans worlds in the Middle East with a specific focus on Turkey. In my most recent work, Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World, I discuss the world-shattering realities, as well as the world-making capacities of queer and trans lives through the co-constitutive relationship between intimacy and violence. Intimacy can take creative and imaginative forms in the production of the ordinary and generate everyday sites of dissent as a way of relating differently, as an experiment of alternative socialities and futures. In a global world, where fascisms are rising on misogynistic, anti-trans, and anti-queer values, sustaining a livable, meaningful, and pleasurable life for feminist-queer-trans people requires a significant amount of individual and collective labor to reconfigure relations of care, obligation, and responsibility. Hence, while dissent continues to manifest itself in public protests and oppositions to government, it is also practiced and stored in building worlds, creating alternative socialities, and experimenting with futures. Dissent becomes a survival method, a persistence under conditions designed to eliminate marginalized people or wear them down. The capacity to persist—to continue desiring, caring, and relating—often unfolds against forces that seek to exhaust or eliminate precisely these capacities. Hence, the domain of intimacy can be the site of a radical position in life, a fugitive possibility from the regimes of the proper, a refusal of assimilation and erasure, and a reservoir for hopes and dreams of survival and change (Hartman). These relations of care, desire, humor, refusal, and fugitivity become a repertoire of dissent.

Here I see a close association between this everyday form of dissent and Audre Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic, in which the erotic functions as “the open and fearless underlining of [the] capacity for joy.” (56) As Lorde beautifully articulates, there is an erotic power that comes from sharing deeply any pursuit with another person. She notes, “The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.” (56) Building on this formulation, I approach the erotic as a source of dissent to remake, reinvent, and reorganize the violent conditions of everyday life while inhabiting them, at the same time. In that sense, the erotic can be a fueling force for the dissident reorganization of a life that is shaped by violence, precarity, and vulnerability.

I will demonstrate this with one example, gullüm, from the queer-trans world of Istanbul. Gullüm may indicate a social gathering, a gossip circle, a social occasion of drinking alcohol and chain-smoking, dancing, or simply a shared joke. In Violent Intimacies, I discuss how gullüm derives its force from the pleasurable and the joyful, how it generates a creative and resilient collective effort to bring laughter, joy, and euphoria into the harsh reality of everyday queer-trans life. It serves as a source of empowerment, both for the self and for the community as a whole. In these moments of gullüm, immense beauty emerges through shared laughter, gossip, jokes, dancing, conversation, drinking, smoking, making music, singing, flirting, kissing, making out, and sex. This is the erotic of queer-trans life, produced collectively and affectively, embracing both tears and laughter. It is a fugitive moment, a temporary space of suspension and transcendence, a place for restoration and healing, a survival strategy, and an oasis of thriving within an otherwise cruel and violent world.

In these fragile yet powerful intervals, dissent manifests itself in momentary lifting of the weight of state violence, economic precarity, and social exclusion. What emerges is not mere distraction or escape, but an active reclaiming of life on one’s own terms. The body, so often policed and pathologized, becomes a site of pleasure and mutual care. The voice, frequently silenced or mocked, finds expression in songs, humor, gossip, and laughter. The gathering, whether in a friend’s kitchen or couch, a corner of a park, a community space, or a safe bar or coffee shop, becomes a makeshift sanctuary. These are acts of radical world-building, begetting small, ephemeral rebellions that assert dignity, desire, and the right to joy.

To dissent is not only to refuse or negate, but also to propose and act on alternative ways of being together. These alternatives may be fragile, partial, and contingent. Yet they matter precisely because they materialize other future possibilities within the present. To care for those who are marginalized, to remain attached to forms of life that are deemed unviable, or to find joy under conditions of constraint can unsettle the normative order. They do so by refusing to be fully organized by it. By attending to these quotidian forms, we can begin to see dissent as a dispersed and continuous practice. It is carried in everyday practices that reconfigure the terms of life. To take these practices seriously is not to dilute the concept of dissent, but to expand it. It is to acknowledge that the work of unsettling power often takes place in the very spaces where life is most intimate and vulnerable, and most insistently sustained.

Aslı Zengin is an assistant professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick and the author of Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World.

Works Cited

Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

Zengin, Aslı. Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024.