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Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how debts emerge in Amed's queer/trans sex work economy as an affective reality through which Kurdish sex workers constitute social boundaries for their personal and communal security while constituting collective care and community belonging.

Paper Abstract:

The affective landscapes of Kurdish Turkey are intimately shaped by a culture of collective sentiments, care, and desires shared and lived through the context of warfare and the emergent securitization logic in the region. This paper shows how entangled sentiments like debt, loss, and obligations remake the self and communities across identities and political causes through the restructuring of desire, difference, and belonging. In the often mundane and intimate socialities of the sex work economy, the paper traces the presence of collective feelings and sentiments, vocabularies, and attachments to the cause on three grounds: dava as a queer Kurdish cause, bedel as an affective debt, and the pink Kalashnikov as becoming a queer guerrilla. It examines how Kurdish lubunyas (queer/trans in LGBTI lingo) understand racialized and sexual desires and violence, use and shift terminologies, affective intensities, and ethics of care among Kurds, ultimately writing the scripts of their own “bedel,” the feelings of indebtedness cultivated through loss and obligation among Kurdish families who lost their loved ones in their fights against the Turkish state. Kurdish lubunya sex workers deploy and shift the meanings and affects of bedel to constitute social boundaries for their personal and communal security: those who can and can’t be members of bedel’s intimate and affective economy; link histories of state-sponsored violence against Kurds and everyday homophobia by embodying, enduring, and embracing it to transform society towards embracing LGBTI identities; and constitute moral value, respectability, belonging, and honor in Kurdish society.