CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2016
| Author | Kocak, Mert |
|---|---|
| Title | Remembering and mourning the ungrievable: gendering deathscapes through the materiality of dead bodies of transwomen in turkey |
| Summary | This thesis examines the deaths of transsexual women in Turkey by looking at two concepts; deathscapes and ungrievability. It is constituted by three main arguments. The first one states that the deaths of transsexual women are deemed ungrievable in the public sphere in Turkey. Either there is a void, a silence in terms of representing their deaths or existing representation of their deaths makes it impossible to remember and mourn them as transwomen. This thesis acknowledges that ungrievability in the domain of the representation cannot account for all forms of remembering and mourning that are purposely excluded from the public sphere in the first place to create that ungrievability. This is why this thesis aims at looking for alternative ways of remembering and mourning that do not have a reflection in the public sphere, through doing an oral history study with people from the LGBT movement in Turkey. The second argument is that these alternative ways can be located at a rapture point resulting from inadmissibility of dead bodies of transwomen into deathscapes which are defined as spaces, including bodies, exclusively assigned to death and to performing rituals of burial and practices of memorialization. In close relation with the second argument, the third one claims that transwomen cannot occupy their own bodies as deathscapes, and they cannot occupy the formal deathscapes as long as their bodies still carry the traces of their non-heteronormative gender performances inscribed upon their bodies while they were living. Their inadmissibility into deathscapes creates the rapture in the conventional rituals of burial and practices of memorialization in the sense that they cannot account for LGBT people’s need to care for their own deaths. This opens up the possibility for LGBT people to come up with different burial rituals and practices of memorialization of transwomen. This thesis, thus, brings a spatial and gender lens to death, and remembering and mourning the dead. |
| Supervisor | Peto , Andrea |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2016/kocak_mert.pdf |
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