UCLA Department: Gender Studies
Country of Study: Turkey
This research focuses on an intense and fateful episode of anti-trans police violence and displacement in 1990s Turkey: a “cleansing” operation that targeted trans sex workers living in Ülker Street, in the district of Beyoğlu in İstanbul, Turkey, for the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements (Habitat II) held in İstanbul, from 3 to 14 June 1996, and its outcomes. The organized attacks against the trans inhabitants of Ülker Street started in late May 1996 and continued during and after the end of Habitat II, until there were only five or six people left from more than seventy trans sex workers who were living in the street before this operation. This event triggered a wave of local LGBTQ activism in relationship to international LBGTQ activism. Drawing upon this period, the project explores how urban space, policing, and categories of “otherness” around sexuality, gender, class, ethnicity, and nationality intersect with anti-trans violence and LGBTQ activism.