Paper short abstract:

This paper highlights the intersection of mobility and manhood in Turkey through performances of 'hassling' tourists in Sultanahmet, Istanbul. The analysis focuses on how the already precarious nature of manhood comes under increased strain when detached from the normative pull of 'place identity'.

Paper long abstract:

My research follows single young men occupied with 'hassling' visiting foreign women in the touristic Sultanahmet district of Istanbul. I examine this phenomenon through the notion of mobility in connection with local understandings of manhood, highlighting ambiguities that emerge from a slippage between normative or 'sedentary' frameworks of manhood and those relating to the 'nomadic' paths taken by my informants (Deleuze and Guattari 1987/1980).

I discern between 'migrant' and 'nomad' through local structures of 'place identity' (Mills 2008). These are mediated through sıla and gurbet, concepts that dichotomise dimensions of 'home' against those of 'exile' and presume all migrants to be in mourning for the place left behind. Instead, my informants are focused on transgressing new boundaries. This disposition is illuminated by the term garip, which can translate into both 'strange' and 'stranger', and which sets up the relationship between mobility and the moral subjectivity of the aspirational masculinities I examine.

My informants, who leave home during adolescence, aspire to manhood on terms they set for themselves rather than on those dictated by normative sociability. In other words, they use physical mobility—extracting themselves from the gaze of their home communities—to transcend their social immobility. Relationships with foreign women, which might lead to marriage and visas for international travel, are among the many sites of ambiguity associated with their psychosocial and spatiotemporal mobility. And outcomes depend on a combination of their performative skill and luck, with potential consequences for their relationships to the category of 'man'.