III: The Performance as an Act

III

THE PERFORMANCE AS AN ACT

Just five months before the inauguration of the twelfth Istanbul Biennial where Kutluğ Ataman’s jarse was exhibited, the same space, Istanbul Modern, had held the first retrospective exhibition of Ataman in Turkey: The Enemy Inside Me. Consisting of installed moving images, the retrospective highlighted Ataman’s interest in identity politics and the representation of marginalised members of the society ‘while simultaneously creating a continuous, extended and ever-changing self-portrait.’ 45

His 2007 single screen video work, Turkish Delight, is the first performance piece featuring the artist himself. The viewer confronts a life-sized Ataman in the guise of a belly dancer in the complete darkness of the main space of the museum. The abyss-like arena of the gallery consumes the black surroundings of the dancer from the video to create the illusion of having Ataman in the

same room as his viewers. Uncharacteristically as a belly dancer, the artist ignores the gaze of the viewers and instead dances in an arrhythmic, uncoordinated and clumsy manner. She shimmies, allowing the undulations of the gold fringes of her bikini-resembling two-piece outfit, but drags her foot around as if scared of falling over on her golden-high heels.46 She attempts creating figure of eight movements using her waist and hips and ignores her complete lack of grace and eroticism. She purses her red-painted lips and continues chewing a piece of gum. Uninterested in her beholder, she moves her arms up to caress her wavy black wig in an unengaged demeanour.

45 Duygu Demir, ‘Kutluğ Ataman: The Enemy inside Me’, Ibraaz, 1 June 2011, <https://www.ibraaz.org/essays/26>[Accessed 10 May 2019].

46 I am using the pronoun she based on Ataman’s description of the work on his website.

Though not shown in the same exhibition, Ataman’s website archives an alternative footage. Double Roasted is a video work that is presented on a

single small screen, allowing the audience to be drawn in a lot closer. The title is a literal reference to a type of Turkish delight that is smaller in size. The act of belly dancing is meant to attract and seduce, but in both pieces ‘the dancer […] conveys the opposite: her disinterest in the male beholder.’47 The purposeful isolation of the audience and hence their lack of importance is ironic since the belly dancer is dependent on their gaze to sustain herself. The description the artist gives to both works implicate the male gaze on a female body as performed by an openly gay man. In a cultural space where the male belly dancer also exists, does this constitute as a drag performance?

Figure 2 (left) Kutluğ Ataman, still from Turkish Delight, 2007.

Figure 3 (right), Kutluğ Ataman, still from Double Roasted, 2007.

47 ‘Artworks’ Kutluğ, Ataman, (No Publishing Date) <http://www.kutlugataman.com/site/artworks/work/72/> [Accessed 1 May 2019].

Male belly dancers – zenne – (historically known as köçek) have long been part of the Turkish culture with fluctuating popularity. Joanna Mansbridge gives an account of meeting Diva, a zenne in an Istanbul tavern:

Diva is young, lithe and boyish. With hair immaculately sculpted, eyes

thickly rimmed with black eyeliner, lips brightly coloured, and chest aglow with glitter and oil, he rouses the entire room, shimmying

provocatively toward individual tables, where people clap to the rhythm of the music. […] Lips slightly parted and formed into a faint smile, he

commands attention with his gaze, inviting the audience to look at him and appreciate his beauty.48

The zennes first emerged as entertainers for the Ottoman court and grace the murals of Topkapı Palace where they are depicted dancing for the Sultan in

social ceremonies. With hair grown long and dressed in elaborate costumes, they drew the attention of European visitors and Ottoman poets. Whilst male and female belly dancers coexisted in the Ottoman society, the zenne gained increasing prominence between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, as women performing in public were deemed inappropriate. Much like the Janissaries as discussed in the first chapter, the zenne were recruited at a young age from non-Muslim ethnic minority families. From the age of fourteen they would start performing at the palace. Much like the shampoo boys from the same era, they also assumed the role of sexual servants. The

Ottoman society perceived male sexuality in two distinct phases, dependent on biological age: until puberty boys would possess a sexuality that could be

48 Joanna, Mansbridge, ‘The Zenne: Male Belly Dancers and Queer Modernity in Contemporary Turkey’, Theatre Research International, 42:1 (2017), 20-36 (p.20).

used to attract older men to penetrate them but after the growth of a full beard, they were expected to be the desirer instead.49

In the beginning of the nineteenth century, there were over six hundred zennes in the taverns of Istanbul. Their popularity grew, turning these spaces to areas of violence between the men who courted them. In 1837, Sultan

Mahmoud forbade their appearance due to the ensued quarrelling amongst the Janissaries – the members of the Sultan’s household troops. As the

Ottoman Empire transformed into the modern Turkish republic, the draw of the zenne dissipated due to ‘the changes in societal structure and the containment of sexual desires that accompanied the process of modernisation.’50 The zenne were thus replaced by female belly dancers based on ‘the Western system of sexual classification [where] the displayed female body [is seen] as the emblem of modern attitudes towards sex and gender’.51

The costume worn by zenne usually consists of loose-fitting trousers (şalvar)

and a chest piece adorned with sequins and gold coins: there is a resemblance to the female counterpart’s but unlike Ataman’s, it does not

include high-heeled shoes or wigs. There are also marked differences in the way the dancers move: women tend to perform the same movements slower and prominently use their lower body and arms, whilst men perform faster

49 Delice, p.124.

50 Mansbridge, p.21.

51 Ibid, pp.22-23. For an account of how the Ottoman reforms had an impact on clothing and hence strengthening of the Western gender binary please refer to Spencer, Hawkins, ‘Queerly Turkish: Queer Masculinity and National Belonging in the Image of Zeki Müren’, Popular Music and Society, 41:2 (2016), 99-118.

with a focus on the shoulders and torso.52 Ataman attempts to sway his hips and raise his arms up with minimal recruitment of his shoulders and torso –

both his movements and costume resemble that of a female belly dancer. Ataman is indeed belly dancing in drag rather than as a zenne, but could this be his way to highlight the gender binary forged by republican modernity and Westernisation in Turkey? Is Ataman performing for a Western gaze that is

accustomed to an almost-naked woman dancing rather than a historical gaze that is acquainted with a man dancing in a similar manner?

Mainsbridge argues that ‘the zenne dancer is a queer ghost, returning to haunt (and seduce) the present.’53 She links the revival as part of global transformations in the visibility of LGBT identities and as the unexpected consequence of the romanticization and revival of Turkey’s Ottoman past by

the ruling political party. Much like the shampoo boys, the zenne were linked to the disruption of the Janissaries, which partially led to the demise of the zenne. Although it appears far-fetched to imagine a male belly dancer in the contemporary military setting, such seductive and implicative performance of the zenne may threaten the gatekeepers of the hegemonic masculine society – the heteronormative military that’s is strengthened by their homosocial bonding practices. As outlined in the first chapter, the procedure of gaining an exemption from the military service offers several opportunities for the applicant to perform in such a dangerous manner: during the interview with a psychiatrist, during an extended military hospital stay, and during the final discussion with the committee regarding the outcome of their application.54

52 Ibid, pp.25-26. 53 Ibid, p.21.

54 The procedure of the application can bear a resemblance to a prison as candidates may be placed in a psychiatric ward to be monitored for several days. The questions asked among the observers are: would he provoke other men and is his homosexuality noticeable enough. For more details and first

Whilst one cannot equate the zenne solely as a queer identity, their movements, mannerisms and costumes fall within the military’s and contemporary Turkey’s classification of homosexuality.

As discussed in the previous chapter, the act of evidencing one’s sexual orientation for the military resides closely with the camera capturing a predefined image that is constructed in a performative way. Ontologically speaking, however, the military zone becomes the site of performance or a stage for the performing applicant. This performance, much like the photographic evidence, relies on a collective of past applicants who, through various channels of communication, have shared accounts of their

performances and their outcomes.

Peggy Phelan asserts ‘in performance, the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of “presence”. But in the plenitude of its apparent

visibility and availability, the performer actually disappears and represents something else – dance, movement, sound, character, “art.”’55 The applicant or the performer can rehearse the content of their speech, tone of voice, mannerisms, gestures and movements only to disappear and become a

character that his audience – the military personnel – will be expecting to experience: the culturally predefined homosexual man. Since ‘performance uses the body which cannot appear without a supplement’, the performer

may try to make the character more visible by wearing brightly-coloured revealing clothing to highlight their desire for attention and their potential to

cause disruption within the institution.56 They may also shave their beard and

person accounts please refer to: Oyman Başaran, ‘”You Are Like a Virus”: Dangerous Bodies and Military Medical Authority in Turkey’, Gender & Society, 28:4 (2014): 562-582. 55 Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London; New York: Routledge, 1993), p.150.

56 Ibid, pp.150-151.

body hair to mirror a pre-pubescent boy – the Ottoman expression of youthful male sexuality.57

According to Phelan, ‘performance’s only life is in the present. Performance

cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or, otherwise participate in the circulations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance.’58 The applicant has a chance to give a convincing performance for his audience to reach a decision at that time; that he is

indeed homosexual. This act is not recorded other than in the document that

is produced at the end; not a full account of the event but the decision based

on it. Will he be exempt from the compulsory military service? A possible outcome is the suspension for one year, giving more rehearsal time for the performer to portray a penetrable gay man more convincingly. The ‘performance occurs over a time which will not be repeated. It can be performed again but this repetition itself marks it as “different.”’59 It might be this difference in the new performance that may finally give him his exemption. Since ‘representation is almost always on the side of the one who looks and almost never on the side of the one who is seen’ the military as an audience, has power over the applicant as a performer.60

Unlike Ataman in both Turkish Delight and Double Roasted, the applicant as a performer is highly engaged with and dependent upon the gaze of his beholder. His interest in the audience however is not for sustenance, but to

57 The applicant I’ve met a few years ago at the beach, as mentioned in the first chapter, gave an account of cleanly shaving his face, his armpits and legs each time he had to visit the military during his one year long procedure of gaining an exemption. He also stated that he purposefully bought clothing that he felt the military would perceive as gay: revealing tank tops with pink floral prints.

58 Phelan, p.146.

59 Ibid, p.146.

60 Ibid, pp.25-26.

label him the enemy inside, a potential threat if he is to serve his conscription. Following a repeated series of seductive and highly gendered performances, the applicant awaits the legitimisation of his apparent sexual identity. The label of unfit for military service has the capacity to make the performer disappear from the gates of the hegemonic masculine realm: a space intertwined with nationalism and military prowess. The record of his performances – the documents documenting his unfit and inferior nature –takes its place in the military’s archive for future reference, if a need to refer to them arises. In the years to come, despite the performer’s advancing age, his masculine development is suspended and thus he retains the status of a

penetrable beardless boy.

IV

THE ABYSMAL ARCHIVE

It appears that Kutluğ Ataman has a complicated relationship with his place of birth, Turkey. At only seventeen years old he was taken to the police station from his home in Istanbul and was tortured. Following the 1980 coup, public expressions of dissent towards the official ideology were prohibited and thus all of Ataman’s work from the previous year was confiscated when he was sent to the military hospital to retrain to become a Turkish nationalist. He claims,

‘my collection probably still exists in some dark corner in a storage room in a military facility, where they bring those kinds of things.’61 Ataman’s family bribed the state officials to allow him to leave the country after his imprisonment and he then relocated to Los Angeles where he lived for many years before returning back. He recounts, ‘I was really critical of the state ideology [but] I felt that freedom to express myself.’62

Ataman claims that he creates his most controversial work during the Biennial despite possible ramifications, but ‘if they [want] to do something they [are] not going to do it in front of the Europeans and foreigners.’63 His piece jarse, from the 2011 Istanbul Biennial, is a good example of this. Military exemption reports like jarse, along with supporting evidence of an applicant’s deviant sexuality, are held within an archive. In his research, Başaran was surprised when ‘one of the psychologists even emphasized that the psychological tests are done only so that they appear in the applicant’s file.’64 It is rumoured that

61 Kutluğ, Ataman, ‘Political Framing: Interview with Radical Turkish Artist Kutluğ Ataman’, (interviewed by Kaya Genc for Index on Censorship), 43:3 (2014), 124-127 (p.124).

62 Ibid, p.125.

63 Ibid, p.126.

64 Başaran, pp.572-573.

this archive is also the world’s biggest collection of amateur gay porn.65 The materials holding data on the applicants take their place in an invisible archive, far away from the public gaze, thus taking on an almost mythical

status.

Simply put, an archive is ‘a place where documents and other materials of

public or historical interest are preserved.’66 However, as Jacques Derrida claims, ‘nothing is less clear today than the word archive.’67 What is considered to be a document and whether or not it is of interest can vary immensely between disciplines and perspectives. Michel Foucault gives a more encompassing definition:

The archive is first the law of what can be said, the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which determines that all these things said do not accumulate

endlessly in an amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities.68

65 This promiscuous statement appears in countless newspaper articles, journals and books, taking its place between a rumour and an anecdote.

66 Marlene, Manoff, ‘Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines’, portal:Libraries and the Academy’, 4:1 (2004), 9-25 (p.10).

67 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. (Chicago/ London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p.4.

68 Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), p.129.

It is vital to understand that archives are not neutral or innocent repositories of knowledge. The practice of archiving has a long history but the institutionalised archive has its foundations in the nineteenth century. As an example, the birth of the modern state-nation during the French Revolution coincides with the formation of the French national archives.69 These archives

influence national identity by playing a role in the formation of national

histories. Berger argues ‘the archive promise[s] the nation the truth about origins and provenance because it promised the confirmation of difference to and often superiority over neighbours.’70 The contents of the archives is thus biased; the objects contained within it are already a selection that has been preserved for a specific purpose: ‘These objects cannot provide direct and unmediated access to the past’.71

Although Berger considers historic superiority in reference to neighbouring countries, the Turkish military creates a division between a heteronormative male and a verified homosexual man in the contemporary setting. This division is maintained by the archive that serves to support the military’s outlook: homosexual men are unfit to serve and hence inferior. The archive

says who among the applicants are in fact homosexual, by providing visuals of unique events – the photographed moment of intimacy between the applicant and another man – as a statement of the truth. Okwui Enwezor states, ‘the camera is literally an archiving machine, every photograph […] is an archival object’.72 The truthfulness of this object however is an area of

69 Stefan, Berger, ‘The Role of National Archives in Constructing National Master Narratives in Europe’, Archival Science, 13:1 (2013), 1-22 (p.2).

70 Ibid, p.19.

71 Manoff, p.14.

72 Okwui Enwezor, Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art. (New York/Gottingen: International Centre of Photography/Steidl, 2008), p.12.

contention as photographs ‘are made for a reason for a specific audience, to embody specific messages and moral values.’73 The applicant created the photograph in a performative manner to mirror the military’s idea of the homosexual man.

Both the military and the applicant thus collaboratively contribute to the archive’s content but it is only the former who has access to it. As Derrida notes, ‘there is no political power without the control of the archive […].

Effective democratization can always be measured by this essential criterion: the participation in and access to the archive, its constitution, and its

interpretation’.74 Despite being the co-creator of the contents, the applicant is powerless against the military: the photographs and the documentation only function to ‘dissociate them, […] insist on and illuminate their difference, their

archival apartness from normal society.’75

Enwezor likens the archive to an anthropological space where the photograph within it can act as ‘the sovereign analogue of identity, memory, and history,

joining past and present, virtual and real, thus giving the photographic document the aura of anthropological artefact and the authority of a social

instrument’.76 Provided that there is an equal access to it, the military’s archive has the potential to be the physical space – the monument – to acknowledge, understand, relate to, question and critique the performed queer

masculinities that are based on a complex amalgamation of the past Ottoman

73 Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart, Photographs Objects Histories: On the Materiality of Images (New York/London: Routledge, 2004), p.10.

74 Derrida, p.4.

75 Enwezor, p.13.

76 Ibid, p.13.

practices with the republican nationalistic ideations: the institutionalised homosexual man.

Another example of an invisible institutional archive is in Poland; colloquially known as the Pink Archive. Its construction commenced by the police forces of the People’s Republic of Poland in cooperation with the Secret Service in

1985 as part of the two-year Operation Hyacinth. The purpose was to ‘create within Polish society, the illusion that the government is fighting against allegedly socially harmful individuals, prostitution and the spreading of AIDS epidemic’.77 The Citizen’s Militia raided private households, schools,

universities and work places: men suspected of being homosexual were detained, interrogated and registered. It is estimated that more than eleven thousand files gathered by the police forces remain uncatalogued and

scattered among various institutions.

The work of Ryszard Kisiel, the gay activist detained by the police and catalogued in the Pink Archive, is explored in the Warsaw-based artist Karol Radziszewski’s long-term project Kisieland. The police targeted Kisiel for creating and disseminating the first gay zine of Eastern Europe – Filo. The zine intended only for a small audience – Kisiel’s friends – consisted of news on culture, politics and lifestyle, explicit homoerotic content and advise on safer sex and HIV prevention.78 The on-going project Kisieland features a short film from 2012, where Radziszewski visits Kisiel’s home, which serves the

function of a private queer archive, holding countless materials in the form of

77 Aleksandra Gajowy, ‘Performativity of the Private: The Ambuguity of Reenactment in Karol Radziszewski’s Kisieland’, Art Margins Online, 26 January 2018. <https://artmargins.com/performativityof-the-private/>[Accessed 1 June 2019].

78 Kisiel, working as a commercial printmaker, knew that it was legal to print any publication regardless of its content, if printed up to one hundred copies only. Yet the content of this zine ultimately lead to Kisiel’s interrogation and hence registration as a homosexual man in the government’s archives. At the time, official sources in Poland barely acknowledged the spread of the epidemic.

staged erotic photographs, newspapers, magazines, fliers and books, alongside with back issues of Filo. The film invites its viewers, not physically but visually, to an alternative archive that chronicles the lives of individuals that were targeted by Operation Hyacinth. This archive is created by a member of the same community that it represents – Kisiel – and its access is granted to a new audience by an artist – Radziszewski – who takes on the role of the researcher, interpreter, curator and ultimately the conservationist.

Figure 4, Karol Radziszewski, film still from Kisieland, 2012.

What untapped potential can the military’s invisible archive hold? Enwezor argues artists can interrogate the claims of the archive by ‘reading it against the grain’ to appropriate, interpret, reconfigure and interrogate both the content and the structure of an archive.79 In the absence of access to the

institutional archives, Radziszewski allowed a new audience to enter Kisiel’s

home, which functions as a counter-archive. With jarse, Ataman has shared a document from an invisible archive – a space that may also hold his

79 Ibid, p.11,18.

confiscated work from when he was seventeen – with an international

audience, to commence a dialogue about the abysmal practices of the military that places homosexual men as unfit and hence inferior. Though even today the applicant needs to evidence his homosexuality through different gendered performances, in the last few years, sexually explicit imagery has no longer been requested. The abysmal archive will continue to expand but without the constructed visual content being part of this growth. Scholars and practitioners from different archival disciplines, including artists like Ataman

and Radziszewski, can tap into this system and announce new statements or truths based on the unique events performed and experienced by the subject of the abysmal archive: the homosexual and homosexual men.

48

CONCLUSION

Regardless of living the majority of my life in the UK as a dual citizen, the Turkish government considers me to be solely Turkish within its institutions when I go back home. After years of postponing my conscription, eventually, as a man over the age of twenty years, I too had to enter into a formal

relationship with the state to become its independent and sovereign subject. Through this rite of passage, the gates of the masculine realm would have

opened up and I too could have said ‘I have served my conscription.’ I consciously object to military violence but I couldn’t avoid my conscription without the risk of being imprisoned; I could not evade. This left me with only two choices: to pay a large sum of money due to a new law transiently in place, or to declare and evidence my sexuality, marked by the military as a

psychosexual disorder.

Despite the current revival and romanticising of the Ottoman past by the ruling political party, the sexualities residing outside of the heteronormative

matrix deeply embedded in the imperial culture are conveniently withheld. The shampoo boys, the zennes and the çivelek bedfellows remain as ghosts expressing a historical type of sexuality that is only reserved for the penetrated youthful and the beardless boys: transient identities that are displaced over time and dependent on an older man’s protection against other men. The military’s contemporary conception of a homosexual man resides very closely to this historical sexuality: a sexuality that needs to be

outgrown. Remaining penetrable deems the individual dangerous; as he possesses the means to provoke, seduce and hence disrupt the dynamics

inherent in the male homosocial bonding that help to sustain the military order.

As discussed throughout this text, exemption requires the applicant to mark himself and declare his sexuality to the institution that is inherently suspicious of anyone trying to evade. Fearful of losing its manpower, the military deploys a set of investigations to ascertain the applicant’s true sexuality and prevent the exemption of any imposters. The applicant is examined and the documented results are stored in an inaccessible archive for future verification

in case such need arises: a practice that is abysmal since it creates a tangible division between different sexualities. To bolster his claim, the applicant becomes both the criminal and the detective to construct his own crime

scene photograph. This doubly indexical image incriminates him in front of the military acting both as the judge and the jury: not specifically for that crime but for future unnatural behaviours if he were to serve. The applicant is

doubly penetrated: in the photograph as the documented evidence and by the medical staff ascertaining his penetrability. Furthermore, the applicant must convincingly play the part of an effeminate man whilst the military adjusts its gaze to surveil the seductive and disruptive behaviours displayed during these performances performed within the institution. Much like the shampoo boy and the zenne, he too may be banished from the hegemonic masculine realm before entering it, and sentenced to lead a stigmatised existence within another domain: the abyss – a dark chasm resembling the closet but with a full exposure of one’s sexuality.

As Phelan asserts, ‘the binary between the power of visibility and the impotency of invisibility is falsifying. There is power in remaining unmarked.’80 Increased visibility as a gay man - in front of the military personnel and within

the abysmal archive - does not equate to increased power. These excessive

80 Phelan, p.6.

representations, in the form of the performative image and performed acts, perpetuate an identity that is (re)constructed by the institution’s desire to preserve its power. Is there a way away from representing queerness in the manner that the institution has deemed inferior?

Despite the ‘impotency of the inward gaze’ and the fact that ‘seeing the hollow blindness of our own eyes […] risks both self absorption (one sees nothing other than the self) and self-annihilation (one sees only the nothing of the self)’, throughout his career Kutluğ Ataman has produced work that made him the subject of his own gaze and practice, representing himself as a marginalised member of his society.81 In agreement with Phelan, ‘self identity needs to be continually reproduced and reassured precisely because it fails to secure belief.’82 Ataman, to sustain himself and his identity, does not rely on the gaze of his beholder; he rejects the surveying eye functioning to preserve a hierarchical system. Sentenced away from the masculine realm and

banished into the abyss, he continues to share stories and experiences: both his and of others. It is imperative to acknowledge that ‘talking is the only meaningful activity we have. Once we are no longer willing or allowed to tell our stories, we collapse into conformity.’83 Whether it is our own uttered

words or the unique statements preserved by an archive, we must speak up.

The other day I got a haircut and my obtrusive barber asked me,

-Why don’t you have a girlfriend?

81 Ibid, pp.6,26.

82 Ibid, p.4.

83 Kutluğ, Ataman, ‘What the Structure Defines: An Interview with Kutluğ Ataman’, (interviewed by Ana Finel Honigman for Art Journal), 63:1 (2004), 78-86 (p.82).

I then came out of the closet and declared,

- I am gay.

53

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Hoffmann, Jens and Adriano Pedrosa, ‘12th Istanbul Biennial’ (17 September 2011) <https://bienal.iksv.org/i/assets/bienal/document/12B_JENSHOFFMAN-ADRIANO-PEDROSA.pdf> [15 May 2019].

Kazi, Tehmina, ‘The Ottoman Empire’s Secular History Undermines Sharia Claims’, The Guardian, 7 October 2011. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2011/oct/07/ottomanempire-secular-history-sharia> [Accessed 25 March 2019]

No Author’s Name, ‘Sedat Peker Hakkında Yayınlanan Rapor Sahte Çıktı!’ Son Dakika Türk, 6 September 2017. <https://www.sondakikaturk.com.tr/gundem/sedat-peker-hakkindayayinlanan-rapor-sahte-cikti-h52985.html> [Accessed 10 April 2019]

Films

Double Roasted, directed by Kutluğ Ataman (2007)

Kisieland, directed by Karol Radziszewski (2012)

Turkish Delight, directed by Kutluğ Ataman (2007)

58

APPENDIX

Translation of Kutluğ Ataman’s psychiatric examination from jarse

PSYCHIATRIC EXAMINATION: APPEARANCE FITTING WITH HIS AGE, NO

DISABILITIES, NORMAL INTEREST IN HIS SURROUNDINGS, SELF-CARE

INTACT, QUIET NATURED, RESPECTFUL SOCIABILITY, SPEECH FEMININE,

TONE OF VOICE FEMININE, MANNERS AND GESTURES ARE FEMININE,

MOVEMENTS ARE FEMININE, HE TRAVELS IN HIS SPARE TIME, SLEEP IS

NORMAL, APPETITE INTACT, NORMAL URINATION, NORMAL

DEFECATION, PERCEPTION INTACT, AWARE OF HIS SURROUNDINGS,

NORMAL COGNITION, THOUGHT FORM IS NORMAL AND LINEAR,

THOUGHT CONTENT INCLUDES DISINTEREST IN WOMEN, INTEREST IN

MEN IS AT FOREFRONT, ATTENTION INTACT, MEMORY INTACT, GOOD

JUDGEMENT,NORMAL AFFECT, BEHAVIOUR (BASED ON OBSERVATION)

NORMAL PSYCHOMOTOR ACTIVITIES WITH GOOD SOCIAL

RELATIONSHIPS. FROM PERSONAL HISTORY: PLAYING GIRLY GAMES

WITH GIRLS SINCE CHILDHOOD, INTEREST IN MEN, NO INTEREST OR

SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH WOMEN, SEXUAL RELATIONS WITH MEN

SINCE THE AGE OF 17, GAY MARRIAGE. FROM DOCUMENTS: JUNE 2006

DATED GAY MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE FROM OVERSEAS.

(Translated by Gökhan Tanrıöver)