Lubunya Assemblages - Queer Networked Resistances in Turkey

“Queer Networked Resistances in Turkey” ⤴️
“queer knowledge production at the digital level” ⤴️
“The queer movement in Turkey has a strong culture of spatial resistance, their struggles for supporting the existence and growth of queer spaces and neighbourhoods in major cities” ⤴️
“how did queer resistance move to digital spaces,” ⤴️
“how do digital technologies transform the political experience of physical spaces? Do the entanglements of online and offline spaces create novel forms of resistance?” ⤴️
“of protecting a public park in the heart of Istanbul, which was historically a queer cruising spot, Gezi Park became an experience of a networked public sphere (Tufekci, 2017) where the roles of digital and physical spaces collided” ⤴️
“ontoepistemologies of queer resistance practices. I investigate how digital technologies have transformed queer resistance cultures, and propose theoretical and methodological approaches for analysing the changing spatiality of queer resistance in Turkey” ⤴️
“relate queer resistance practices to acts of citizenship beyond the legal framework, exploring activist practices from a digital ethnographic perspective” ⤴️
“resistance practice as a political contestation using the assemblage theory to examine how queer bodies, technologies and spaces interact in such practices.” ⤴️
“queer counter-archival practices” ⤴️
“digital ethnography on social media platforms” ⤴️
“part of a transnational struggle that reflects the queer resistance against global heteropatriarchy, especially in contexts where right-wing populist regimes are on the rise.” ⤴️
“I bring the situated knowledges of the queer movement to the epistemological centre of this research. I aim to provide new insights on transnational queer theory from the Global South by analysing the transformations of spaces of resistance and queer politics.” ⤴️
“rethinking sexual citizenship from the perspective of grassroots political imaginaries of queer subjects and in relation to spatiality” ⤴️
“How do queer memories emerge and be kept alive under the authoritarian here and now? What is the role of queer memories in hoping for and doing queer futures within and beyond the authoritarian temporality?” ⤴️
“While it brings the question of time and space to the forefront, it examines whether and, if so, how the practice of keeping queer memories is interrelated with the anticipation of queer futures.” ⤴️
“As these thoughts or impressions came to me often quite unexpectedly, I also decided that they should appear in the text without integrating them into the main flow of the manuscript. My aim was that the moments also reflect the methodology of this thesis, which is framed by an assemblage” ⤴️
should explain early that the thesis Should be fragmentary
“of contributing transnational perspectives on queer resistance, building assemblage epistemologies, and queer knowledge produ” ⤴️
“how queer resistance is rooted in local activist trajectories, considering the historical development of the movement in Turkey, while also engaging with the transnational dimensions of the broader queer movement.” ⤴️
“Queer in Translation (2021), Evren Savcı conducts” ⤴️
“Savcı employs translation as a methodology, highlighting the power of vernaculars in understanding how resisting collectives, such as “the commons”, create their own vocabularies.” ⤴️
“Turkey’s queer resistance reveals an ambiguity of epistemic divisions between East and West;” ⤴️
“(2016), Abdulhamit Arvas also argues that Turkey’s “inbetweenness” in terms of the geographic divisions between East and West or epistemic divisions between coloniser and colonised creates a hybrid space where queerness becomes a site of resistance to forced binarisms (p. 99)(see also Cakirlar & Delice, 2012)” ⤴️
“such dichotomies are (neo)colonial impositions on the queer movement and disregard the situated grassroots struggles in cross-border settings. This is one of the main reasons why I insist on using “transnational” over “global”, as globality tends to refer to a Western hegemony on queer knowledges, while transnationality embraces the complexity of queerness.” ⤴️
“activists could go beyond in/visibility regimes due to multi-scalar resistance tactics that help them navigate between different scales of action—namely, individual/collective and local/transnational.” ⤴️
“I adopt an assemblage epistemology to understand how queer resistance occurs rather than focusing on what the objects/subjects of resistance are.” ⤴️
in analysing the boards/channels as assemblages I see what is held in context of other things, I seem them as multi-modal and concerned with past/present/future
“decided to approach queer bodies not only in the flesh but also as information (Haraway, 1991)” ⤴️
“I see queer as an assemblage whose “doing” is epistemologically relevant rather than merely its “being”” ⤴️
“queer not as a utopian ideal, or a queer subject without failures, but queer as “doing” and an everyday practice, both through the successes and failures in resistance” ⤴️
“I explore digital spaces not as “safe spaces” where the queer movement can easily navigate and do transformative action, but as a contested space with the strong presence of surveillance and control regimes” ⤴️
“Queering Middle-Eastern Cyberspaces, Kuntsman and Al-Qasimi (2012) brought together queer digital activism scholars from the Middle East in seeking answers to the question, “how can critical cyber-queer scholarship write about non-Western or non-white queerness, without reaffirming whiteness and the Eurocentre as an epistemic center, thus recreating Eurocentric, Orientalist, and colonial mappings of the world into liberal and backward, queer and heteronormative?” (p. 5). In their ethnographies focusing on contexts such as the Iranian diaspora blogosphere (Shakhsari, 2012), Egyptian blogs (WalshHaines, 2012), lesbian and gay activism on the internet in Turkey (Gorkemli, 2012) and more, contributors bring online and offline experiences of Middle Eastern queers with their local and transnational encounters.” ⤴️
“Arabic Glitch (2023), the digital media scholar Laila Shereen Sakr discusses how today’s advanced surveillance regimes have transformed humans into “data bodies” whose online traceability and embodied personalities are entangled. On a hopeful note, she uses glitch theory to show how social media activists in the Arab world use errors and disruptions in digital technologies to create community-based actions and resist authoritarian surveillance regimes” ⤴️
“One of the main tasks of this thesis is to show how queer knowledge production and memories remain alive in authoritarian times.” ⤴️
“(2021), Serena Owusua Dankwa refuses categorical approaches to sexuality and identifies that same-sex intimacies are built through situated experiences of failures and victories, and that stories and practices of intimacies like this build queer knowledge” ⤴️
“queer knowledge production as an integral part of transformative politics, I focus on queer counter-archives as a way of doing resistance (Article IV)” ⤴️
“José Esteban Muñoz’s (2019) discussions on queer hope, I focus on the non-linear experiences of queerness where queer counter-archives have the potential to make stories of resistance travel across time and space. Empirically in this study, those memories of the past, not necessarily memories of success but also of loss and failure, play an affective role for imaginaries of the queer movement. In conceptualising counter-archives, I am inspired by Ann Cvetkovich, who in An Archive of Feelings (2003) finds archival value in emotional experiences and life stories. From a Turkish context, Yener Bayramoğlu (2021) argues that archives of resistance contribute to queer hope in maintaining queer presence in the public sphere.” ⤴️
“hile I fully acknowledge the value of queer counterarchives in sustaining resistance cultures, I also argue that the analysis of collective feelings should go beyond the conditions of hope/hopelessness. Hope can be a troubling concept to hold onto, or may even come across as 34” ⤴️
“naïve, when (settler) colonial, authoritarian and capitalist projects are dominating the world, and feelings such as rage and anger become necessary to survive.” ⤴️
“argues for the role of technological affordances in providing flexibility to refracted publics.” ⤴️
“I discuss the role of emotions and memories in making resistance not only as a spatial struggle but also as a question of time.” ⤴️
“It is a flexible, fluid and ever-changing mode to feel and identify as a collective based on sexual variance and gender identity. It is also not free from internal challenges, as different subjects cohabit different power positions. With that in mind, is it possible to categorise a queer/lubunya subject?” ⤴️
“begin by asking whether it is necessary—or even possible—to conceptualise lubunya as a fixed subject category” ⤴️
“Lubunya is also a “movement”. It refers to queer subjects with experiences of (im)mobility, who engage with and reshape cultures of resistance through activism, both within and outside organisational structures” ⤴️
“I adopt an assemblage ontological framework (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) and thus my focus is on how that “movement” is formed by relations between different actors from bodies that are organic and inorganic and in their relations to spaces and affects. The assemblage framework helps me see the “identity as an event of temporality” rather than as a given status of stability (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987).” ⤴️
“a “subjectless critique” to renew queer studies by destabilising an understanding of queer subjects as a fixed identity category” ⤴️
““what might be called the ‘subjectless’ critique of queer studies disallows any positing of a proper subject or object for the field by insisting that queer has no fixed political referent” (p. 3).” ⤴️
“thinking of a queer time and space beyond modernist linearity, of queer utopianism and futurity, as well as in showing the complexity of queer resistance and its intersections with other power hierarchies based on race, class and ableism” ⤴️
“David L. Eng and Jasbir Puar (2020) argue furthermore for an “objectless” queer critique, claiming that the subject-object distinction is rather blurry in today’s biopolitical materialisms (p. 16). Rooted in an object-oriented ontology, they focus on the biopolitics of objects whose agential roles may be impactful for queer lives” ⤴️
“intersectionality and assemblage theory can be in friction rather than in opposition to each other (Puar, 2020, p. 50).” ⤴️
“Puar argues that the “modern subject is exhausted” (2017, p. 206); it is overly analysed, and fragmented. She states that: …to dismiss assemblages in favor of retaining intersectional identitarian frameworks is to dismiss how societies of control tweak and modulate bodies as matter, not predominantly through signification or identity interpellation but rather through affective capacities and tendencies. (2020, p. 63)” ⤴️
this is why I favour ‘multiply marginalised’ as well as neuroqueer
“grasp the importance of temporality in catching the moments of action and their potential for radical transformation (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017).” ⤴️
“This assemblage approach is an ontological shift from “subjects of rights” to “subjects of acts” whose interaction with other humans and non-humans becomes central for (queer) knowledge production (Haraway, 1991). A similar shift is observed in queer movement transnationally, where stable categories of gender and sexuality are increasingly deconstructed, and queer grassroots groups are aiming for a radical transformation of the heteropatriarchal gender regime (Nash & Gorman-Murray, 2017, p. 1524; Puar, 2017).” ⤴️
“look at the relational modes that together make lubunya into a movement.” ⤴️
“Mouffe’s theory of citizenship reveals the radical democratic potential of plurality: that citizenship is never a fixed category of law, and that its radical potential comes from the openness to change its meaning through political activism. This kind of approach resonates with the assemblage thinking of sexual citizenship suggested by Puar (2013, 2017) in which political practice becomes the facet of radical transformation to what citizenship may become.” ⤴️
“Puar examined how Western nationstates build themselves as sexually progressive through a sexualised and racialised exclusion of people of colour as “potentially homophobic”” ⤴️
“According to queer and crip theory scholar Margrit Shildrick (2013), a topdown conceptualisation of citizenship leads to a “citizenship of indifference” that normatively defines the fixed rights and duties of any citizen. It functions inherently for the normalisation and domestication of bodies, or, in other words, for a standardisation of binary, heterosexual and ableist bodies in framing the normative citizen. Shildrick uses Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality to explain the notion of citizen, in which law produces its truth and disciplines the citizen-subject according to intended norms (Foucault, 1978) and in which “equality of all before the law inherently risks effacing difference, at the very moment of appearing to recognise it” (Shildrick, 2013, p. 144)” ⤴️
“In previous studies on resistance, it is conceptualised as an exercise of action or a practice: to “resist” means to withstand hegemonic power structures, with an aim of destabilising the recurrent power relations (Baaz et al., 2016, p. 17). Two resistance traditions have been distinguished by resistance scholars: one in the form of visible contentious resistance such as social movements and street protests (della Porta, 2018; Tilly, 2008) and the other in the form of everyday resistance practices that are subtle and integrated into social life, and yet potentially transformative (Vinthagen & Johansson, 2013, p. 3).” ⤴️
“From this perspective, the success of a movement is measured by its visibility in public spaces and in contentious transformative actions such as strikes, street protests and public campaigns (della Porta, 2020; Tilly, 2008). Although these are very useful resistance tactics, in this thesis I challenge the idea of paradigms of visibility as a measure of success and go beyond the visibility/invisibility dichotomies (see Article III) (cf. Liinason, 2020).” ⤴️
“the potential undesirability of visible contentious politics for reasons of safety of the queer community, especially with the rise of global anti-genderism and local authoritarianisms (Çağatay, Liinason, & Sasunkevich, 2022; Stella, 2015). I am inspired by the idea of resistance in the “grey zone” (Murru, 2020, p. 172) that brings together unorganised and (generally) individual actions and more organised forms of activism of the lubunya movement (Çağatay, Liinason, & Sasunkevich, 2022).” ⤴️
“This blurring of boundaries challenges the ontological primacy of contentious politics where large-scale resistances are strongly associated with urban space. It opens for individualised, subtle and everyday forms of resistance in translocal actions (Lilja et al., 2017).” ⤴️
“Çağatay, Liinason and Sasunkevich (2022) propose a multi-scalar approach to analysing resistance, which acknowledges feminist and queer resistances at micro, meso and macro levels and their constant interchange with each other. Adopting this multi-scalar perspective, my conceptualisation of resistance recognises the togetherness of individual/collective and subtle/contentious forms of resistance practices” ⤴️
“The critical point of analysis here is how these practices become translocated and move from one scale to another via networked connectivity and digital affordances.” ⤴️
“The concept of counterpublics is widely used by queer scholars in describing queer communities’ relationship to space. I use neo-Marxist political philosopher Nancy Fraser’s conceptualisation of counterpublic due to its importance for emancipatory and transnational queer movements. According to Fraser, feminist and queer struggles challenge the hegemony of the (neo)liberal political subject who appears as a majoritarian male (Fraser, 1992, 2007).” ⤴️
“Fraser calls these alternative publics that are critical to the neoliberal regime “counterpublics”: their members come together for oppositional interpretations of redistributive justice and politics of recognition to produce collective counter-discourses (Fraser, 1990, p. 67). To conceptualise a global justice of “queer counterpublics” (Soriano, 2014), it is important to critically discuss the injustices targeting queer people based on exclusionary neoliberal politics and identify colonial capitalist power hierarchies targeting the queer communities.” ⤴️
“it is important to acknowledge an agential character of “spaces of resistance”, not as passive geographic surfaces for social movements but as affective entities with their contested and reclaimed histories (Escobar, 2001)” ⤴️
“Doreen Massey (2005) and her understanding of space as a relational concept. Massey sees space as dynamic and ever-changing; its meanings are never fixed but remain in constant transformations due to struggles over them. By using an open conceptualisation of space as contested, I argue for its relationality, whether online or offline” ⤴️
“Place is, rather, conceptualised with its symbolism created in a particular time and space. Therefore, the effective place-making is a practice based on queer memories.” ⤴️
“The Covid-19 pandemic significantly reshaped perceptions of public and private spaces, raising questions about the relevance of such a dichotomy altogether. For the lubunya community, the boundaries between home and activist spaces became increasingly blurred as most solidarity gatherings and even queer solidarity parties took place in the corporeal isolation of home spaces. With platforms like Zoom becoming central spaces of resistance, new power hierarchies emerged. For instance, ageing or disabled queers faced greater challenges in accessing certain activist circles, highlighting disparities within these virtual environments.” ⤴️
“Benkler et al. (2015), who define these contemporary spaces of resistance as a “networked public sphere” derived from online-offline entanglements of the public with today’s “digitally networked” society or “networked publics” (Pink et al., 2016; Vivienne, 2016). These networked publics appear as groups of people organised around a social imaginary (or a discourse) that makes further political identifications and interactions possible (Warner, 2002).” ⤴️
“The growing literature on digital affordances provides effective ways to understand this connection by exploring online-offline entanglements in resistance cultures and the impacts of technological tools, such as hashtags and algorithms, to facilitate or contest resistance cultures” ⤴️
“Informatics scholars introduced the term digital affordances to explain how technologies provide and enhance the potential for a particular action (Earl & Kimport, 2011; Majchrzak et al., 2013, p. 39). My take on the affordances is related to the assemblage theory, in which technological affordances are meaningful only through their relationality with bodies and spaces (Shaw & Sender, 2016). This approach assumes that human agency is important for alternating how certain technologies can be used, even outside their intended functions. Digital spaces can be queered just as offline spaces, in creating micro-communities or in producing queer knowledge online (Pain, 2022).” ⤴️
“This relationality makes the queer body into a more-than-human entanglement (Bates, 2017), using technology to transform what it has been initially intended to do within the constraints of a heteropatriarchal matrix.” ⤴️
“Hashtag activism has been a central way of doing networked resistance since the early 2010s. Oh, Eom and Rao (2015) name this function of hashtags “technolinguistic grammar” as they provide grammatical tools to bring together the messy interactions on social media and organise them for the continuity and mobilisation of discussions.” ⤴️
“Their networked character also blurs the boundaries between public and private spaces, as spaces that would be considered private or personal can potentially be impactful in activism due to online connectivity. In this regard, the “networked public sphere” is a way to facilitate multi-scalar resistance through the affordances of digital platforms where everyday resistance practices and contentious politics may coincide.” ⤴️
“retrogressive personal narratives easily reaching hypervisibility online. In Turkey” ⤴️
“A crucial outcome of cis-gendered, able-bodied and heterosexist norms that shape the standards of algorithms is “shadow banning” of marginalised online communities (Rauchberg, 2022). Ideologically biased algorithms threaten queer visibility on social media by categorising their contents as inappropriate” ⤴️
“r Crystal Abidin (2021)” ⤴️
“networked publics are transformed into “refracted publics” ⤴️
“novel spaces of resistance, not necessarily visible to the wider public but tactically hidden and subversive. I find the concept of the refracted public useful in describing how the lubunya movement sustains their networked resistance. According to Abidin, today’s refracted publics use subtle yet effective forms of connecting in digital spaces, shifting between politics of visibility and invented invisibility, depending on their political aims. She calls this tactic “silosociality”, which is based on affording visibility that is communal and localised in which “the content is tailor-made for specific subcommunities and rabbit-holes and may not be accessible or legible to outsiders” (Abidin, 2021, p. 4).” ⤴️
“what digital affordances may provide to those “silos” for the communities to remain hidden from state surveillance, hate speech or authoritarianism.” ⤴️
“This approach directs my attention away from the reductionism of lubunya or queer identity as a static category and their predetermination as the only way of facilitating collective action.” ⤴️
“Sedgwick (2003) criticises the poststructuralist focus on language as a primary source of knowledge and, instead, pays attention to affective interactions in seeking knowledge of resistance. Sedgwick deploys the term reparative reading, or a return to the ontology of intersubjectivity and community. Her affective ontology of the body helped me follow the traces of “becoming lubunya in action”—through bodily performances, online manifestations and vernacular formations. Moreover, Sedgwick argues that affect has a freedom of circulation between bodies. The very impossibility of preventing it from moving around makes affect highly contagious and, in many instances, attached. This can be seen as the reason for the ease of affective circulation to move between different scales of resistance: an everyday or individualised action can circulate affectively and eventually become transformative” ⤴️
““sticky objects”. She proposes that the flow of emotions between people can be facilitated by the objects which happen to become “sites of personal and social tension” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 11).” ⤴️
“Hemmings uses the concept of affective dissonance (2012) as a feeling of discomfort and desire for transformation. She argues that such dissonance is at the core of feminist movements because of the onto-epistemological gap, or tension, between the hegemonic knowledge available to queer subjects and their embodied experience in the world (Lakämper, 2017).” ⤴️
“all these feelings can produce a politicised impetus to change that foregrounds the relationship between ontology and epistemology precisely because of the experience of their dissonance. (2012, p. 150)” ⤴️
“the potential of every gendered and (de)sexualised subject “to feel” the violence that heteropatriarchal society produced and to be able to act upon it. The queer vernacular” ⤴️
“The feelings of fear, anger or rage are commonly associated with the Lubunca term madilik which designates encountering discomfort. A situation of madilik induces the affective response from lubunya to share with other members of the community, for instance in case of police violence or homo/bi/transphobic encounter (İlaslaner, 2015, p. 80” ⤴️
“49). Gullüm, another central concept in the vernacular, has an added term gullüm alıkmak (making gullüm), which connotes the collective act of joy or humour as resistance against moments of madilik (Ozban, 2022, p. 134). I” ⤴️
“A common outcome of these temporalities was public authorities challenging and restricting spaces of resistance. Time is also related to building knowledge of resistance, as situated queer memories and vernaculars in Turkey are significant for the continuation of resistance cultures.” ⤴️
“Massumi (2011), argues, from a Spinozian perspective, that affect is never in the present, but it is a movement between the past and the future. This is due to the capacitation of the body to carry the past affectively and imagine the future through these affects. Massumi argues: So there’s a reactivation of the past in passage toward a changed future, cutting transversally across dimensions of time, between past and future, and between pasts of different orders. This in-between time or transversal time is the time of the event. This temporality enables, and requires you, to rethink all of these terms – bodily capacitation, felt transition, quality of lived experience, memory, repetition, seriation, inclination – in dynamic relation to each other. (2011, p. 38)” ⤴️
“not merely as a reactionary politics against authoritarianism but as rooted in a continuous culture of movement.” ⤴️
“they draw motivation from past struggles and advance towards queer utopian imaginaries.” ⤴️
“relational becoming (Massumi, 2011, p. 38). This understanding of the queer as a “relational becoming”” ⤴️
“the queer subject has the critical position and ability to feel the discomfort of heterosexual space: queer presence in these spaces feels disturbing to heterosexism as the queer does not “sink into” a space that has already taken shape. This is the difference for a queer subject who does not follow a heteronormative culture providing homonormative lives (Halberstam, 2005) of marriage, having children, and participation in war for nation-states; queer is against the very idea of “normativity” that produces the subject and space not to be queer (Ahmed, 2013, p. 149)” ⤴️
“then anticipatory temporality is a “modality that seeks to catch a small hold of many futures, to invite futurity even as it refuses to script it” (Puar, 2017, p. xix)” ⤴️
“by José Esteban Muñoz (2006) critique of presentism in analysing queer movements. Muñoz argues 82” ⤴️
“that a focus on the present is not productive and puts resistance into a paranoid and passive position. His intervention in queer politics is a reminder of the radical potential of the struggle, a “response to queer thinking that embraces a politics of the here and now underlined by […] pragmatic gay agenda” (p. 825). Here, queer is a horizon rather than an identity, something to be imagined and in the making that exceeds the limitations of current authoritarianism(s). This queer perspective commonly leads to a discussion on hope, where queer becomes a doing of politics of the unknown, creating possibilities for acting towards radical transformation. The politics of hope is not necessarily dependent upon optimism or positive feelings. Hope as an affective mode can be in copresence with negative affects” ⤴️
“In Atmospheres of Violence, Eric A. Stanley (2021) uses the concept of “overkill” to describe how killing of queer/trans individuals is not an act of the moment, but a killing of that which is already constituted as dead. Stanley writes that “trans/queer life is a threat that is so unimaginable that one is forced to not simply murder but to push the dead backward out of time, out of history, and into that which comes before” (p. 33, emphasis in original). Therefore, overkill describes a politics of hate and erasure that connotes a violence that is epistemic beyond that which is corporeal; it is an act to erase the queer memories and futures.” ⤴️
“I see lubunya memories and counter-archives as valuable affective entities, where memories are not disconnected from the present and the future but, rather, transform how lubunya survive and imagine queer futures.” ⤴️
“that space is a dynamic mode of assemblage, rather than an inactive geographic surface.” ⤴️
“I do not approach digital technologies as purely emancipatory spaces; rather, their affective potential also intensifies state surveillance and violence” ⤴️
“study resistance not merely as reactive, but as deeply rooted in the past struggles and future aspirations of the lubunya community.” ⤴️
“explore how lubunya subjects engage in memory work and counter-archiving as everyday acts of resistance that transcend the authoritarian present. I will also examine the interplay of hope and hopelessness in queer resistance, demonstrating how collective memories of loss and despair fuel radical transformation and solidarity (s” ⤴️
“ueerness as a process of “becoming”, where the subject is always in flux, never fully defined. In this sense, queerness remains partial—an ongoing subjective experience that resists closure, aligning with Donna Haraway’s (1991) notion of situated, partial knowledges. In resisting universalist knowledge regimes, I draw from Haraway’s concept of feminist objectivity as “a doctrine and practice of objectivity that privileges contestation, deconstruction, passionate construction, webbed connections, and hope for a transformation of systems of knowledge and ways of seeing” (Haraway, 2013, pp. 584-585). The queerness of this ethnography lies in its openness to the unexpected, its embrace of imperfection, its decentring of the fixed subjectivity and acceptance of the” ⤴️
“ontology of the situated lubunya practices” ⤴️
“In Turkish, alan has multiple meanings. It means “field”, referring to a piece of land, but it also means a field in a more abstract sense, as in “field of knowledge”. I use alan for Istanbul because of this twofold meaning: it is both an alan for corporeal resistance and alan as an idea that lives in the memories of many lubunya and contributes to building the knowledge of resistance.” ⤴️
“Massey’s (2005) conceptualisation of place: “if space is […] a simultaneity of stories-so-far (rather than a ‘surface’), then places are collections of those stories, articulations of the wider power-geometries of space” (p. 130). For Massey, the place is not just a “geographic surface”; it is a constellation of people’s trajectories and processes experienced socially (p. 141)” ⤴️
“I let myself get lost in the messiness of cross-platform discussions and the multimodal usage of videos, texts, pictures and sounds.” ⤴️
“Christine Hine’s (2017) work From virtual ethnography to the embedded, embodied, everyday internet, with its emphasis on the multi-sited fieldwork experience, has influenced my ethnography. Hine’s “digital” ethnography suggests a focus on the “machinegenerated” aspects of the ethnographic settings, such as following hyperlinks or algorithmic bias, which are also sites the ethnographer follows. Inspired” ⤴️
“While Atlas.ti was useful for categorising hundreds of associated tweets initially, I later decided to focus on the hashtag manually and let myself be moved by it and its hyperlinks” ⤴️
“All my movements following hashtags between different communicative modes, such as videos, pictures, texts and sounds, led me to conduct a multimodal discourse analysis, centring the hashtag and its discursive role in facilitating other corporeal or digital forms of action beyond the conventional modes of communication” ⤴️
“y Sara Ahmed: Emotio” ⤴️
“ement and attachment is instructive. What moves us,” ⤴️
“what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place. Hence movement does not cut the body off from the ‘where’ of its inhabitance but connects bodies to other bodies: attachment takes place through movement, through being moved by the proximity of others. (2013, p. 11)” ⤴️
“ace is an affective form of space.” ⤴️
“not categorising myself and limiting my sexuality, but defining myself through collective memories of resistance. (My fieldnotes, 2022)” ⤴️
“The form and method of my journal changed over time, depending on my needs in the field and spatial experiences or difficulties.” ⤴️
“ict” ⤴️
“ctures” ⤴️
“Writing in a notebook was sometimes impractical or impossible, like at a protest or a march, or in a more intimate setting to interact with my participants. I sometimes used my digital tablet to attach pictures to my text to retain my visual memories. I recorded my voice a few times when I found it more practical or my feelings motivated me to do so. I attached these recordings to relevant texts, which helped me to organise the multimodal character of journaling via sound, visuals and writing. My mobile phone also proved a valuable aid in taking pictures of the scenes, primarily to remember what spaces I had been in or to keep visual memories.” ⤴️
“ctures of the scenes, p” ⤴️
“The fieldnotes as a reflexive/affective method for the events or social settings are important for producing “thick description” in the ethnographic genre. Thick description is crucial in ethnography, particularly in contextualising the (sub)cultural practices from a located perspective (Geertz, 2008). W” ⤴️
“The thick description provided by my continuous journaling practice resulted in the epistemological centrality of “movement” and in the thematic choices I made in this chapter, namely, the focus on alan, immobilities and affects. During interviews, our language of communication was Turkish. H” ⤴️
“At times, I could not understand certain Lubunca terms and asked for clarification, which contributed to the feeling of shifting positions between being an insider and outsider to the movement.” ⤴️
“around friendship in those times [referring to 2016-17], and one night you make some gullüm together, and it can turn out to become a political action the next day (Eda, she/they, 2020)” ⤴️
“it is not necessarily the joyful aspects of lubunya memories that contribute to the resistance practices, but the feelings of loss, desperation and anger can cause “affective dissonances”, which can be transformative (Hemmings, 2021; see Chapter 3).” ⤴️
“feminist standpoint theory, a position of “outsider within” (Biricik, 2014; Collins, 1986).” ⤴️
“instead of being immersed in the negative affects of “paranoid reading” practices, as Sedgwick (2003) argues, I have been more strongly influenced by practices of “reparative reading”, which have allowed me to find pleasure and strength in the material.” ⤴️
“saw the practice of consent by research participants as a continuous process rather than a static one, where participants are integral agents of knowledge production and can always be in dialogue with me.” ⤴️
““contextual integrity” by Nissenbaum (2010) u” ⤴️
“privacy is not about making personal information absolutely hidden, which, in the case of my study, would mean omitting critical activist trajectories. Privacy is instead considering what appropriate information should flow within contextual norms” ⤴️
“some of the activists were very open and wanted to make their presence visible, some others preferred to remain anonymous.” ⤴️
“a self-reflective process to decide whether it was a good idea to disclose some identities even with their given consent. I used pseudonyms for my participants, deciding not to use their birth names or chosen names for the safety of the research process. A few of my participants told me that I could use their names as they are very public figures and their names may occasionally appear in media outlets. However, I still referred to them by pseudonyms to protect their confidentiality in case of future conflicts with state powers or other individuals and the risks involved because of arbitrary authoritarianism.” ⤴️
“a turn to digital is not abandoning long-term immersion in the resistance culture but acknowledging the complexity of online and offline appearances of bodies and messy interactions. Besides, they suggest that the field for the ethnographer is more open than ever before, which requires a combination of conventional methods of activism research with digital ethnography (p. 125). This necessitates novel perspectives on reflexivity for the researcher to consider and flexibility to move between entangled spaces rather than separated (Pink, 2009).” ⤴️
““grey data” (Rambukkana, 2019), which makes it more difficult to categorise them as public or private. A” ⤴️
“Annette Markham and Buchanan (2012) argue that people can develop more privatised expectations from digital platforms that are widely considered as public. T” ⤴️
“I did not assume content on digital platforms sent by individual accounts such as tweets, posts, pictures or videos to be public data. Open digital spaces, which is to say spaces that were neither privatised nor confidential, were treated as spaces in the public domain. I” ⤴️
“Such an approach resonates with Haraway’s (2013) cyborg ontologies in doing feminist digital research, where our bodies and identities leave traces in digital spaces.” ⤴️