Academic talk: ‘Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday’

The book arose from ‘ethnographic* and archival research among queer-, trans people, feminists and sex workers’ and was about the ‘everyday troubles with transness in social and institutional life’ in Istanbul, Turkey, since 2016.  She wanted to know how trans people dealt with such ‘state power’ in everyday negotiations.  It was her claim that there were two currencies – violence and intimacy; hence ‘violent intimacies’ were an ‘entanglement’ that trans people were caught in.  Therefore, the book offered a novel (i.e. stupid and cockeyed) concept and was obviously chosen in lieu of actual evidence of real violence, the traditional got-punched-in-the-face sort. 

In conversation event with ‘trans bearish man’

‘Fucking Myself Goodbye’ is the title of the last chapter. It was going to be the title of the book but she was persuaded otherwise by her publisher. Ben-Zeev did her reading, torpid prose indeed and also very confusing. Talia is the woman she wants to fuck, – as a man, as Avi. She wanted connect to the physical parts of the herself which caused her pain and self-loathing. She can’t really do this via her imagination so settles instead on finding a Talia-lookalike (another trope of AGP males, trying to imitate the women in their lives).

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