Contribution short abstract

This paper examines trans mother–daughter relationships in Turkey as sites where longing becomes a practice of endurance. Through temporal and linguistic play, trans women rework kinship, memory, and continuity, imagining other ways of belonging beyond cis-hetero-patrilineal family norms.

Contribution long abstract

This paper approaches longing not as lack or deferred fulfillment, but as a generative practice that unfolds through trans women’s everyday negotiations with time, language, and kinship in Turkey. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research with trans women in Istanbul, I focus on trans mother–daughter relationships: non-biological, matrilineal bonds through which trans women care for, teach, and orient one another across time. These relationships function as sites of memory-making, temporal pedagogy, and survival, enabling trans women to navigate everyday life while collectively reshaping what family, continuity, and care can mean. Centering narratives of trans mothers and trans daughters, I examine how cis-hetero-patrilineal recipes of family, continuity, and propriety are disrupted through alternative matrilineal formations. These relationships are not simply chosen or symbolic; they are actively practiced through temporal and linguistic play—reworking concepts such as birth, growth, generation, and care in ways that make trans lives livable and joyful. Through practices of teaching, waiting, warning, joking, and remembering, trans women cultivate modes of endurance (being long) that exceed survival while refusing the binary of victimhood and happiness. Longing emerges here as a trans-specific orientation toward time: a longing to be and to belong otherwise. This longing is neither purely future-facing nor nostalgic; it circulates through memory, particularly through the shared archives of motherhoods and daughterhoods that trans women assemble together. Attending to these circulations allows us to rethink how memory moves—not as linear transmission, but as a relational practice that creates other ways of imagining belonging and continuity.