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How Istanbul’s Kadınca nightclub became melting pot of sexual, class, and religious politics

In ‘Queer in Translation’, Evren Savci explores the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance in Turkey.

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Homonormativity does not capture all aspects of class, however, as neo-liberalism does not capture all aspects of capitalism. This became especially clear in Lambdaistanbul volunteers’ relationship to the women-only club Kadınca—a space that was mostly, but not exclusively, frequented by queer women. I often heard activists complain about the bar crowd, strongly disapproving of the infamous bar fights that seemed to be a staple at Kadınca and referring to the actions of its clients as “reproducing cultural practices of manhood.” In fact, one of the early mentions of the club I had heard among the activists was in the context of a complaint about a fight that had taken place during one of the 2008 pride week parties. Some of the activists were suggesting that Kadınca should no longer be considered as a potential venue for pride parties. I was personally warned not to go to the club because of the fights and perhaps even more so because of what they perceived to be the sexually aggressive (female) masculinity of the clientele.

A further criticism I often heard from activist women was about the apoliticalness of the club’s patrons. Lambdaistanbul volunteers were frustrated with the fact that the crowds who filled the club did not show any interest in their work as political organizers and marked this refusal to participate as being apolitical. While they articulated no clear connection between the fights that took place in the club and the apoliticalness of the club goers, the fact that they often critiqued the violence because it reproduced “cultural practices of manhood” and not because people actually got hurt spoke to the political nature of their critique. In other words, the women activists of Lambdaistanbul in particular perceived the bar’s violence as politically problematic and attributed it to the patrons’ lack of a critique of “cultural practices of manhood.” As I will discuss later, the fact that many of these fights were rather performative and did not cause any serious harm to anyone resulted in the club’s workers and clients perceiving politics as an abstraction, merely theoretical and disconnected from life.


Patrons of Kadınca were mostly baç/buç or feminen, as they referred to themselves and each other. No one seemed to remember where they had heard the terms first, but by 2008 they seemed to have been in circulation for a few years. They were used by almost everyone at the club, if not always as an identification, at least as a reference, yet none of the Lambdaistanbul activists I knew used these categories. Baç women of Kadınca indeed performed highly masculine genders, sporting short haircuts, baggy pants, and T-shirts, no makeup, no manicures, and flat, masculine shoes. The feminen clients, on the other hand, mostly had long hair, makeup, and manicured nails; they wore tight jeans or short skirts with feminine tops and heels. The baç/feminen dynamic of the club stood in contrast to the lesbian and bisexual women of Lambdaistanbul, most of whom were neither as feminine as feminens nor as masculine as baçs.

Over time, complaints I heard about the rather abstracted gender performances of the baçs of Kadınca took on qualities other than being simply about masculinity and violent tendencies. These included critiques of masculine Kadınca clients carrying tesbih (worry beads), which are seen as markers of unsophisticated, rural, and sometimes religious masculinity, carrying cigarette packs in their socks, or acting like kamyoncu (truckers). All these “inappropriate” behaviors, including frequent fighting, were markers of particularly working-class masculinities, indicating Kadınca clientele’s lack of cultural capital that would follow from an educated, civilized background.

It is important to note here that not all Lambdaistanbul activists came from middle and upper-middle-class backgrounds. And while some even worked in order to financially support their families, almost all were then attending university or had a college degree. Kadınca clients, on the other hand, were mostly from the lower middle and working classes, working at retail and other service sector jobs, such as hairdressers or as staff at restaurants and hotels. Few attended college.

If class forms a set of dispositions that structure practices and perceptions, as Pierre Bourdieu suggests, then narrowing respectability to what hetero and homonormativity dictates can result in missing out on other moral dimensions of respectability and of class. In this case, it was possible for Lambda activists to be critical of neoliberal capitalism and simultaneously to be invested in markers of civility and bourgeois respectability (not always the same as neoliberal respectability) vis-à-vis queers whose gender performance they disapproved of and understood as political failures. The fact that I never personally observed any of the club’s patrons fiddling with worry beads or carrying cigarette packs in their socks speaks to the power of such classed behaviors becoming markers of the space, even if they have been observed only once, continuously reproducing Kadınca as a space of unacceptable, uncivilized masculinities.


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Yet it was not simply the masculinities performed by Kadınca’s baç women that were (politically) problematic; it was also the fact that they did not have the proper language to express and defend their gender performances. For instance, Eren, the Lambdaistanbul volunteer cited earlier, told me during our interview that initially he, too, was called out as a trans man for “reproducing cultural practices of manhood” by Nevin, a lesbian Lambdaistanbul activist. In return he had responded that Nevin was equally reproducing the cultural practices of womanhood with her long hair and feminine and often heavily accessorized outfits. This retort of course required that Eren be able to grasp the nature of Nevin’s critique and also have an equally apt understanding of the social reproduction of binary gender as a framework through which to think about gender performance critically. As a result, Eren was able to turn Nevin’s argument on its head to show that the reproduction of normative gender was not simply the territory of trans men and therefore did not constitute a proper critique. Over time, his masculinity became very much accepted by Lambdaistanbul members, along with other members of the newly emerging trans men category. As a new category of queer, they knew how to make sense of themselves to other Lambdaistanbul activists in a way the baç clients of Kadınca did not know how, or did not care, to do.

Thus the inappropriate masculinities of baç clients of Kadınca merged with their inability to politically defend their gender performance, doubly marking their class. Their particular performance of masculinity, as well as their lack of cultural capital regarding current theories of gender and sexuality, positioned them as apolitical in a framework where politics was already predicated on the command of certain knowledges and on particular forms of embodied as well as verbal self-expression. I myself experienced both being challenged for the Kadınca club’s women-only door policy when I worked at the club and being corrected about my narrative of my own sexuality.As I was talking to three activists at another Istanbul-based lgbt organization about growing up and living in Istanbul until moving to the United States to continue my education, I casually said that I “had been heterosexual [het- eroseksüel] back then.” I was immediately corrected by one of the activists who said I had always been a lesbian, but I had just not known it at the time. I insisted that I really had been straight as a younger woman—I had dated boys and found them attractive, and I had experienced no sexual attraction or romantic interest in women or queer and nonbinary people until my early twenties.

After some back and forth, another activist encouraged everyone to accept me as I was—I was different, yes, but it was possible to be like me, too. To be included on the list of legitimate kinds of queers, it was not enough, for instance, to challenge the prevalent frame of cinsel yönelim (sexual orientation) by suggesting one could inhabit different sexualities at different stages of life. That, too, was necessary of course, but having confidence in my knowledge, and being persistent in my narrative, were, in the end, what resulted in the activists ultimately acceding to my account of my sexuality. The issue was not that the activists would not listen or change their minds; it was that their default position was to assume that narratives that did not reflect their existing frameworks were wrong and in need of correction—this was part of their political and activist work.


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What does it mean for an lgbt association to have such a sophisticated criticism of global neoliberal capitalism and to feature intersectional principles in their political organizing but nevertheless enact classist distinctions and exclusions? The shift of discussions from capitalism to neoliberalism at large has meant that certain important features of class, such as habitus and cultural capital, are rarely found in analyses regarding political organizing. Yet an acknowledgment of the role of cultural capital in accessing and evoking what counts as political language needs to accompany our analyses of social justice movements if our analyses are to be informed by social justice concerns. The case of Lambdaistanbul and the Kadınca club shows that class can and does inform normativities beyond neoliberal ideas of what is profitable, fundable, and respectable — Copyright Duke University Press 2021

This excerpt from Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam by Evren Savcı has been published with special permission from Duke University Press.

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1 COMMENT

  1. After Kamal Ata Turk knocked down the conservative restrictions in Turkey, the Turks westernized themselves with vengeance.
    Before anything else the sexual exploits seen in the west were first to be adopted, open extra -marital affairs replaced the polygami and became a respected way of life. Just like Beirut, Istanbul also started to emerge as the brothel for the rich Arabs of the gulf. Now with the present regime the trend is reversing.

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