Queer debt

Abstract

In the Kurdish-majority city of Amed (Diyarbakır), Turkey, the local sex work economy has become increasingly and intimately interwoven with institutions, discourses, and practices of securitization. In this context, queer and trans Kurds adopt, adapt, and use surveillance to negotiate the value of their work and life with one another, the broader community, and the state. These negotiations involve vocabularies, strategies, and affective attachments derived from the long-standing militarized conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party. Key to this dynamic is the notion of bedel, or the indebtedness and obligation that Kurds feel toward the struggle for Kurdish rights. Through affective debt, queer and trans Kurds police boundaries for their security and livelihoods through surveillance, defining those who can and cannot do sex work. In the process, they shift the meanings and functions of bedel as they endure, embody, and embrace violence and homophobia to gain acceptance of their identities.