Rethinking Heteronormativity in Contemporary Turkey
The Destabilising Heteronormativity Project is a critical, long-term artistic and research-driven initiative that interrogates how dominant norms around gender and sexuality are produced, circulated, and resisted in Turkey. Rather than viewing heteronormativity as a fixed, monolithic system, the project approaches it as a shifting constellation of expectations, laws, and social practices that can be disrupted and reimagined. By engaging with queer and feminist lenses, it highlights the everyday negotiations, vulnerabilities, and creative strategies that shape LGBTQIA+ lives in an increasingly authoritarian context.
Heteronormativity as a Moving Target
Heteronormativity is often understood as the presumption that heterosexuality and binary gender identities are natural, normal, and ideal. In practice, however, it is not a static ideology. It moves through policy decisions, media narratives, religious discourses, and family expectations, shifting shape in response to political and economic pressures. The Destabilising Heteronormativity Project pays close attention to this dynamism. It asks how public morality campaigns, censorship, and the policing of public space work together to redraw the boundaries of acceptable intimacy, kinship, and self-expression.
In Turkey, these processes play out in courtrooms, on television screens, in social media feeds, and within private homes. The project treats these locations as overlapping stages where heteronormativity is constantly rehearsed and sometimes subtly sabotaged. This framework makes it possible to move beyond simplistic victim–perpetrator narratives and to focus instead on the messy, often contradictory ways that people navigate gendered and sexual norms in daily life.
Queer and Feminist Frameworks of Analysis
At the heart of the project lies a commitment to queer and feminist theory as both critique and method. Queer perspectives question assumed categories, expose the hierarchies embedded in ideas of normality, and foreground forms of desire and affiliation that do not fit conventional scripts. Feminist analysis, meanwhile, traces how these scripts intersect with patriarchy, capitalism, and nationalist politics. Together, they illuminate the ways in which heteronormativity functions not only as a sexual regime but also as a broader technology of governance.
By drawing on these frameworks, the project offers tools to understand how gender, sexuality, class, ethnicity, and religion intertwine. It addresses issues such as state control over bodies and reproduction, the disciplining of non-conforming masculinities and femininities, and the unequal distribution of safety, visibility, and mobility. This intersectional approach ensures that the critique of normativity does not erase the particular vulnerabilities of migrants, working-class communities, or those living at the margins of urban life.
Archiving Vulnerabilities and Everyday Resistance
The Destabilising Heteronormativity Project treats vulnerability not as a weakness but as a crucial starting point for understanding contemporary social relations. It pays attention to the emotional, legal, and material precarities experienced by LGBTQIA+ people, women, and other marginalised groups, and it documents the survival tactics that emerge in response. These tactics may include coded forms of speech, alternative kinship networks, and creative uses of public and digital spaces.
Instead of reducing queer life to stories of trauma or heroism, the project constructs an evolving archive of complex, everyday experiences: fleeting moments of safety, quiet acts of refusal, and fragile but resilient forms of community-building. This archive, shaped through artistic practice, research, and collaboration, allows for a broader and more nuanced narrative of what it means to live under intensifying social and political control.
Artistic Practice as Critical Method
Art is central to how the project thinks, feels, and communicates. Installations, performances, videos, and text-based works operate as research tools that can sense and express what is difficult to capture through conventional academic approaches. By staging encounters between bodies, images, and sounds, the project makes visible the subtle forces that structure intimacy and exclusion. The aesthetic choices are not merely decorative; they are designed to unsettle the spectator's assumptions and to generate new forms of critical attention.
Artistic practice also opens space for collaboration across disciplines. Artists, theorists, activists, and audiences come together to negotiate how vulnerability, desire, and difference can be represented without reproducing exploitation or spectacle. This collective negotiation becomes itself a form of destabilisation: it challenges the rigid roles assigned to experts, subjects, and spectators, and invites participants to rethink how knowledge about gender and sexuality is produced.
Authoritarianism, Intimacy, and the Politics of Everyday Life
The project unfolds against the backdrop of an increasingly authoritarian political climate in Turkey. Restrictions on freedom of assembly, intensifying censorship, and moral panic campaigns around gender and sexuality are not isolated developments; they reach deeply into the fabric of everyday life. Policies that target pride marches, public affection, and discussions of queer identities simultaneously regulate public space and reshape what is imaginable in the private sphere.
By foregrounding intimacy as a political arena, the Destabilising Heteronormativity Project shows how home, family, and friendship become contested sites. It examines how norms around marriage, reproduction, and respectability are weaponised to silence dissent and to produce compliant citizens. At the same time, it pays careful attention to how people reconfigure these spaces through chosen families, shared households, and non-normative forms of care that resist official narratives of the good, productive, and patriotic subject.
From Local Contexts to Transnational Conversations
While grounded in the specificities of Turkey, the project speaks to a wider, global conversation about the rise of illiberalism and the tightening of control over gender and sexuality. Around the world, similar patterns can be observed: attacks on so-called gender ideology, the instrumentalisation of family values, and the portrayal of queer and feminist movements as foreign threats. By tracing these parallels, the project highlights how heteronormativity functions transnationally, linking national anxieties to broader geopolitical projects.
At the same time, the initiative insists on the importance of local textures and experiences. It resists any simple mapping of Eurocentric queer theory onto the Turkish context, and instead advocates for knowledge produced through situated practices and collaborations. In doing so, it contributes to a more plural, decentered understanding of queer and feminist politics, one that recognises the multiple genealogies of resistance and imagination that exist beyond dominant Western narratives.
Imagining Futures Beyond Normative Scripts
Destabilising heteronormativity is not only about critique; it is also about opening space for alternative futures. The project is invested in speculative thinking: what kinds of relationships, intimacies, and communities become possible when heterosexual coupledom and binary gender no longer anchor social life? How might institutions, infrastructures, and collective rituals change when they are no longer organised around the nuclear family or rigid gender roles?
Through its artistic and research activities, the project offers partial, unfinished answers to these questions. It experiments with new forms of assembly, care, and cohabitation that remain attentive to difference and inequality. It invites audiences to inhabit these alternatives, even if momentarily, and to sense how other ways of living might feel. In this way, destabilisation becomes a creative practice: a way of loosening what seems inevitable and of nurturing the conditions for more livable, more just forms of social coexistence.
Why Destabilising Heteronormativity Matters Now
As political regimes harden and social divisions deepen, the regulation of gender and sexuality often becomes a key tool of governance. Questioning heteronormativity therefore means questioning broader structures of power. The Destabilising Heteronormativity Project shows that struggles over bodily autonomy, family life, and intimate choices are inseparable from struggles over democracy, freedom of expression, and social justice.
By attending to vulnerability, documenting everyday resistance, and embracing artistic experimentation, the project contributes to a vital archive of the present. It preserves traces of how people live, desire, and care under pressure, and how they continue to imagine otherwise. In doing so, it offers not only a critique of the current moment but also a set of resources—conceptual, affective, and aesthetic—for those who are seeking to build more inclusive, more expansive futures.