Academy in Exile
2018/ 2019

Nazan Üstündağ

The Pornographic State and the Erotics of Resistance: A Photographic Account of Kurdish Bodies in Turkey

Nazan Üstündağ received her PhD in 2005 from the sociology department at Indiana University Bloomington. Between 2005 and 2018, she worked as an Assistant Professor at Boğaziçi University, Department of Sociology. Currently, she is an Academy in Exile and IIE-Scholar Rescue Fund Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. Nazan’s dissertation examined different forms of subjectivities and belongings of rural-to-urban women in Istanbul and the life stories they craft in the intersection of the violence of state, capital and patriarchy. Aside from writing on urban belongings in the era of neoliberalism, Nazan wrote extensively on social policy, gendered subjectivities and state violence in Kurdistan. She has also worked as a columnist in the journal Nokta and the newspaper Özgür Gündem. Her opinion pieces appeared in venues such as Bianet, T24, RoarMagazine and Jadaliyya. Üstündağ is a member of Women for Peace and Academics for Peace. Most recently, she is finishing a book manuscript with the working title “Mother, Politician and Guerilla: The Emergence of A New Political Cosmology in Kurdistan Through Women’s Bodies and Speech”.
 

The Pornographic State and the Erotics of Resistance: A Photographic Account of Kurdish Bodies in Turkey

Nazan is going to work on her second book project with the working title “The Pornographic State and the Erotics of Resistance: A Photographic Account of Kurdish Bodies in Turkey” based on research that she has conducted in Turkey’s Kurdistan since 2005. The book aims at explaining the different modalities by which the Turkish state and the public passionately obsess about Kurdish bodies, how such obsession is manifested in images and how these images render Kurds available for state and communal violence. The book also addresses the dialogical process by which Kurds transform this obsession into a knowledge of oppression and struggle against it, by producing their own images of law, community and body. Nazan’s research is informed by studies that address the “irrational” dimensions of state violence and law in order to trace the life of politicized bodies, objects and images without assimilating them into a rationalized historiography. Her book builds a common framework for these studies by introducing the concepts of pornography and erotics that are useful in elaborating the affective, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of violence and power. Methodologically, her study contributes to the work on violence and power by taking photographic images as its focus. Images make it possible to talk about changing technologies and hence show how the operation of power and resistance, desire and passion, are linked to materiality.