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.