(Comp Lit Luncheon) Evren Savci (Yale University) on “Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam”

In this talk, Evren Savcı speaks about her book Queer in Translation that intervenes in queer studies’ separate, and in fact diagonally opposing approaches to neoliberalism and Islam by using the case of Turkey’s AKP governments for the past 16 years. She theorize “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities that work to deploy marginality onto ever expanding populations instead of concentrating it in the lower echelons of society, and suggest that sexual liberation movements are the most productive places from which to theorize neoliberal Islam as well as to imagine resistances to it.