Queer postmemory

Trans mothers and daughters in Istanbul

As Dean Spade (2015) argues, trans people are told by the law, state agencies and families that they are impossible. They are impossible subjects to exist. ‘They cannot be seen; they cannot be classified, and they cannot fit anywhere’ (p. 12). The case is not very different in Turkey where state policies and legal institutions position the ‘proper citizen’ as Turkish, male, heterosexual, Muslim and cis-gender. Within this context, trans women experience different forms of discrimination that begin once their gender identity ‘becomes visible’ within their families in the earlier periods of their lives.

National law in Turkey has never criminalized transgender identities but, as Asli Zengin (2016) and Ezgi Taşçıoğlu (2015) argue, trans women are routinely discriminated against in criminal and civil legal systems in Turkey. Moreover, most trans women face homophobic and transphobic violence and abuse, insufficient education, and under- and unemployment, homelessness and general socio-cultural dispossession (Şeker, 2013). Left with sex work as one of the only options to sustain themselves, many trans women experience another layer of marginalization through criminalization of sex work (Taşçıoğlu, 2015).

Almost all of the trans mothers and daughters that I had conversations with since 2014 had lost contact with the families that they were born into, due to their gender and sexuality. They had to leave their hometowns and move to Istanbul (if they were not already living there) for new job opportunities and start their gender confirmation processes. The majority of trans mothers and daughters come from families and communities in which they have had to navigate the often-difficult terrain of violence and explicit neglect. For most, the mother and daughter relationship became an important refuge in which forms of intimacies turn into a quotidian space where the experience of how to live as a trans woman in Turkey circulated. Within this framework of oppression and violence, trans women who do sex work form mother and daughter relationships in order to create networks of support where knowledge and memory of trans women travel across time and space. When I asked Burçin – a trans mother in her fifties – about her trans daughter and why there was a specific relationship that was called ‘mother and daughter relationship’ among trans women, she paused and asked: ‘Why would I let anybody else to go through the shit that I had to experience?’

During my activist involvement within the trans movement since 2007, I saw that most of the mothers and daughters define their relationship as a ‘companionship’ against the discriminative and isolating structures of normative society and family forms that make them vulnerable to transphobic hate incidents. When I started to conduct interviews with trans mothers and daughters in 2014, the problems related to sex work, systematic police violence and transphobic culture were the main issues that emerged in relation to the formation of the mother and daughter relationship among trans women. As Pelin, a trans daughter in her 20s, puts it, the mother/daughter relationship brings trans women together because:

To be trans means that everything is forbidden. This is forbidden, that is forbidden. Don’t do this, don’t do that. So, your trans mother becomes a companion to you within this society. While you are exposed to exclusion, your mother embraces you and shows you the right way to do things.

Purple, who is a trans daughter in her early thirties, thinks that the mother and daughter relationship is necessary especially for the ‘young trans women’. According to Rojda and Yeliz, who were trans mothers in their early twenties, this relationship shows that trans women who are ‘isolated from society, create their own communities through bringing experienced and inexperienced ones together’.

In this manner, the mother and daughter relationship creates spaces for providing guidance on how to continue to contend with the social challenges that individuals who are situated outside of cis and heteronormativity face regularly. Within this context, ‘being a trans mother’ or ‘being old’ were often used in relation to the experience of being a trans woman in Turkey and knowing how to navigate the social and legal difficulties of being a trans woman and a sex worker, rather than one’s chronological age.

However, this association between being a mother and being ‘experienced’ might often create tensions between trans mothers and daughters and limit what a trans daughter can or cannot do. While sharing the story of her ‘first trans mother’ who turned her life ‘into hell’, as she puts it, Didem, a trans daughter in her thirties, stated that the mother and daughter relationship among trans women is ‘a very tricky situation and everybody designs their own relationship according to their needs’. She said that ‘even though her first mother was very helpful in many ways, she was very weird when it came to money and sex work’, which eventually ended their relationship according to Didem.

So, it is important to note that, positioning trans mother and daughterhood as forms of self and community making or a type of ‘companionship’ does not mean that this relationship is immune to exploitation, cruelty and violence. Similar to dominant (non)familial scripts of intimacy, everyday experience of trans mother/daughterhoods are highly connected to power dynamics within the community. For example, even though the chronological age of a person is not an indicator of trans mother or daughterhood, the reputation and networks within the trans community, the ‘realness look’ (Bailey, 2013: 108) which is often based on normative gender performance and ‘popularity among clients’, as one of my interlocutors put it, play an important role in being a trans mother. As Mehtap, a trans daughter in her early twenties states, trans mothers ‘like biological mothers are [a matter of] luck. You can get a good one or a shitty one. And you can be unlucky on both, like me. (Laughter).’ During our interview in the summer of 2018, Mehtap explained why she couldn’t continue living and being with her trans mother:

What is very different among trans mothers and daughters is that you are not stuck with your mother for the rest of your life. You can just say ‘fuck off’ and leave. Ironically though, it is often mothers who say that to their daughters. Because not surprisingly, it is about power and imposing this and that. I was lucky to be able to get rid of my trans mother because we hear a lot of stories that often end up with daughters getting hurt, even murdered.

Similarly, during our interview in 2014, New Wave said that ‘it is dangerous to think about trans mothers and daughters as savers of each other because it is not a product of a queer fairy tale’.

On the other hand, for some like Burçin, the mother and daughter relationship was literally saving lives. When I asked Burçin – a trans daughter in her thirties – about her trans mother and why she was involved in this relationship, she paused and said:

when you are a trans woman who does sex work in Istanbul, you quickly understand that it is not very easy to stay alive or to be able to stay connected to your family and friends. Having a trans mother or daughter keeps you alive in many different ways.

Similarly to Burçin, many mothers and daughters defined their relationship as a companionship against the discriminative and isolating structures of normative society and family forms that make them vulnerable to transphobic hate incidents.

Within this context, drawing on the narratives of trans mothers and daughters, far from romanticizing, I intend to think about spaces of refuges and queer intimacies as sites of negotiation that play with norms through concurrent deviation, emulation, dissonance and also reproduction without giving any guarantee of non-cruelty or non-violence (as we saw in the example of Mehtap above). As Brian A Horton argues, queer forms of engaging with intimacy and kinship contain seemingly contradictory experiences (i.e. being a friend vs being an enemy). Following Horton’s suggestion, here I position trans mother and daughterhoods as ‘sites of uncertainty and unpredictability’ (2018: 1071) where care and violence might cohabit.

In other words, what I intend to discuss in these pages is not to situate trans mothers and daughters as ‘heroic queer people’ who save each other’s lives but to position this relationship where violence and care intermingle (Horton, 2018; Singh, 2011). I look at how trans mothers and daughters negotiate with standardized notions of womanhood, family, age and generation within the ‘mundane, banal, and ordinariness of queer experience’ (Manalansan, 2014: 98). In order to do this, in the next section I will look at how family and family time is experienced and circulated among trans mothers and daughters.

Family, time and generation

We are continuously and constantly connected to time. From the moment we are born, we are expected to relate to pre-established chronological repertoires that surround our lives. Within this normative time zone the ‘ideal individual’ gets born, grows up, receives an education, creates a social environment, finds a job, gets married, has a child and lives happily ever after in the ‘chrononormative’ time zone. Elizabeth Freeman defines chrononormativity as a state sponsored mode of implantation and as a ‘technique by which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches inculcate hidden rhythms, forms of experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege’ (2010: 3).

Queer responses and resistances to chrononormativity have been varied. For example, Lee Edelman (2004) has seen the queer as outside reproductive futurity. To him, queer is representing no future. In contrast, Jose Esteban Muñoz has explored queer utopia as futurity, as horizon, as a non-prospective site of ‘a horizon of possibility, not a fixed schema’ (2009: 97). Furthermore, Tom Boellstorff rethought time out of its linearity and explored other forms of time such as ‘coincidental time’ (2007: 240). Others like Carolyn Dinshaw and Carla Freccero worked on the ‘refusal of linear historicism’ (Dinshaw et al., 2007: 178) in order to think ‘further about multiple temporalities in the present’ (2007: 178) and ‘to intervene politically in the present by using the past’ (Freccero, 2011: 48). Jack Halberstam referred to ‘queer time’ as a term ‘for those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois, reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance’ (2005: 8). According to him ‘queer uses of time develop, at least in part, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality and reproduction’ (2005: 1).

I argue that the narratives of trans mothers and daughters reveal how being a trans woman dramatically changes the conception of not only social but also temporal rhythms of the quotidian. Because time not only creates already established recipes for certain socialities like family, but it also turns certain lives and experiences into impossibilities. While we were talking with Purple about her experience of living in Istanbul as a trans woman, she focused on the visibility of her body. According to her, ‘growing up’ was about ‘learning where to be’ and ‘to know what you can do or where you can go’ as a trans woman. While explaining her experience of being pushed out of daily routines of mundane practices (buying bread in the morning from a bakery, etc.) due to her gender identity, she reveals how normative time turns the whole city into a prison ‘with invisible bars’:

I feel like these vampires; I feel like my skin is burning every time I go out when it’s daylight not because of the sun but because of these weird looks that come from people around me. Those looks turn all of us into owls of society. I can only go out comfortably when it’s dark. So, I eat breakfast when people go to bed.

Her words indicate that being a trans woman in Turkey includes legal, political and social experiences of not only spatial but also temporal confinement.

Looking at the daily practices of mother and daughter relationships reveals the centrality of subjective time and temporality in trans women’s lives. They invite us to see lived experiences that experiment with normative ways of living and ways of relating to family, time and memory. Their narratives encourage us to go beyond the options of either ‘accepting’ or ‘refusing’ the norm in order to think about queer experiences of family and time. They show how meanings and experiences of being a mother or daughter can differ and unsettle the understandings of the notions such as ‘being born’, ‘giving birth’, ‘childhood’, ‘growing up’ and being part of a ‘generation’.

For instance, after talking about her ‘biological family’ and her place of birth Pelin (who is a trans mother in her fifties) said:

I can say that I was born in Istanbul … Because Istanbul is the first place where I went outside as a woman. I remember, I had a long pink dress. I learned everything there.

Pelin was mentioning her ‘birth’ distinctively from its fixed definition and defined the term as the moment when she ‘went outside as a woman’. Moreover, in her narrative, the process of ‘growing up’ was identified with the process of getting ‘experienced’ in sex work. Considering different attributions that I came across, it is important to stress that, trans mother/daughterhood does not only change the meaning of ‘birth’ but also destabilizes it through the impossibility of placing a fixed definition. For example, when the term was used in relation to gender identity in Pelin’s narrative, in narratives of other trans women the term ‘birth’ was used to refer to multiple occasions such as ‘the moment of meeting with the trans mother’, ‘becoming a trans rights activist’ or ‘starting sex work’.

In some cases, daughters were also identifying themselves as ‘children’ of their trans mothers. Rojda (a daughter in her late twenties) for example, defined herself as ‘11 months old’ and continued:

To be honest, I am new. But I have learned a lot. I’m eleven months old but it is very important who your mother is. I can say that I have learned a lot in such a short period of time.

During our interviews, Burçin and Yıldız (both trans mothers in their late forties) also mentioned the idea of ‘giving birth’ to a trans daughter. While they were comparing themselves to their daughters’ ‘biological mothers’, they both made similar comments:

If giving birth was enough, it would be very easy. There are other mothers here. Not everyone is good, most of them could be exploiters or parasites. But I literally gave birth to my daughters. I think it is even harder than giving real birth. (Yıldız)

I am not her birth mother; this is pretty clear (laughter) but I very much supported Elif [her trans daughter]. Even her birth mother could not probably take care of her this much. I literally gave birth to her. (Burçin)

The narratives of Yıldız, Burçin and Pelin reveal that notions of ‘birth’ and ‘giving birth’ are mostly related to subjective processes of gender identity and the experience of sex work.

When it comes to circulation of the term ‘generation’, its meaning was constantly changing in comparison to its heteronormative understanding and it was impossible to have a general definition due to its dramatically subjective form. When I asked Yeşim (who is in her thirties) about her and her mother’s age difference, first she made it clear that I should not mix the idea of ‘generation’ with its ‘normal’ meaning:

It is not the same as in the normal life. Here you have a new generation every five or six years. It was not the case before, though. In fact, my mother is not the same age as me, she is older than me but nowadays you see a lot of mothers who are only three or five years older than their daughters.

Similarly, Hülya (a trans mother and daughter in her twenties) kindly reminded me ‘the difference’ between the definitions of the term ‘generation’ in trans community and its everyday use in society:

You need to remember this by the way. What we call a generation is not something long term. We don’t use the word generation in the conventional way as used by society. I saw people who are four years younger than their mothers, even people who are a few months older than their mothers.

As Pelin states below, trans conceptualizations of time stay in and out of temporal and familial norms simultaneously, and create opportunities to re(f)use the chrononormative notions of family, time and memory:

Don’t mind me, we are fucking around. We call her mother, she’s got a cock. You call her your daughter, but she has the gender re-assignment surgery before you. Or you call someone as your mother who is actually three years younger than you.

In this manner, the narratives of trans women reveal that experiences of trans mothers and daughters do not necessarily leave the normative frame of family and family time behind but leave and stay in it at the same time through disidentificatory tactics (Muñoz, 1999). And this concurrent and fruitful movement of ‘leaving while staying’ allows us to explore non-normative forms of memory and its cruise across ‘generations’.

Rather than approaching generation as an abstract homogeneous measure of universal movement along a singular frame, scholars such as Astrid Erll (2014), Marianne Hirsch (2012), Sigrid Weigel (2002), position ‘generation’ as plural. Within this perspective, it becomes important that generation and generationality cannot be understood through coherent rhythms and sets of relationships across time and space. It is explored as a process that can be used as an analytic to think critically about the normative codes in which mundane practices of the everyday carry the risk of turning into instruments of controlling the ways in which memory transmits. For instance, as Astrid Erll states, ‘concepts of genealogy and generationality are working together’ and even though the earlier usage of the term ‘second generation’ ‘described familial genealogy, in its uses today, it has become a powerful signifier of a broad societal, even transnational, generationality’ (2014: 398).

Drawing on the fruitful conversation between trans mothers and daughters, and scholars who work on memory transmission, queer intimacy and time, here what I suggest is to expand our critique on conceptualization of generation and generationality by questioning the gendered articulations of notions such as ‘being born’, ‘giving birth’, ‘childhood’ and ‘growing up’ to see how they interestingly still work together in the discourses on critical theorization of ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory.

In the next and final section, I will focus on a theoretical framework of queer postmemory to think about how gendered codes that are embedded in the ways in which we study memory transmission can actually turn into spaces to negotiate and unsettle seemingly inextricable links between family, time and memory.

Queer postmemory and circulation of ‘giant archives’

While we were talking about the things that she learned from her mother’s experience, Purple told me that trans mothers are actually ‘giant archives of trans history’ of Turkey. When I asked about what she means by ‘giant archive’ she continued and said:

When you become a trans daughter in the beginning mostly you don’t know anything about where to shop, how to deal with the police, where to work, etc. In order to stay alive you need to learn the tactics of how to live as a trans woman. And you somehow learn the history of the past. The history of trans women.

It is this ‘somehow’ that creates a very curious space to think about queer postmemory. And I argue that trans strategies of disidentifying with normative codes of family and family time play with the already established itineraries of memory transmission and work on/with/against them concurrently.

The years between 1980 and 1996 were one of the worst periods for trans women communities in Turkey (Selek, 2001). During the martial law period in 1981, the state had the right to take anyone who was found to be ‘suspicious’ into custody. According to the narratives of many trans women during this period, especially trans women were found to be ‘suspicious’ and were taken to police stations and experienced torture because of their gender identity.

Come the 1990s, as one of the trans mothers Yıldız, in her late fifties, addressed the systemic police violence and their brutal interventions under Süleyman Ulusoy, the Chief of the Police Department in Beyoğlu, where the majority of trans women still live in Istanbul, changed their lives drastically. Within the LGBTI community in Turkey he is known as Süleyman the Hose, which comes from his specific harassment (with water hoses of different colors and shapes) that targeted trans women. While we were talking about the 1990s, Yıldız named those times as years that are ‘shameful for the history of humanity’ and continued:

You know, there are situations as they happen you say, ‘no this is not happening to me right now’. It seems very awkward to you at the moment but you also know it is horrible and you don’t want to believe it’s happening. It was exactly this case. This was what happened to trans women in the 80s and 90s.

According to Pelin who was in her early twenties when she was taken into custody and ‘tasted the bitterness of Süleyman’s Hose’ as she puts it:

The pressure was enormous. When he [Süleyman] became the chief of the police department, our lives turned into hell. We were constantly attacked by the police forces. While they were bringing us to the police cars, they were acting like we were terrorists. And they would keep us in the cell the whole night without telling us the reason. Just before we leave the police station in the morning, they were taking us to his room one by one. There were water hoses in different colors and sizes. He was making us to choose one of them. He was hitting us with the hose that we chose. Once he hit my ass so hard that the bruise didn’t go away for weeks.

During our interview, Selin put the visibility and materiality of trans bodies in the center and said:

We were captured like mosquitoes. I mean it was really not easy to be unrecognizable and trans at the same time. Especially in the 80s and 90s. Where most of the trans women were going through their transition via horrible procedures that were done by butcher doctors.

Her words discuss the materiality of trans bodies and their role in the shared history of trans pasts and presents. While we were talking about the 1980s and 1990s and their role in the everyday lives of trans women specifically in Istanbul, Selin said ‘we will never be able to get over those times’. I knew that she was younger than me and she hadn’t been born at the time of either the military coup or Süleyman the Hose. So, I asked, ‘Were you there while all those things were happening?’ She replied while mocking me as ‘being silly for not knowing her age’ and said ‘Of course not! You know that I am 20 years old right? I wasn’t even born then. Of course, I wasn’t there, but it doesn’t really matter. Does it?’ And I replied with confidence: ‘Of course! It doesn’t.’

But when I think about it now, I see that it does. It matters because it reveals that trans identities not only disturb the gender binary but also unsettle and play with the fixed and predetermined understandings of family, time and memory. I realized that whenever I asked about the daily experiences of being a trans woman in Turkey, both trans mothers and daughters started their words by mentioning the traumatic events of the 1980s and 1990s even though sometimes neither the trans mother nor the trans daughter was there to experience these events.

For example, Hale, who was in her late twenties, was living in Istanbul for a few weeks and was ‘looking for a daughter to feel safe and protected’ during the time we conducted our interview in 2018. While we were talking about the transphobic attitudes of police officers and water cannons that occupy certain points in Beyoğlu in 2016, she told me that ‘seeing the water cannons was like going through the times of Süleyman the Hose one more time’. When I asked her if she was there at the time of Süleyman the Hose, she said: ‘No my sister, I was a little kid by then. I hadn’t stepped into this world yet.’ But according to her, the current increasing police violence in Istanbul towards trans women was reminding them of the time of Süleyman the Hose:

Because once the police almost killed me in Belgrade Forest [in Istanbul]. They stabbed me and did many other things. They are really making us suffer. Inevitably, one is afraid that things that happened in the past may happen again. I don’t want to go through the time of Süleyman the Hose again [emphasis added].

Hale was in primary school during the period of Süleyman the Hose, and seeing the impacts of the times she has never been through once more shows that by hosting familiar terms of family and family time with constantly moving meanings of foundational concepts, trans mothers and daughters disidentify with the links between presence/absence, reality/fiction, true/false and present/past.

Trans mothers and daughters allow us to talk about ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory without a fixed definition of the very term ‘generation’. Looking at the traces of memory besides the normative and generalized sequence of family and time, they offer us ‘panoramic now[s]’ (Dinshaw, 2012: 114) which can be both vertical and horizontal at the same time. These panoramic nows show the possibility of experiencing other ways of relating to time and intimacy while inviting us to be curious about the relationships between relatedness and inheritance of memories.

Conclusions

Understanding of intimacy is very central in the study of memory and memory transmission. And most of the time questions of ‘who remembers what? And how?’ are answered through taken for granted formulas for ‘inter-generational transmission’ of memory. As Astrid Erll discusses in ‘Locating family in cultural memory studies’ (2011), the notion of family and family memories play a very important role within memory studies. Starting with Maurice Halbwach’s work on collective memory, since the 1920s scholars have been closely working on the complex relationships between individual and collective memories across time and space. In this regard, family memory becomes ‘a typical inter-generational memory: a kind of collective memory that is constituted through ongoing social interaction and communication between children, parents, and grandparents’ (Erll, 2011: 306).

Challenging the monolithic categories of ‘inter-generational transmission of memory’, scholars such as Marianne Hirsch (2012) worked on the conceptualization of ‘postmemory’ and brought affect as a theoretical tool in the study of memory transmission. Through ‘postmemory’, Hirsch (1997) explored the emergence of past traumatic memories in the present of individuals who were never there to witness those events. She argues that ‘postmemory is not an identity position but a generational structure of transmission embedded in multiple forms of mediation’ (2012: 35). Family life, Hirsch states, ‘even in its most intimate moments, is entrenched in a collective imaginary shaped by public generational structures of fantasy and projection by a shared archive of stories and images that inflect the broader transfer and availability of individual and familial remembrance’ (2012: 35) In her analysis Hirsch locates the roots of the familial and affiliative practices of postmemory in feminism and encourages us to use critical strategies of feminism to connect past(s) to present(s). Through personal and collective memories that travel among ‘generations’, queer postmemory plays not only with the itinerary of the ‘inter-generational transmission of memory’ but also makes us curious about the postness of memory within contexts where ‘queer perspectives on trauma challenge the relation between the catastrophic and the everyday’ (Cvetkovich, 2008: 111).

As we see in the narratives of trans mothers and daughters, queer postmemory and its relation to family, time and memory within daily practices of trans mothers and daughters is not always an adequate strategy of resistance (or leaving things behind), rather it emerges at the sites or moments where unpredictable engagements with the norm mobilize certain worlds in which the very aspiration of the normative can be re(f)used. Idiosyncratic and disidentificatory practices of queer postmemory and its reflections on the quotidian transpose the determinative take of ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory while opening spaces for being in the world and creating an alternative world.

Queer postmemory does not only encourage us to think critically about the already existing paths related to inheritance of memory, it also inspires us to destabilize our perspectives on the study of ‘inter-generational’ transmission of memory. The narratives of trans mothers and daughters remind us that not only memory becomes inheritable through certain modes of family and time, but also alternative forms of family and time can be formed through memories that unexpectedly become inheritable. In this manner, queer approaches to memory and memory circulation might not necessarily be coherent and they can be familiar and strange at the same time.

Curious interactions between alternative models of relatedness and temporality reveal that moments in which ‘queer’ meets memory are not only related to histories of identities and bodies but also unpredictable directionalities. Through the example of trans mothers and daughters, here queer postmemory shows how seemingly predictable and unidirectional roadmaps for ‘inter-generational transmission of memory’ include alternative attunements between ‘generations’ that enable creative spaces for multiple and not necessarily consistent pasts, presents and futures.