I am a sociologist of state power and sexuality. Across my research, I am interested in how states and institutions like prisons regulate intimate life, and how criminalized and queer people respond to, work around, and resist that control. My research draws upon in-depth interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, historical, and archival methods.

Henri Cartier-Bresson. Solitary confinement. Model prison of Leesburg. New Jersey. USA. 1975.

sexuality & prisons

This line of research asks how prisons govern the sexual and intimate lives of incarcerated people. Prisons are built to prevent sex and relationships, but I find that the everyday tools of confinement, like surveillance, isolation, sex segregation, and controlled movement, shape the forms sexuality takes rather than simply suppressing it. That includes forms of queerness the institution is supposedly organized to prevent.

The project also looks at the other side of that control: how incarcerated people build relationships, manage the risks that come with them, and make sense of what queerness means inside. It draws on interviews with formerly incarcerated people and prison staff as well as archival writing by incarcerated people.

LGBT politics

Before turning to prisons, I studied queer activism and anti-LGBT politics in Turkey, where I was a Fulbright scholar. This work asks how global rights frameworks shape national sexual politics, sometimes in ways their advocates never intended. In “Blueprint of Backlash,” published in Gender & Society, I show how European homonationalism, the linking of LGBT rights to ideas of Western progress and belonging, helped shape the rise of anti-LGBT politics in Turkey.

With Meriç G. Doğan, I have also written on queer life and activism in Turkey in “Moving lubunya in the age of rights,” published in The International Journal of Human Rights. Across this work, I’m interested in what happens when rights become a marker of national identity, and who ends up protected or policed as a result.

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