Gender Performativity, Normative Power, and Queer Resistance in Turkey

 Gender Performativity, Normative Power, and Queer Resistance  in Turkey

In contemporary Turkey, the regulation of gender and sexuality is increasingly visible through both overt state actions and subtle cultural norms. When a police officer steps on a Pride flag during a banned march or when a trans individual is required to undergo sterilization to legally change their gender, these moments reveal how normative power operates not only through law but also through deeply rooted assumptions about gender and identity. These examples invite us to critically examine the forces that construct gender as a binary, naturalized category. This paper approaches the question of how gender is produced and regulated by drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, Michel Foucault’s analysis of normative power and biopolitics, and Susan Stryker’s emphasis on transgender embodiment and resistance. Together, these frameworks allow for a multidimensional exploration of how gender norms are enacted, enforced, and contested within Turkey’s socio- legal context. Rather than treating these theories as separate lenses, this study situates them in conversation, tracing both their conceptual overlaps and their contextual limits in explaining the lived realities of queer and trans existence in Turkey. Michel Foucault’s notion of power as productive rather than merely repressive further illuminates this process. Power operates not simply by forbidding or censoring, but by constituting the very terms of intelligibility; determining what can be known, named, and lived. His concept of biopolitics, the regulation of bodies and populations through subtle and pervasive norms proves especially relevant when examining how gender and sexuality are governed in contemporary contexts. In this light, gender becomes a regulatory fiction, a stylized repetition of norms that stabilizes certain identities while rendering others illegible or pathologized.

Trans theorist Susan Stryker extends these critiques by highlighting how trans and non- binary identities are often excluded not only from dominant gender categories but also from mainstream queer discourse itself. Stryker’s work draws attention to how the demand for legibility, the requirement to be “readable” within existing gender norms, functions as a mechanism of exclusion and control. Furthermore, she critiques the medicalization of trans bodies, arguing that institutionalized processes of recognition often reinforce normative understandings of gender rather than dismantle them. These theoretical insights are especially relevant in Turkey, where gender and sexuality are tightly policed by both formal institutions and cultural expectations. Although homosexuality is not criminalized by law, the expression of queer identity is constrained by a moral and legal order that often functions through silence, omission, and selective visibility. Over the past decade, increasing state repression has targeted LGBTQ+ organizations, public gatherings, and cultural expressions, exemplified by the banning of Istanbul Pride marches since 2015 and the ongoing censorship of queer content in media. These measures are reinforced by a broader social conservatism that frames non- heteronormative expressions as threats to national values, producing a climate where queer life is simultaneously present and denied, legible yet excluded, tolerated in form but suppressed in substance. In such a context, understanding gender as performative allows us to trace how power operates not just through explicit prohibitions but through the normalization of certain bodies, desires, and appearances, while others are systematically erased or disciplined through both legal means and cultural narratives. This paper engages with Butler’s performativity theory to explore how gender is constituted, recognized, or erased within Turkey’s socio-legal and cultural framework. It draws on Michel Foucault’s insights into normative power and biopolitics, as well as Susan Stryker’s contributions to trans theory, to analyze how law, discourse, and cultural practices function as regulatory mechanisms. Special attention will be given to drag performances and queer artistic practices, not as the central focus, but as critical examples of how normative boundaries can be both enforced and subverted in the public sphere. Drag performance, with its exaggerated stylization of gender norms, provides a potent site for examining how performativity can expose and destabilize the mechanisms of gender regulation. The paper begins by outlining the theoretical background of gender performativity and its relation to structures of power. It then moves to a critical reading of legal frameworks in Turkey, including the civil code, penal code, and bureaucratic practices around gender recognition. The third section explores cultural and activist practices that resist these norms, followed by a reflection on the applicability and limitations of Butler’s theory in the Turkish context. The conclusion considers the broader implications of performativity for legal reform, resistance, and queer recognition.

This section establishes the theoretical groundwork for analyzing how gender is performatively constructed and regulated within the Turkish socio-legal context. It draws on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to understand gender as an enacted identity, and on Michel Foucault’s notions of power and biopolitics to explain how normative structures produce and discipline bodies. These insights are further expanded through Susan Stryker’s transgender theory, which highlights the specific struggles of trans identities under normative regimes. Together, these theories will help clarify how gender is produced, policed, and potentially subverted in Turkey’s cultural and legal landscape. 

 Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, first articulated in Gender Trouble (1990) and expanded in Bodies That Matter (1993), fundamentally challenges essentialist conceptions of gender. Rather than treating gender as a fixed, innate quality rooted in biology, Butler conceptualizes it as an effect produced by a repeated, stylized repetition of acts. In her view, gender is “a doing rather than a being,” an identity instituted through a ritualized performance rather than something one simply is. Importantly, each individual act of gender draws on prior acts and norms; it is iterative and citational, meaning each performance references established cultural conventions of gender. This citational quality gives gender performances the appearance of naturalness over time, even though they are constructed. There is, as Butler famously argues, no original or core gender identity behind these expressions, the performance itself creates the illusion of an abiding identity. By understanding gender in this way, Butler shifts focus from what gender is to what gender does: it is a continuous act that produces the very identity it claims to express.

Butler also emphasizes that performative acts of gender are not freely chosen in a void; they are heavily regulated by social norms and power structures. Individuals perform gender under constraints set by discourse and institutions that define what expressions are deemed intelligible or acceptable. From early on, societal norms (reinforced by family, education, media, and law) script the “appropriate” ways to behave as male or female. Those who fail to comply with these scripts face social sanction or marginalization. In this way, people become both subjects of and subjects to gender norms: they internalize expectations and perform them, but those expectations are imposed by a larger heteronormative structure. What feels like personal gender expression is thus deeply political; it is shaped and sustained by cultural repetition and institutional enforcement. Performativity, in Butler’s sense, reveals how social reality of gender is actively constituted: the man or woman one “is” arises from the continuous acting out of gendered expectations under normative pressures.

While Butler’s framework exposes how gender norms are consolidated, it equally highlights their potential fragility and the possibilities for change. Because a performative gender identity must be reenacted incessantly, it is never entirely secure, each iteration is subject to variation. There is always the possibility of “slippage” or deviation in the performance. Butler notes that if a gender act is repeated with a difference or fails to fully approximate the norm, this “performative failure” lays bare the constructed nature of the norm itself. These moments of dissonance, where the repetition does not perfectly align with what is expected, reveal the instability at the heart of what appears natural and fixed. For example, subversive gender performances such as drag or parody deliberately exaggerate or twist normative gender signs. By doing so, they expose how gender can be imitated and altered, undermining the idea that masculinity or femininity is inherent. Butler suggests that such non-normative performances (even if they are ironic or parodic) have subversive potential: they do not operate outside the gender system but within it, exploiting internal inconsistencies in the norms they cite. In contexts like Turkey, where law and culture work together to rigidly define “acceptable” male and female identities, these subversive performances take on a pointed political significance. Failing or refusing to perform gender in the expected way becomes a form of critique, it challenges the audience to see that the standard of “proper” gender is an arbitrary construction upheld by repetition, not an absolute truth. In short, Butler’s concept of performativity not only explains how normative gender is produced but also illuminates how agency and change are possible within a restrictive system, through the conscious or unwitting disruption of the repeated acts that constitute gender norms.

To understand how these gender norms are enforced and naturalized at a structural level, we turn to Michel Foucault’s theorization of power. Foucault significantly deepens our understanding of how norms regulate bodies and identities by describing power in modern societies not just as something repressive (that says “no” or prohibits), but as profoundly productive. In contrast to a traditional view of power as held by authorities and used to repress individuals, Foucault proposes that power in modern societies works through the creation of knowledge, categories, and norms that people come to accept as “natural.” In other words, power produces the very categories of identity and knowledge that it then governs. It is not only wielded through laws or overt coercion; rather, it is diffused through everyday practices, institutions, and discourses that shape our understanding of what is normal, acceptable, or even possible. Through education systems, medicine, psychiatry, religion, media, and law, society continuously communicates standards of appropriate behavior and identity. Individuals internalize these expectations, often policing themselves without any need for direct coercion. Thus, power operates “from below” as much as from above; it forms a pervasive network that constructs reality and truth (what Foucault calls “regimes of truth”) about things like gender, sexuality, and the body. People come to believe that certain gender norms are natural or commonsense, which in turn reinforces those norms and makes alternative expressions seem unthinkable or illegible. In Foucault’s analysis, norms are one of the primary instruments of modern power: by defining the normal, power also defines the deviant, and in doing so, it actively molds individual identities and societal expectations.

Central to Foucault’s later work is the concept of biopolitics, which extends the idea of productive power to the realm of managing life and populations. Biopolitics refers to the way power targets biological life; it is concerned with regulating bodies, health, reproduction, and sexuality at the level of the population. Rather than power acting only on individuals through punishment, biopolitical power works through normative regulations and administrative controls that ensure populations conform to certain desired standards. It employs a range of techniques (in medicine, law, public policy, etc.) to make individuals into “docile bodies”: bodies that are trained, shaped, and normalized to meet social and institutional expectations. This form of power is not external or overtly violent; instead, it is intimately woven into the fabric of daily life. People internalize social expectations about their health, sexuality, and gender roles, coming to monitor and discipline themselves in line with those expectations. For instance, surveillance and self-surveillance (from public scrutiny to one’s own conscience) encourage individuals to behave “appropriately” without needing direct force. In the sphere of gender and sexuality, biopolitics decides which bodies and behaviors are deemed acceptable and attempts to foster a population that fits heteronormative, reproductive ideals. It governs not only what identities are allowed to exist, but even who is allowed to live freely and safely. For example, by influencing public health policies around sexual activity, or controlling access to gender-affirming medical care. In summary, Foucault’s perspective reveals that modern power works by producing a normative social order in which individuals willingly participate, thus ensuring that certain gender norms appear natural and unassailable. 

Foucault’s insights are particularly illuminating when examining the Turkish state’s mechanisms of gender regulation, where legal, medical, and moral discourses intersect to enforce norms. In Turkey, as in many societies, the state, the medical establishment, and religious authorities often converge to define and police normative identities. For example, the government has historically been deeply involved in legally recognizing gender: the process for an individual to change their officially recognized gender has been regulated by strict medical and legal criteria. Under Article 40 of the Turkish Civil Code, a person seeking gender reassignment had to undergo a series of medical interventions – including psychiatric evaluations, hormone treatments, and surgeries – and until 2017 was even required to prove they were permanently infertile (a de facto sterilization requirement) in order to be granted legal permission for the transition. This legal mandate (which was only annulled by the Constitutional Court in 2017 as a human rights violation) is a clear example of biopolitical power: the state directly intervened in individuals’ bodily autonomy and reproductive ability to maintain control over how genders are defined. Even beyond this extreme case, the insistence on medical certification and court approval for gender transition shows how normative power disciplines bodies, forcing them to conform to a binary standard (male or female) before they can be deemed legitimate in the eyes of the law. Likewise, Turkish medical protocols historically treated being transgender as a disorder to be managed, reflecting Foucault’s point that expert knowledge (here, medical/psychiatric knowledge) is used to categorize and control individuals.

Additionally, public and political discourse in Turkey frequently invokes traditional family values and religious morality as normative yardsticks, which further enforces a heteronormative framework. Government officials and institutions often promote the idea that a “normal” society is built on a union of a heterosexual mother and father raising children, casting this model as vital to national morality and social order. This discourse stigmatizes those who fall outside the norm – including LGBTQ+ individuals – by implying they threaten the social fabric. Such rhetoric is reinforced by the influence of religious authorities (for instance, the Directorate of Religious Affairs, Diyanet), which has, at times, declared non-heteronormative genders and sexualities to be sinful or deviant. Through Foucault’s lens, we can see how this convergence of law, medicine, and religion in Turkey works as a normative regime that defines what counts as an “intelligible” or acceptable gender. It exemplifies how power operates productively: rather than merely forbidding non- normative identities, it tries to produce citizens who internalize the value of fitting into the prescribed gender roles. The outcome is a society where many individuals strive to align with these roles (e.g., by marrying and having children in heterosexual families), and where those who cannot or will not conform (such as many transgender people) are rendered socially and legally invisible or illegitimate. Foucault’s framework thus helps explain not only the existence of strict gender norms in Turkey but also the subtle ways they are maintained through a mixture of coercion, administration, and cultural conditioning.

Susan Stryker’s contributions to transgender theory build upon and extend the ideas of Butler and Foucault, centering the experiences of trans people as a critical site of insight. In her foundational essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the Village of Chamounix” (1994), Stryker famously adopts the voice of Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for the transgender experience. By doing so, she situates trans identity as a site of both political resistance and epistemological struggle, a battleground over who gets to define the truth of gender and whose bodies matter. The monster in Mary Shelley’s novel is an artificial being rejected by society, and Stryker draws a parallel to how trans individuals are often treated as unnatural “others” by a society that strictly enforces the male/female binary. She articulates a potent “transgender rage”: a righteous anger at being cast as monstrous or illegitimate, which she turns into a source of empowerment. This rage, in her analysis, is not mere personal frustration but a deeply political emotion that arises from the experience of having one’s existence delegitimized. By embracing the figure of the monster, Stryker powerfully reclaims the trans body as something that can threaten and unsettle the norms that reject it. In other words, she transforms the supposed shame of being labeled unnatural into an affirmation of transgressive identity and agency. This move echoes Butler’s point about subversive performance, but Stryker centers the embodied reality of trans people, insisting that trans bodies themselves speak back to the normative structures that would render them invisible or abject.

A key aspect of Stryker’s theory is her critique of the medicalization of trans identity and the narratives of legitimacy that trans individuals are often forced to adopt. She challenges the dominant frameworks – in medicine, psychology, and law – that require trans people to conform to a certain story or path in order to be recognized as “truly” transgender and thus worthy of transition or rights. For instance, trans individuals frequently must undergo extensive psychiatric evaluation to be diagnosed with “gender dysphoria” and thereby gain access to hormones or surgeries. They often feel compelled to tell a particular narrative (such as “I was born in the wrong body”) that aligns with medical expectations, even if their personal experience of gender is more complex. Stryker argues that these institutional processes (psychiatric approval, hormone therapy, surgical procedures, etc.) are not neutral or purely benevolent; rather, they are embedded in power relations that define what forms of trans identity are considered legitimate. In many cases, the medical and legal systems have historically only recognized trans people if they express a binary-aligned identity (fully “male” or “female” after transition) and if they agree to modify their bodies to fit those categories. Such requirements end up forcing trans individuals into normative trajectories that reproduce the very binary gender system they might personally be trying to challenge. For example, a trans person may have to live strictly as a man or woman (according to stereotypical norms) for a trial period to satisfy doctors, or undergo surgeries to “fix” their genitalia, in order to change their documents, all of which reinforces the idea that only two binary sexes exist and one must belong to either. Stryker’s point is that trans people’s access to recognition and resources often comes at the cost of conforming to narratives and treatments that reinscribe the binary norm, rather than allowing a genuine exploration of gender diversity.

Crucially, Stryker highlights that trans individuals are not merely passive objects of these medical and legal narratives, but agents who can assert their own truths and push back against the constraints. Her work underscores the embodied knowledge that trans people have; knowledge about gender and body that may exceed or contradict what medicine dictates. By voicing transgender experience from her own perspective, Stryker demonstrates an epistemological claim: that trans people themselves produce valuable insights about gender, identity, and the limits of normative systems. She “speaks” as the Frankenstein’s monster to flip the script: rather than the experts or society telling the trans person “what you are,” the trans individual speaks for themselves, revealing the blind spots and violences of normative definitions. In doing so, Stryker’s perspective expands Butler’s and Foucault’s theories. She agrees that power and norms shape bodies (Foucault) and that identity is performative (Butler), but she adds that the lived reality of trans people provides a unique vantage point from which to critique and reinterpret those norms. Her contribution is thus both a theoretical expansion and a call to acknowledge trans experiences as central, not peripheral, to discussions about gender regulation.

When we apply Stryker’s framework to the Turkish context, it sheds light on how trans individuals in Turkey navigate a landscape of simultaneous invisibility and hypervisibility. On one hand, trans people (especially trans women) are highly visible in Turkish popular culture and public imagination – there have been several famous transgender figures in entertainment and media, and transgender individuals are often sensationalized in news or used as symbols in social debates. This cultural hypervisibility means that trans bodies are frequently on display or under scrutiny. However, this visibility does not necessarily translate into acceptance or rights. In fact, trans individuals remain legally and socially marginalized, which amounts to a form of legal invisibility. For example, until the recent legal changes mentioned above, the state provided very narrow pathways for trans people to change their gender status, and even now, there are inconsistent protections for their employment, housing, and safety. Transgender people in Turkey often face discrimination, violence, and lack of access to adequate healthcare, yet their struggles are rarely acknowledged in law or policy. Stryker’s insight helps us understand this paradox: visibility can be a double-edged sword. It can be a survival strategy, some trans women in Turkey have used visibility (for instance, as performers or public figures) to create space for themselves and advocate for change. Yet visibility can also become a mechanism of control and vulnerability; making trans people targets for social policing, ridicule, or even state crackdowns (such as police harassment of trans sex workers, or the banning of Pride parades and trans rights marches under the pretext of “public morality”). In Stryker’s terms, the Turkish trans community’s experience exemplifies how recognition politics can both help and harm: being seen is necessary to gain rights and social presence, but being seen only on the terms set by a hostile society can reinforce one’s status as outsider or other.

By using Stryker’s perspective, we are invited to reconsider the limits of seeking recognition solely through existing institutions. Her work asks us to imagine new forms of coalition and understanding that do not force trans people to fit into narrow boxes as the price of admission to society. In Turkey, this could mean pushing beyond simply achieving legal gender change (important as that is) towards broader acceptance of gender diversity in everyday life and culture. It also means listening to trans voices in Turkey as they articulate their own narratives, whether about the experience of undergoing state-mandated medical procedures, dealing with family and religious expectations, or building community in the face of adversity. These narratives can challenge the dominant Turkish social norms from within, much as Stryker challenged dominant Western narratives. Ultimately, Stryker’s transgender theory adds a vital dimension to our framework: it centers the agency of marginalized individuals and shows that even those most regulated and stigmatized by gender norms have the capacity to redefine the terms of their existence. This is a powerful reminder in the Turkish setting that change can come from the margins, the very people considered “monstrous” or illegible by the mainstream can force society to confront its own injustices and rethink what is natural or just.

Taken together, the theories of Butler, Foucault, and Stryker provide a multidimensional framework for analyzing gender as not merely a private identity, but as a performative and regulated structure deeply embedded in society’s legal and cultural systems. Butler illuminates how everyday gender performances produce the illusion of a natural identity, yet always carry the seeds of their own subversion. Foucault reveals how power operates through norms and institutions to shape those identities, managing bodies and populations in ways that make certain genders appear valid and others deviant. Stryker brings into focus the voices and bodies at the margins, showing how those deemed deviant (such as trans individuals) both suffer under these normative regimes and actively resist them, offering new possibilities for understanding gender. Using this framework in the Turkish context allows for a critical interrogation of how normative power is enacted and contested. We can see clearly how Turkish laws, medical practices, and cultural narratives work to enforce a binary, heteronormative gender order, and we also see where cracks in that order appear; whether through subversive performances, legal challenges, or the insistence of marginalized people on living their truth. Ultimately, this theoretical approach opens up space to imagine how gender might be rearticulated outside the confines of binary and institutional logics, particularly within a society like Turkey. It points to the possibility of redefining gender in more inclusive and fluid ways, undermining the power of normative structures and allowing for greater gender justice and diversity. In sum, the blend of performativity theory, power analysis, and transgender critique equips us to critically analyze the status quo and envision transformative changes in the understanding and regulation of gender in Turkey.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of performativity and Michel Foucault’s analysis of normative power, this section examines how gender is produced and regulated in the Turkish socio-legal context. Butler’s theory conceives gender as an iterative act, a repeated performance sustained by social norms and institutional sanction. In Turkey, these performances of “womanhood” and “manhood” are not merely personal expressions but are orchestrated and policed by legal definitions and cultural institutions. Foucault’s notion of power further illuminates how those norms become disciplinary: power operates not just by forbidding deviance, but by actively constructing the categories of sex and enforcing what counts as a “normal” identity. Through this dual lens, we see that the Turkish state and its institutions produce gender norms – by defining legal sex and acceptable conduct – and regulate those norms by punishing or marginalizing that which falls outside the binary, heteronormative ideal. The result is a regime in which gender is both a performative achievement, iterated daily, and a normative yardstick, backed by law, religion, and culture.

The legal system in Turkey provides a clear example of how normative power operates to define and constrain gender identities. Article 10 of the Turkish Constitution enshrines the principle of formal equality between the sexes, stating that “men and women have equal rights” and charging the state with ensuring this equality in practice. This constitutional commitment to gender equality, however, is framed in strictly binary terms (men vs. women) and does not explicitly contemplate gender identities beyond the binary. In practice, the state’s bureaucratic apparatus recognizes and produces gender through rigid classification. From birth, every citizen is registered as “male” or “female” in the civil registry, and this designation appears on national identification cards. No other categories are legally available, which means that the very existence of a legally intelligible person is tied to one of two gender statuses. This reflects what Foucault would call a biopolitical intervention: the state manages the population by categorizing bodies, insisting on a stable binary sex for every individual. Such classification is not a neutral administrative act but a normative one, it renders some gender expressions legible and “normal,” while making others (non-binary, gender-nonconforming, etc.) illegible or “deviant” by default.

The regulation of transgender identities under Turkish law starkly illustrates this normative power. Article 40 of the Civil Code sets out the process for obtaining a legal gender marker change. Until recently, Article 40 imposed onerous medical conditions: an applicant had to be unmarried, over 18, diagnosed by an official medical board as having a “transsexual constitution,” and crucially, had to have undergone gender confirmation surgery that resulted in permanent infertility. In effect, the law required transgender people to be surgically sterilized before they could exist in the eyes of the state as their identified gender. This requirement exemplified how legal norms discipline bodies, the state literally would not recognize a gender transition unless the individual’s body was irreversibly conformed to binary sex norms. Such a mandate aligns with Foucault’s idea of the docile body, produced by power through medical and legal regulation.

Significantly, this aspect of Article 40 was challenged and overturned. In 2017, the Turkish Constitutional Court struck down the mandatory sterilization clause of Article 40 as unconstitutional, recognizing that forcing individuals to undergo sterilizing surgery to change their legal gender violated fundamental rights. After the landmark 2017 ruling, the law can no longer require proof of infertility for gender reassignment. However, other gatekeeping requirements remain – such as the need for a diagnosis and a court order – and the state still requires proof that a surgical transition has been carried out to amend the gender on identity documents. In short, even as outright sterilization is no longer demanded, the legal system continues to treat gender identity as something to be administered by doctors, judges, and bureaucrats rather than determined by the individual. Butler’s insight that gender is performatively constituted under constraint rings true here: only by performing a very specific script – the trans person as a patient who undergoes medicalized transition – can one achieve legal recognition. Those who do not or cannot perform this script remain outside the law’s recognition. Thus, the law in Turkey has been a primary site of producing gender normativity, reinforcing the idea that “real” gender is binary, fixed, and grounded in physical morphology.

Law is only one axis of gender regulation; cultural and religious institutions in Turkey actively reinforce normative gender roles through powerful discourses. Butler emphasizes that performative acts are not executed in a vacuum, they are conditioned by societal scripts and enforced by the threat of punishment for deviation. In Turkey, institutions like the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the media regulator RTÜK, and the Ministry of Family and Social Services serve as key authors and enforcers of the gender script. They propagate ideals of how “men” and “women” should behave, often under the guise of protecting morality or family values, thereby buttressing the heteronormative order.

Religious discourse has a profound influence on cultural norms of gender. The Diyanet, an official state institution, regularly pronounces on social issues in its sermons and publications, aligning Islamic moral precepts with gender roles. These pronouncements frequently entrench patriarchal and heteronormative values. For example, in a widely publicized sermon in April 2020, the head of Diyanet, Ali Erbaş, claimed that homosexuality and extramarital sex cause illness and moral decay. Such rhetoric effectively brands LGBTQ individuals and non- normative sexualities as a threat to public health and social order. It exemplifies how religious authority is used to regulate gender and sexuality at the cultural level: by casting queer identities as sinful and dangerous, the Diyanet legitimizes their ostracism.

Hand in hand with religious narratives, state institutions also propagate heteronormativity. The Ministry of Family and Social Services has in recent years positioned feminist and LGBTQ movements as threats to national values. A 2024 action plan described LGBTQ people as part of a “project of degenderization” and pledged to promote “family values” in education and media. President Erdoğan echoed these sentiments in speeches, equating queer advocacy with societal decay. These discourses construct a narrative in which only a binary, heterosexual understanding of gender is legitimate, while other identities are foreign or corrupting.

The media environment reinforces these norms through censorship and stereotypical content. RTÜK frequently fines platforms for featuring LGBTQ characters or themes, claiming such content violates “national and moral values.” Turkish television dramas, a dominant cultural force, overwhelmingly depict women as caretakers and men as powerful providers. Such portrayals serve as repeated citations of gender norms, in Butler’s sense, giving them the appearance of naturalness through constant repetition. Advertising also reinforces these binaries, portraying women with cleaning products and men with cars and electronics. These media narratives discipline viewers’ expectations and help normalize traditional gender roles.

In Turkey, the production and regulation of gender identity emerges through a web of laws, institutional narratives, and cultural representations. Butler’s theory of performativity and Foucault’s analysis of power together illuminate how gender is not only enacted but also governed; rendered visible or invisible through bureaucratic, religious, and cultural mechanisms. Legal frameworks like Article 40 administer identity by demanding conformity to binary norms. Institutions like Diyanet, RTÜK, and the Ministry of Family shape public perception through discourse and censorship. And cultural products—television, advertisements, education—rehearse and reaffirm normative roles. Yet resistance persists: in activism, art, and even humor. The cracks in this gender regime suggest that although normativity remains dominant, it is neither total nor uncontested.

Drawing on the frameworks of Butler, Foucault, and Stryker, this discussion critically examines how well each theory illuminates the regulation of gender in Turkey’s legal and cultural context. Each framework offers important insights into the dynamics of power and identity, yet each also encounters limitations when confronted with Turkey’s specific socio- political realities. In a country where state officials routinely invoke “family values” and public morality to police gender and sexuality, the performative subversion envisioned by Butler, the productive power described by Foucault, and the embodied resistance celebrated by Stryker all operate under constraints that test their explanatory power. Recent events – from the banning of Pride marches to the censorship of queer media and restrictive laws on gender transition – provide concrete examples to assess these theories’ applicability. Below, each theoretical lens is evaluated in turn, followed by a consideration of additional perspectives that could further enrich the analysis.

Judith Butler’s theory of performativity posits that gender is an enacted repetition of norms, always vulnerable to subversion through the very acts that constitute it. This idea is useful in the Turkish context to the extent that it reveals how rigid gender norms are maintained – and how they might be undermined. Butler highlights that because gender is essentially “a doing rather than a being,” repeated under social constraints, there is always the possibility of doing it differently. Indeed, one can see glimmers of performative subversion in Turkey: for instance, LGBTQ+ activists each year attempt to hold Istanbul Pride marches in defiance of official bans, creatively occupying public space in ways that challenge the prescribed image of a heteronormative society. Such acts echo Butler’s notion that parody, drag, and non- conforming performances can expose the contingency of gender norms. The very need for the state to ban these performances – with the Istanbul governor claiming Pride would “threaten the institution of the family” – suggests that queer expressions carry a subversive potential recognized (and feared) by authorities. Butler’s concept of performative subversion helps us understand why even symbolic acts like marching with rainbow flags or cross-dressing in public are perceived as destabilizing to Turkey’s gender regime: they disrupt the illusion that masculine and feminine roles are natural, exposing them as social constructs reinforced by repetition.

However, while Butler’s framework illuminates the potential for resistance, it also encounters sharp limitations in Turkey. A key challenge is the legibility of subversive performances; that is, whether society and the state even recognize these acts as valid expressions of identity or political protest. In a largely conservative and authoritarian climate, non-normative gender performances often are not seen as playful or political iterations of gender, but rather as deviance or moral threat. Butler notes that not all gender performances are intelligible within the dominant cultural frame; some identities are rendered unintelligible or abject when they deviate too far from the norm. In Turkey, this problem of legibility is acute: a drag performance or a trans visibility march that might be understood as a form of queer protest in a Western context is more likely to be met with public incomprehension or hostility, given the lack of mainstream exposure to such subcultures. Moreover, the risks of performative subversion in Turkey are considerably high. Butler’s theory acknowledges that subversion is not cost-free, but the Turkish case underscores how perilous it can be to deviate from gender norms. Performances that flout norms are frequently met with direct repression rather than dialogue. For example, participants in Istanbul’s Pride have been met with police violence and mass detentions year after year, as authorities refuse to tolerate any public display of queer identity. What Butler might describe as a resistive “failure” to properly perform one’s assigned gender – such as two men holding hands or a trans woman publicly asserting her identity – is treated not as a critical parody of gender, but as an excuse for coercive intervention. The state’s harsh response effectively limits the subversive potential that Butler celebrates: while performativity implies that norms can be destabilized from within, in Turkey any visible destabilization is quickly quashed by legal and extralegal enforcement. In short, Butler’s framework is useful for revealing the cracks in the facade of gender’s naturalness and for inspiring the idea of resistance, but it must be tempered by an understanding that in Turkey those who exploit such cracks do so under conditions of extreme vulnerability. Performative agency exists, but its transformative impact is curtailed when queer expressions are neither protected by law nor broadly accepted by society. The concept of performativity thus needs to be applied with caution, recognizing that the space for gender subversion in Turkey is constrained and often comes at a steep personal cost.

 Michel Foucault’s theorization of power – particularly his concepts of normative power and biopolitics – provides a powerful lens to analyze how gender is regulated in Turkey. Foucault shifts our focus from seeing power merely as top-down law or repression, to seeing it as a productive force that defines what is “normal” and shapes individuals to fit those norms. This perspective is highly pertinent in Turkey, where multiple institutions (the state, the media, education, religion) work in tandem to construct and enforce a normative gender order. The productivity of power is evident in the Turkish government’s open promotion of a traditional heterosexual family model as the cornerstone of national identity. Rather than simply forbidding LGBTQ+ identities, authorities actively produce a discourse in which such identities are cast as dangerous and non-normative. A clear example is the recent initiative declaring 2025 the “Year of the Family,” accompanied by a directive from the Radio and Television Supreme Council (RTÜK) to combat what it calls “LGBTQ+ content” in media (Turkish Minute, 2024). By branding queer representation as a “deviant mindset” that must be prevented from “harming the Turkish family structure”, the state is not just saying what one cannot do, it is delineating what a proper family and citizen should be. This aligns with Foucault’s notion of normalization: power operates by defining the norm (here, the straight, cisgender family) and subtly or overtly pressuring everyone to conform to it. People internalize these norms, and those who don’t fit are marked as outsiders to the moral order.

Foucault’s idea of biopolitics – the management of populations by regulating bodies and behaviors – also resonates strongly. The Turkish state’s involvement in intimate aspects of gender identity is a case in point. For years, Turkey’s legal system effectively controlled transgender bodies through a strict medicalized process for gender reassignment. Until a recent court decision, individuals seeking to change their legal gender were required by law to undergo gender confirmation surgery and to prove they were permanently sterilized (Constitutional Court of Turkey, 2017). This requirement, rooted in Article 40 of the Civil Code, exemplified biopolitical regulation: the state dictated which bodies could be recognized as legitimately male or female, and it imposed surgical intervention (and loss of reproductive ability) as the price of that recognition. The policy literally enforced a normative vision of binary gender on trans people’s flesh. Although Turkey’s Constitutional Court eventually annulled the sterilization requirement as a human rights violation, the fact that such a rule existed – and that surgery is still a de facto prerequisite for legal gender change, underscores how deeply the law penetrated into regulating the body in service of a normative ideal. Through Foucauldian lenses, one can see this as the state exerting biopower: encouraging certain kinds of reproductive, “normal” bodies, and discouraging or re-shaping those that don’t fit the reproductive heteronormative mold.

While Foucault’s framework helps expose these pervasive forces of normalization in Turkey, it does not fully account for the role of open coercion and the embodied suffering of those who resist norms. Foucault famously downplayed traditional legal power in favor of subtle disciplinary mechanisms, but in Turkey we see a potent blend of both, with the state unabashedly using its legal and police powers to reinforce the normative order. For example, the banning of Pride events and the rough dispersal of LGBTQ+ gatherings are exercises of classic repressive power. When Istanbul’s Pride march was prohibited for the ninth year in a row and over a hundred participants were detained by force, it was a reminder that the state still wields the sovereign power to punish and exclude. Such blatant coercion falls somewhat outside Foucault’s primary analytical focus, which tended to emphasize power’s capillary action through society rather than its most visible violent caprices. Moreover, Foucault’s work on sexuality (e.g., in The History of Sexuality) highlighted how discourse produces categories like “homosexual” as objects of knowledge and regulation, an insight relevant to Turkey’s official rhetoric. Yet Foucault paid less attention to how an authoritarian or theocratic-leaning regime might harness such discourse to mobilize public hatred against those categories. In Turkey, high-level officials regularly engage in what can be called normative violence: speech acts and decrees that not only define queerness as abnormal but effectively invite persecution of queer individuals. A striking instance is the intervention of the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). In a 2020 sermon, the head of Diyanet, Ali Erbaş, proclaimed that Islam “condemns homosexuality” because it “brings illnesses and corrupts generations,” (Reuters, 2020) even linking it to the spread of HIV. This state-sanctioned stigmatization goes beyond subtle norm-setting, it is a direct vilification of an entire group. The consequences of such discourse are painfully real. Civil society groups, like Turkey’s bar associations, warned that Erbaş’s comments could incite hate crimes against LGBTQ+ people. Indeed, when the ruling party endorsed the cleric’s stance with the hashtag “Ali Erbaş is not alone,” it signaled a convergence of state power and cultural hatred that Foucault’s theory alone struggles to fully capture. The embodied outcomes of this environment are seen in rising violence: assaults on transgender women, harassment of gay individuals, and a climate of fear that pervades daily life for many queer Turks. Foucault teaches us to see how institutions like law, medicine, and religion work together to normalize heterosexuality (for example, through censorship by RTÜK or moralizing sermons by Diyanet), but we must go further and acknowledge how, in a semi-authoritarian context, normalization is often backed by brute force. In sum, Foucauldian analysis elucidates the productivity of power in Turkey – how norms of gender and sexuality are actively produced and enforced through myriad channels – but it requires supplementation to address the coercive apparatus and the very tangible suffering of those who are deemed abnormal. Without incorporating an understanding of state violence and legal coercion, a Foucauldian view might risk understating the peril faced by marginalized genders in Turkey’s current regime. 

Susan Stryker’s transgender theory brings to the forefront aspects that Butler and Foucault engage only indirectly: the materiality of the body, the emotional force of lived experience, and the politics of visibility from a transgender perspective. Stryker, especially in her influential essay “My Words to Victor Frankenstein,” speaks of “transgender rage” as a productive, galvanizing response to a society that casts trans bodies as monstrous. This framework is highly illuminating in the Turkish context, where transgender individuals have often been at the center of both the LGBTQ+ movement and the backlash against it. Stryker’s emphasis on embodiment reminds us that the regulation of gender is not just an abstract process; it happens quite literally on people’s bodies, through violence, medical interventions, or the denial of recognition. In Turkey, this is tragically evident: trans people endure frequent harassment on the streets, face difficulties accessing healthcare, and until recently were forced by law to undergo unwanted surgeries to have their gender acknowledged. Their bodies bear the brunt of societal and legal norms, whether through police beatings during a protest or the scars of state-mandated surgery. By centering these bodily experiences, Stryker’s perspective ensures our analysis does not lose sight of human impact amid theoretical concepts.

Moreover, Stryker’s focus on rage and visibility offers a powerful lens to understand transgender activism in Turkey. Transgender women in Turkey, in particular, have a long history of courageous activism, from organizing one of the earliest Istanbul Pride marches in the early 2000s to leading NGOs like Pembe Hayat (Pink Life) that advocate for trans rights. Their very existence is often a form of protest: simply being visibly trans in public can be a bold assertion of identity in a society that prefers they stay invisible. Stryker would likely see in this a form of the “rage” she describes; an insistence on one’s right to occupy space and be seen, even when the world refuses to acknowledge or loves to vilify. A vivid example was the figure of Hande Kader, a 22-year-old Turkish trans woman and activist. Kader became an icon of resistance when she defiantly sat down in front of police water cannons during the attempted Istanbul Pride march in 2015, refusing to be moved by the forces that sought to erase her presence (Al Jazeera, 2016). Her image spread widely, embodying the fiery resilience that Stryker celebrates, a refusal to be shamed out of public life. Such instances demonstrate how visibility can turn into political power: by making themselves seen and heard, trans activists in Turkey convert the supposed source of their vulnerability (their marked bodies) into a statement of pride and resistance. Stryker’s framework helps us appreciate the significance of these acts; how the emotions of anger and pride, rooted in the pain of exclusion, can fuel a movement that challenges the dehumanization of trans people. It also highlights the importance of storytelling and solidarity; by publicly sharing their struggles (for example, testifying about police abuse or discrimination), trans individuals in Turkey are reshaping the narrative around their lives from one of shame to one of empowerment. 

For all its contributions, however, Stryker’s approach also faces limits in the Turkish setting, especially when it comes to effecting change through visibility and rage alone. The harsh truth is that visibility in an unyielding hostile environment can lead to heightened risk more often than to social transformation. Hande Kader’s story again serves as a cautionary tale: after her moment of symbolic resistance, she was later found brutally murdered – her body mutilated and burned – in August 2016. Far from being protected as a prominent activist, her visibility may have made her a target for extreme violence. This underscores a painful paradox: the very act of claiming visibility that Stryker valorizes can, in Turkey, expose trans people to lethal dangers when the broader society and state remain intolerant. Rage, too, has its ambivalent outcomes. While it can unite and mobilize the marginalized, it can also be met with stone-faced repression. The emotional catharsis and solidarity of, say, a trans rights march in Ankara might be powerful for participants, but if the state’s response is mass arrest and if media either ignore or demonize the event, the broader impact is blunted. Stryker rightly argues that embodied resistance has inherent value – a trans person living openly is performing a courageous act that can inspire others – yet in Turkey the institutional unresponsiveness is profound. Public institutions, from the police to the courts, often do not sympathetically register this resistance; instead, they may double down on policies that criminalize visibility (as seen with proposals to penalize “public display” of LGBTQ+ identity as “obscenity”). Thus, the transformative potential Stryker sees in visibility and personal narrative may not be fully realized under current conditions. In an environment where even basic rights like freedom of assembly are denied to LGBTQ+ people, the tools of embodiment and rage need augmentation from other strategies (legal, political, coalition-building) to create change. In summary, Stryker’s framework enriches our analysis by centering the human, bodily dimension of gender regulation and highlighting the bravery of those who refuse to be invisible. It captures the emotional truth of living as a trans person under an oppressive gender regime. Yet, its optimistic thrust – that owning one’s “monstrosity” and expressing righteous anger can destabilize the system – meets the sobering reality of a society and state apparatus that often answer such challenges with indifference or brutality. The Turkish case thus suggests that while embodied visibility is a crucial form of resistance, its gains are fragile and must be buttressed by broader cultural and institutional shifts before Stryker’s liberatory vision can be fully realized.

Evaluating these three frameworks side by side reveals that each illuminates different facets of how gender is regulated in Turkey. Butler shines light on the performative nature of gender norms and the cracks where resistance can emerge; Foucault exposes the normative and institutional machinery that produces and sustains those norms; Stryker centers the embodied experiences and agency of those who bear the brunt of normative enforcement. Together, they provide a multidimensional understanding: gender in Turkey is at once a script that individuals are compelled to follow, a set of norms aggressively promoted and policed by powerful institutions, and a lived reality that people negotiate with courage and pain on a daily basis. The convergences and tensions between the theories are telling. For instance, all three would agree that “the family” is a lynchpin of the gender regime – Butler would call it a reiteration of heteronormativity, Foucault a cornerstone of biopolitical social order, and Stryker a source of corporeal legitimacy or illegitimacy – and this is borne out in Turkey, where the family is explicitly invoked as something to be “protected” from LGBTQ+ influence. At the same time, each theory’s blind spots are complemented by the others’ strengths. Butler and Foucault give us structural insight but can overlook personal suffering; Stryker gives us the affective, human face but can overlook structural inertia. A synthesis of their insights thus yields a richer critical assessment of Turkey’s gender politics, acknowledging both the possibilities of agency and the harsh apparatus of control.

Yet, even this combined theoretical lens may not be sufficient unless we also factor in other critical perspectives attuned to Turkey’s particularities. An intersectional approach, for example, would urge us to consider how gender regulation in Turkey intersects with issues of class, ethnicity, and religion. The experiences of a Kurdish trans woman in Diyarbakır, a veiled conservative cisgender woman in Ankara, and a gay man in Istanbul will differ markedly, and those differences matter. Intersectionality (as developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw and others) would highlight that oppression is not monolithic: the authoritarian regulation of gender often goes hand in hand with nationalism, sectarianism, and economic inequality. We see hints of this in how sexual minorities who are also members of other marginalized groups (such as ethnic or religious minorities) face compounded stigma. Moreover, incorporating the work of local feminist and queer scholars can ground this analysis in Turkey’s own intellectual and activist tradition. Turkish thinkers like Serpil Sancar and Zeynep Direk, among others, have written about patriarchy, gender regimes, and sexual politics in Turkey, offering nuanced accounts of the local context. Sancar’s analyses of Turkey’s “gender regime,” for instance, delve into how the state and family structures reinforce male dominance and heterosexual norms, providing a lens that complements Butler’s performativity with concrete sociopolitical history. Zeynep Direk’s philosophical engagements with gender and power draw on both Western theory and Turkish realities, potentially bridging Foucault’s abstractions with the lived Turkish experience. Engaging such local scholarship can prevent an analysis from imposing a one-size-fits-all theoretical model and instead foster a dialogue between global theory and local knowledge. 

In conclusion, the regulation of gender in Turkey can be most fully understood through a critical and context-sensitive application of multiple frameworks. Butler, Foucault, and Stryker each explain certain dynamics – from everyday acts of compliance and subversion to the overarching strategies of state control and the felt experience of marginalized individuals, but none alone suffices. In a milieu where Pride parades are banned and smeared as threats, where legal barriers hem in trans people’s very identities, where censors and clerics alike propagate a singular vision of moral order, and where brave individuals still stand up to say “we exist,” one must draw on every available theoretical and empirical tool. By acknowledging the strengths and limits of our theories and by remaining open to intersectional and local insights, we craft a discussion that is both academically rigorous and responsive to the concrete struggles on the ground. This critical engagement with theory, grounded in recent Turkish examples, sets the stage for a concluding reflection on what these findings mean for the broader fight for gender justice in Turkey and beyond.

Ultimately, this exploration has demonstrated that gender in Turkey is far from an innate essence; it is a contingent construct actively produced and policed across legal, institutional, and cultural domains. By drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, the analysis revealed how gender identities are iteratively constituted through normative acts rather than emanating from any fixed core of the self. Michel Foucault’s insights on power and biopolitics illuminated how those norms are entrenched and naturalized through diffuse mechanisms of control; how law, medicine, religion, and education converge to define the boundaries of acceptable gendered life. Susan Stryker’s transgender perspective added a vital dimension, centering the embodied experiences of those who transgress gender binaries and highlighting how the pursuit of recognition both exposes the artifice of the gender system and reveals the burdens it places on those deemed non-normative. In sum, gender in Turkey emerges not as a pre-social fact, but as a performative doing shaped and enforced by power at every turn.

For all their powerful insights, these theoretical frameworks must also be critically situated within the Turkish context. Butler’s notion of subversive repetition, for example, illuminates how norms can be challenged symbolically, but it may underplay the immediate material dangers that Turkish individuals face when they defy gender expectations. Foucault’s abstract analytics of power require translation into local terms; accounting for Turkey’s unique fusion of secular law with religious conservatism and nationalist rhetoric, which produces nuances of control beyond his primarily Western illustrations. Stryker’s focus on transgender embodiment underscores the profound personal cost of normativity, yet even her paradigm, largely forged in a Western context, benefits from the perspectives of local trans activists and scholars who grapple directly with being deemed “unintelligible” by state and society. Acknowledging these limits does not negate the value of Butler, Foucault, and Stryker’s contributions; rather, it underlines the importance of complementing their theories with indigenous insights and situational awareness in Turkey.

The cumulative effect of these regulatory forces is that queer and trans individuals in Turkey are effectively both ghosted and banned, symbolically erased from the national narrative even as they are materially repressed in everyday life. They are “ghosted” in the sense that official culture often refuses to acknowledge them except as deviance: for example, the head of the national religious authority declared in 2020 that homosexuality “brings illnesses and corrupts generations”, casting queer existence as a pathological threat to society. Such rhetoric, echoed by political leaders and by censorship of queer expression in media (with streaming platforms fined for “promoting homosexuality”) (Balkan Insight, 2020), ensures that non- heteronormative identities are shunned as illegitimate or alien to the nation’s moral fabric. At the same time, LGBTQ+ individuals are quite literally banned from many public spaces: Pride marches that once drew tens of thousands have been outlawed and met with police violence (Reuters, 2023), and even informal community gatherings are routinely dispersed. To live against the grain of normativity under these conditions entails very real risk and cost: those who dare to express queer or trans identities openly face ostracization, state harassment, and even physical danger at the hands of both vigilantes and security forces. Yet every insistence on being seen and heard, each clandestine celebration, each courageous protest, each daily act of living one’s truth; becomes a subversive performance that exposes the fragility of the dominant norm. In these acts, Butler’s concept of performative subversion finds tangible form; Foucault’s maxim that “where there is power, there is resistance” is vividly affirmed; and Stryker’s call for transgressive authenticity is embodied as living reality. The ghosted do not disappear: rather, they haunt the nation’s conscience, a spectral reminder that the enforced gender order rests on fragile foundations and exacts an immeasurable human cost.

Looking forward, the challenge ahead is multi-faceted. It is imperative to adopt an intersectional perspective that situates the fight for gender freedom within broader struggles for justice, recognizing how gender regulation is intertwined with class inequalities, ethnic tensions, and authoritarian politics. Equally crucial is to heed the insights of local feminist and queer voices; scholars, activists, and community leaders who ground theory in lived reality and offer homegrown strategies of resistance. Meaningful change will demand both legal and cultural transformation: legal reforms (such as robust anti-discrimination protections, the safeguarding of LGBTQ+ assembly and expression, and humane policies for gender recognition) and cultural shifts (in education, media, and religious discourse) that affirm gender and sexual diversity as integral to Turkey’s social fabric. Ultimately, confronting the ghosting and banning of queer lives is a project of social justice and human dignity; one that demands the courage to rethink deeply ingrained norms, the solidarity to amplify marginalized voices, and the radical imagination to build a more inclusive future where living beyond the binary does not exact such a heavy toll. In this forward-looking vision, the critical power of those who live against normativity today becomes the seed for a more liberatory tomorrow.

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