Abstract
Abstract This article proposes a nonsecular transfeminist critique to interrogate how labels such as political, strategic, and activist are deployed in ways that reproduce exclusionary transgender archives in Turkey. It analyzes the section on religion and spirituality from the South African Gabrielle Le Roux’s activist documentary Proudly Trans in Turkey (2012) as well as Rüstem Ertuğ Altınay’s article “Reconstructing the Transgendered Self as a Muslim, Nationalist, Upper-Class Woman” (2008), which focuses on the statements and performances of Bülent Ersoy, who has been a very popular trans public figure in Turkey since the eighties and who has, to the surprise of many, publicly embraced Islam in the last three decades. Through this analysis, this article demonstrates how a Western secular framework persistently disciplines and limits trans studies in a Turkish context by foregrounding trans people whose agency can be described in terms of resistance or subversion, thus excluding those pious Muslim trans people whose approaches differ.
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