Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam

In Queer in Translation, Evren Savci analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savci shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savci traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savci turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West-thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

Review: "In this much-anticipated book, Evren Savci draws our attention to how queers in Turkey translate sexual identity in their constant negotiation with neoliberalism in their country. This will be one of the reference texts that we use to understand the links between neoliberalism, morality, and otherness." -- Roderick A. Ferguson, author of * One-Dimensional Queer *
"Queer in Translation is one of the most intellectually exciting and timely studies I have ever read. Evren Savci's innovative lenses, presented elegantly in this book, shed light on the complexities and innovations of dialogue and solidarity (as well as antagonism) between Islam-identified political projects and those of queer, gay, trans, and feminist assertions." -- Paul Amar, author of * The Security Archipelago: Human-Security States, Sexuality Politics, and the End of Neoliberalism *