Reading the closet through connectivity

Abstract

This article takes up a deceptively familiar observation – the emergence of ‘gey’ as a category of identification by men who practice same-sex sex – in order to consider how this borrowed ‘global’ category is given substance and localized in Turkey. The author places this explication in the broader context and content of the identity formation of upwardly mobile, educationally advantaged young men in İstanbul who embody the contradictions and quandaries that Eve Sedgwick theorizes as the simultaneous existence of two irreconcilable accounts of homosexuality: the minority and the universal. By foregrounding the more opaque (and deeply internalized) instances of cultural particularity in Turkey via Joseph's concept of connectivity this article demonstrates that this conundrum assumes a special potency in Turkey where notions of self inscribed by connectivity (as opposed to ideals of autonomy or independence) work against both ‘minority’ accounts of homosexuality and living as openly gay. The author focuses on two vital aspects of gey identification: desire management and love, and social class to show how these domains give substance to a gey subjectivity that is at once fashioned on ideals of globalism and inflected by cultural particularities. This article concludes that connectivity, closely articulated with class reproduction, informs, fashions, and regulates selves in ways that might not sit well with the global demands of an open gay identity.