RCRC_1345966__ak_rlar edited


ARTICLE 

																																										http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2017.1345966	
 

Transnational Pride, Global Closets and Regional 
Formations of Screen Activism: Documentary 
LGBTQ Narratives from Turkey 

Cüneyt Çakırlar 

Nottingham Trent University, United Kingdom 

cuneyt.cakirlar@ntu.ac.uk 

 

Abstract  
This study explores three documentary projects from Turkey, namely 

Proudly Trans in Turkey (by Gabrielle Le Roux, 2012), My Child (by Can 

Candan, 2013), and Trans X Istanbul (by Maria Binder, 2014). Attempting 

to make visible various spaces and formations of LGBTQ activism in 

Turkey, these collaborative projects can be considered as practices of 

screen activism that critically reflect on their own circulation, spectatorial 

address, ethnographic accent, and documentary aesthetic. Attempting to 

contest modes of the transnational gaze which reifies the saviour 

discourses of the Gay International and its globalised imperatives of 

liberation and pride, this discussion examines the extent to which the 

regional complexities of intersectional LGBTQ activism are compromised 

by the investment in these activist subjects’ global humanitarian value and 

international intelligibility. Questioning the ways in which these 

documentaries tackle their spectatorial address as well as the global and 



local complexities of sexual politics, this study aims to demonstrate how 

various forms/styles of documentary could contest, negotiate, and re-

invent a transnational gaze that critically engages with the ethnographic 

constructions of sexuality, community, identity, and nation.  

 

Keywords: documentary; ethnography; LGBTQ activism; Turkey; 

transnationalism; artivism 

 

The recent turns of events in global sexual politics in various international 

frameworks of human rights activism, and the increased attention given to 

LGBTQ studies in various transregional networks of academia, have 

complicated the universalizing debates addressing cultures and categories 

of sexual identity/identification. Rendering visible the complex 

geopolitical, multi-scalar dynamics of sexual politics, the new formations 

of LGBTQ cultures in the non-Western world trigger an urgency to 

address the voices of regional actors by rethinking the epistemologies of 

sexual subjectivity within intersectional frameworks. What makes 

LGBTQ documentary filmmaking a crucial field of knowledge production 

is this urgency to encourage communities to produce alternative truths that 

would critically respond to neo-colonial ideologies appropriating 

sexuality as a political instrument for “democratizing” and “civilizing” 

certain nations or regions (Haritaworn 2015; Massad 2002). 

 

Focusing on three documentary projects, namely Trans X Istanbul (Binder 

2014), Proudly Trans in Turkey (Le Roux 2012), and My Child (Candan 

2013), this study explores the ways in which discourses of affirmation and 



empowerment are appropriated in the practices of LGBTQ documentary 

filmmaking from Turkey. These documentaries focus on an Islamicate and 

precariously secular national context. The regional actors on screen 

defend an inclusive and dissident queer politics that does not prioritize an 

agenda shaped by faith as the primary marker of LGBTQ identity and 

community. Attempting to make visible various spaces and formations of 

LGBTQ activism in Turkey, these collaborative projects can be 

considered as practices of screen activism which critically reflect on their 

own circulation, spectatorial address, ethnographic accent, and 

documentary aesthetic. Attempting to prioritise a focus on the regional 

complexities of intersectional queer activism, these documentaries seem 

to contest and negotiate transnational discourses of LGBTQ identities that 

reify the globalized imperatives of liberation, pride, and humanitarian 

intervention. The critical regionalism at work in these projects, however, 

neither fetishizes its national/ethnic referent nor constructs a radical 

alterity by enacting a “third eye” through its ethnographic gaze (Rony 

1996). Exposing the spectator to intersectional LGBTQ politics and its 

actors, these works treat their subjects as active interlocutors of 

community and as performers of ethnographic knowledge.  

 

Through an analysis of these three documentaries, this study proposes a 

discussion of the ways in which various transnational registers of LGBTQ 

documentary production engage with the ethnographic site, the regional 

context, and the narrative framing of sexual subjectivity on screen. Hence, 

the selection of these three films relies on their shared transnational 

production context —in terms of both spectatorial address and funding. 



Although the low-budget, regionally circulated, activist productions of 

earlier LGBTQ documentaries from Turkey— such as Aykut Atasay’s 

Yürüyoruz (We’re Marching, 2006), Travestiler (Transvestites, 2007), and 

Beyaz Atlı Prens Boşuna Gelme! (Prince Charming Don’t Bother to Come, 

2009), as well as Melisa Önel’s Ben ve Nuri Bala (Me and Nuri Bala, 

2009) — could contribute to this discussion in productive ways, this paper 

capitalises upon the more recent transnational productions and their logic 

of regionality. Therefore, the films selected here not only demonstrate 

effectively the ideological operation of such global production registers, 

but also facilitate a wider critical debate on the increasingly globalised 

discourses of intersectional LGBTQ activism in Turkey.  

 

Ethics of collaboration in Maria Binder’s Trans X Istanbul 
(2014) 
In her critical examination of the “documentary logic of sobriety,” Pooja 

Rangan takes into account a particular mode of humanitarian 

“seriousness” in ethnographic filmmaking, where the discourse of 

sobriety operates “not merely as an ideological ruse but as the symptom 

and mandate of a humanitarian ethical paradigm—one in which the 

urgent, immediate task of saving human lives legitimates and even 

actively defers all other considerations, including the aesthetics and 

politics of representation” (2014, 2; see also Bandi 2016). Resonating with 

Rangan’s critique of humanitarian intervention and the 

ethnographic/documentary gaze it produces, Hart and Dillwood’s reading 

of Call Me Kuchu (2012), a documentary focusing on the struggle of 



Ugandan LGBTQ activists with anti-homosexuality legislation, proposes 

a critical mode of analysis that prioritizes an interrogation of the ways in 

which the film’s humanitarian discourse engages with “time, contact, 

context and scale” (2015, 1012). Treating Call Me Kuchu as “a dynamic 

artefact of transnational and post-colonial contexts” (2015, 1009), these 

scholars argue that the formal and narrative choices in the film fail to 

provide depth in terms of how the regional actors of LGBTQ activism 

engage with the local specificities of sexual politics. This critical 

evaluation can also be taken as a wider critique of the genre of rights-

based documentary filmmaking and its neoliberal logic of transnational 

humanitarianism (see, for example, Bandi 2016), which, in the case of 

Call Me Kuchu, “underscores the potential to misread the social and 

political oppression their subjects experience as symptomatic of a globally 

undifferentiated homophobia” (Hart and Dillwood 2015, 1020). Being 

critically attentive to the ideological risks of rights-based documentary 

filmmaking in obscuring relations of “time, contact, context and scale” 

(Hart and Dillwood 2015, 1012), my discussion of Maria Binder’s Trans 

X Istanbul (2014) and Gabrielle Le Roux’s Proudly Trans in Turkey 

(2012) explores how these documentary projects give an account of their 

own ethnographic gaze and collaborative approach.   

 

Maria Binder’s Trans X Istanbul focuses on the life of Ebru Kırancı, an 

Istanbul-based trans activist. Through Ebru’s eyes, the documentary aims 

to explore the trans community’s struggle with hate crimes, urban 

segregation, and the exclusionary practices of urban regeneration projects 

in Istanbul. This exploration incorporates multiple modes of 



representation in documentary filmmaking, as identified by Nichols: 

expository, observational, interactive, and reflexive modes (1992, 32). 

The combined framework enables the filmmaker to negotiate the ethical 

complexities of the film’s transnational production context, its 

ethnographic focus, and the filmmaker’s status as an outsider. In the 

introductory part of Trans X, Binder makes use of her footage from nine 

years ago (when Ebru used to do sex work to earn a living) and her voice-

over in this part emphasizes how her friendship with Ebru initiated their 

collaboration for this film:   

 

This is Ebru nine years ago when we first met in Istanbul. At that 

time, she wanted to become a politician. “Our lives aren’t worth 

anything” she said to me. If you really want to find out, come with 

us. Hours later, I found myself hiding in a bush feeling very scared. 

But at a critical moment just when a car tried to run over three 

friends, I wasn’t filming and Ebru cursed me. It was around this 

time, however, that our friendship began. […] One day back in 

Berlin, I got a flood of messages that Ebru had been killed in her 

flat. Unable to believe it, I called her and found out that she was 

still alive. But one of her friends had been stabbed to death. It was 

then that we decided to make this film. I left Berlin and my mother 

joined me. We moved to Istanbul with a fully packed car to become 

a part of Ebru’s life and her struggle. (Binder 2014) 

 

Rather than concentrating on the scene of queer activism which Ebru is a 

part of, the film’s primary focus is on the spatial production and structural 



operation of exclusion that trans communities experience in Istanbul. 

Binder seems to follow an episodic narrative in Trans X, where each 

episode focuses on a different spatial/scalar dimension of the film’s 

subject. In the first part, the film focuses on the ways in which trans 

communities become precarious citizens subject to ostracization, 

segregation, lynching and hate crimes within the current practices of urban 

regeneration in Istanbul. With the guidance of Ebru, the film first 

documents testimonies of the trans residents of Meis Sitesi in the Avcılar 

district, where the conservative majority protest against trans residents and 

their rumoured engagement with prostitution. Binder’s documentary 

incorporates (i) footage from news, (ii) vérité coverage of LGBT activists’ 

public press statements, as well as Binder’s footage of the anti-sex-work 

protests taking place in front of the apartments where the trans people 

reside, and (iii) talking head conversations with trans residents who have 

experienced various forms of violence and lynch events in the district.         

 

Ebru acts as the leading filmic embodiment, and a catalyst, in Binder’s 

collaborative vérité framework. Binder’s use of her own reflective voice-

over, which may be said to run the risk of reiterating the logic of 

humanitarian saviour discourses, is reciprocated by the central focus on 

Ebru’s presence in the film—as the guiding agent and partner of 

collaboration. Represented as a confident, self-empowered trans activist, 

Ebru not only intervenes in moments of conflict to defend and support her 

trans friends, but also actively engages with the process of filmmaking. 

There are several moments in the film where Ebru, as the central figure of 

various activist interventions, asks Binder to shoot particular scenes of 



conflict and confrontation. Apart from the amorous relationship between 

them, the ongoing exchange between Ebru and Binder throughout the 

documentary reminds the audience of the collaborative partnership, the 

claim of which is, I would contend, constitutive of the film’s ethical 

accountability. Furthermore, the fact that Ebru actively addresses Binder 

as the filmmaker negotiates the absence of the filmmaker’s body in front 

of the camera, which may be taken as a potentially hegemonic, 

objectifying—if not colonizing—mode of authorial invisibility. Contrary 

to Hart and Dillwood’s (2015) critique of the disembodied, non-reflective 

directorial discourse in Call Me Kuchu, the on-screen relational dynamic 

in Trans X, as well as the emphasis on Binder’s 10-year-long friendship 

with Ebru, partially eliminates the ethical risks of the documentary 

filmmaker’s relative invisibility in the film.  

 

The film moves from the inner-district cultural conflicts and oppression 

that trans people face in the Avcılar district to another territory of 

exclusion, displacement, and marginalisation that the community has been 

experiencing within the current state-led urban transformation projects in 

Tarlabaşı. In their study on the post-2000 shift to neoliberal governance 

of urban land in Turkey, Kuyucu and Ünsal provide a detailed account of 

the history of Tarlabaşı and how, by the mid-1990s, it “remained an inner-

city slum inhabited by disadvantaged transient populations,” including the 

trans community (2010, 1488). The scholars note that these urban renewal 

initiatives “suffer from a total lack of social projects and economic 

programmes for the inhabitants creating a serious risk of displacement, 

dispossession and geographical relocation of poverty” (2010, 1491). 



Binder’s Trans X offers the audience intimate contact with the trans 

inhabitants of Tarlabaşı and with Ebru’s struggle to help them negotiate 

eviction orders and the imposed relocation deals. Binder uses footage from 

radio, TV interviews, and public demonstrations, wherein Ebru—among 

other activists—notes that the relocation of trans people to the peripheries 

of the city (as part of the demographic upgrade of various locations subject 

to gentrification in Istanbul, including Tarlabaşı) escalates hate crimes and 

creates a more vulnerable community in exile. The film treats the 

condition of trans people as a symptom of a wider ideological continuum 

that produces homophobia and transphobia through hate speech, medical 

neglect, the non-recognition of sexual orientation as a constitutional 

status, the ambiguous references to “family values” and “general 

morality” in Turkish criminal law, and so on. 

 

In addition to incorporating Ebru’s conversations with the trans 

inhabitants of Avcılar and Tarlabaşı to address their precarious, 

economically disadvantaged situation, the film’s representational 

discourse pays particular attention to the urban landscape. By juxtaposing 

the ruins of demolished buildings on various construction sites, 

gentrification, and renewal with a selection of conventionally exoticized, 

postcard-like images of Istanbul, as well as the imagined/idealized 

cityscapes promoted by the campaigns for urban transformation projects, 

Binder captures a demystified image of Istanbul which operates as a visual 

supplement to dramatise the structural violence and exclusion queer 

people face in the city. However, Binder’s vérité style and her use of Ebru 

as informant as well as the key narrative motor enable the film to present 



an image of the city as not only a space of victimization and precarity, but 

also a space of dissidence and resistance.  

 

While the first half of Trans X represents Ebru as an expansive subject of 

activism and the “native” party of the film’s collaborative narration, 

Binder later shifts the film’s frame from the portrayal of a vulnerable 

queer community to Ebru’s individual life story. “Underneath her 

lightness,” Binder’s voice-over notes, “Ebru allowed [her] to see her 

wounds: the loss of a mother who forbade her to enter the house again, the 

loss of a brother who threatened to kill her …” (Binder 2014). The trip to 

Ebru’s hometown in Zonguldak and the visit to her mother switches the 

focus and scale by moving the film’s identity politics from a collective 

portrayal of the marginalized trans community in an urban sphere to an 

individual register of storytelling, addressing the familial exclusion and 

denial Ebru has experienced.    

 

Binder’s documentation of Ebru’s visit to her hometown in Zonguldak and 

the confrontation with her mother after 30 years provides the film with a 

scalar dynamism rather than a narrative diversion. The film reminds the 

viewer of the spatiotemporal range of homophobia and transphobia, where 

the familial order of kinship operates as the core apparatus of oppression. 

Ebru’s tense exchange with her mother and sister reveals their complicity 

in Ebru’s exclusion from the family, due to their fear of Ebru’s brother 

and the wider social pressure they internalized when coming to terms with 

Ebru’s transgender identity. Binder’s switch from the communal to the 

familial/individual operation of identity and body politics turns her 



portrayal of Ebru into a multi-layered representation that does not reduce 

the characterization of the film’s central figure to an inert and personally 

detached native informant. Ebru becomes the actor who facilitates the 

scalar mobility in Binder’s documentary gaze.    

 

The final shift in the film’s focus (and scale) takes place when Binder 

moves the focus from Ebru’s hometown to the Gezi Park protests in 

Istanbul. A symptom of the “frustrations and tensions caused by the AKP 

[Justice and Development Party]-led neoliberal and neoconservative 

regime in Turkey,” the protests started as a reaction against the urban 

transformation project that the government aimed to implement in the 

park; yet, it soon turned into a spectacle of mass dissidence where “the 

composition of the protestors was wildly heterogeneous” (Gambetti 2014, 

92). Binder’s focus on these protests and her documentation of the 

LGBTQ protestors’ presence in this heterogeneous space of mass 

dissidence attempts to demonstrate the intersectional framework in which 

queer activism operates in Turkey. As also mentioned by Ebru in her 

exchange with the younger LGBTQ crowd in the park, a collective queer 

memory is inscribed in Gezi Park, as the park has been a place of cruising 

for years. Binder combines her footage of the protests with the Istanbul 

Pride marches of the same year. Although the footage from the Occupy 

Gezi protests in Binder’s film seems to function as a tokenistic inclusion 

that ignores the inner complexities of the protests as well as the role of 

LGBTQ activists in the park, it effectively supplements Binder’s 

representation of Istanbul as a site of dissidence and resistance against the 

city’s aggressive neoliberal transformation. Ebru’s exchange with 



younger trans people in Gezi park and her friendship with Didem (a young 

trans person who recently moved to Istanbul) provide a narrative closure 

that suggests the continuity of the queer struggle and the hope that it will 

persist across generations.  

 

In his incisive discussion of “image ethics” in post-Stonewall lesbian and 

gay documentary film, Thomas Waugh suggests that a generation of 

lesbian and gay documentary film “past the stages of self-recognition and 

of self-valorisation” should prioritize “an ethical imperative [that is] the 

kind of self-analysis, self-criticism, self-evaluation necessary to any 

healthy community” (2011, 203). According to Waugh, “confusion over 

audience goals on the part of filmmakers, or the appeal to multiple or 

overlapping audiences” may lead lesbian and gay documentary practice to 

avoid presenting inner-community conflicts and to accommodate a kind 

of pluralism in representation (2011, 203–217). The transnational address 

in Trans X accommodates a similar risk in representational ethics. 

Applying Waugh’s critique to different geo-temporal registers of 

documentary representation may be ideologically problematic; however, 

the collaboration between Ebru and Maria Binder in Trans X Istanbul 

could have resolved the absence of self-analysis in the film by reflecting 

on the inner tensions of the trans community, and thus addressing the 

messiness of sexual dissidence within the local context, rather than 

presenting a uniform, and perhaps globally more intelligible, struggle and 

solidarity against transphobia. 

 



Documentary artivism, the politics of sampling, and strategic 
diversity in Gabrielle Le Roux’s Proudly Trans in Turkey (2012)  
In his exploration of contemporary art’s relation to cultural alterity in its 

various ethnographic turns, Hal Foster critiques the figure of “the artist as 

ethnographer” and proposes a “parallactic work that attempts to frame the 

framer as he or she frames the other,” in order to eliminate ideological 

patronage or a “reductive over-identification with” and “a murderous 

disidentification from” the other (1996, 203). Such a notion of a self-

framing artist with a parallactic gaze should incorporate “a multiscalar 

consciousness that reflects on the productions and constructions of scale 

within the mechanism by which contemporary art’s so-called 

internationalism produces simultaneously the (local) other and the 

(global) political” (Çakırlar 2013, 687). Noting the medium-specific focus 

of Foster’s critical framework, namely site-specific installation art, 

George Marcus argues that the ethnographic fieldwork that film/video and 

theatre—as medium—could appropriate is less vulnerable to Foster’s 

critique and “not as easily assimilated as the cultural capital of more 

powerful and sponsoring institutions” (2010, 87). In this regard, the 

contemporary formations of multi- and trans-media documentary 

practices deserve particular attention in terms of the ways in which they 

reconfigure art, ethnography, and screen activism, and offer an alternative 

to the globally hyper-commodified space of contemporary arts and its 

valuation of the ethnographic through the engagement with transnational 

capital. In this regard, practices of digital artivism, which “signifies work 

created by individuals who see an organic relationship between art and 

activism” and employs “a form of political activism that seeks egalitarian 



alliances and connections across difference [within a cross-media setting 

of convergence]” (Sandoval and Latorre 2008, 83), function as a 

contemporary mode of creative expression responding effectively to the 

intersections between art, ethnography, and documentary.     

 

Gabrielle Le Roux’s Proudly Trans in Turkey (2012) is a multimedia 

project of documentary artivism which its producers present as “a cultural 

intervention for social justice inspired by, created in collaboration with, 

and dedicated to the courage of trans and gender-variant people in Turkey 

and other parts of the world.” Realized with the support of Istanbul 

LGBTT, Pembe Hayat, Amnesty International Turkey, The Human 

Resource Development Foundation, and the Consulate of the Netherlands, 

the project consists of 17 paintings and 18 videos by Le Roux, as well as 

transcriptions of in-depth interviews with trans and intersex people 

responding to open-ended, semi-structured questions on identity, 

sexuality, religion, and hate crimes in Turkey. This section will explore 

Le Roux’s discourse of representation in her collaborative ethnographic 

approach, which Ortega identified as of “a pedagogic dispositive … 

because of [the project’s] mid-way position between art and activism, 

personal account and collective memory, and also between diverse 

geopolitical and intercultural contexts of production and enunciation” 

(2014, 88).      

 

Le Roux’s primary focus on trans activists in this collaborative project 

deserves particular attention. Rather than attempting to entirely contain 

the trans identity under the national referent of Turkey, the project’s core 



aim is to work with activists and address their struggle by creating a 

horizontal ethnographic setting where Le Roux’s role as 

artist/ethnographer is reciprocated by the activists as interlocutors of 

knowledge and experience, rather than objects of information and 

representation. In this sense, though operating within a transnational 

human rights framework, the project’s focus on activism and its discourse 

of sampling prioritizes struggle and empowerment over victimhood. 

Rather than being framed as passive recipients of global sexual politics 

and its mandates of progress or liberation, the participants are presented 

as subjects who claim ownership of their struggle in Turkey and its 

regional political intricacies. Their responses to the open-ended questions 

shape the 18 videos, which do not necessarily reveal to the viewer a trans 

community with a coherent identity, but an ideologically diverse network 

of connectivity, solidarity, and intersectional politics. A selection of these 

questions are as follows:    

 

How old are you?  

How do you describe your gender identity? 

How do hate crimes affect you? 

Who and what qualities do you find attractive?  

What is the role of religion and spirituality in your life?  

What would like to share about your story? 

How would you describe the state of trans people in Turkey?  

What is your occupation? How does your gender affect your work? 

What is your dream job? 

What repressive things would you like to see changed?  



What motivated you to get involved in trans activism?  

Who were your role models as youth?  

What are your dreams and inspirations?  

Who are your family, friends and supporters?  

Why did you choose to be a part of this project and whom do you 

want it to reach?  

What doors did your gender identity open or close for you?  

(AI Turkey 2012)  

   

The activists’ responses to these questions, which are inter-cut within a 

talking-head format, demonstrates Le Roux’s representational framework, 

which can be considered as a form of “strategic diversity.” Not necessarily 

reiterating the generic register of confessional documentary, the responses 

used in these videos show the differences among the subjects’ gender and 

sexual identifications, family values, faith or religious beliefs, ethnic and 

class backgrounds, ages, professions, political ideals, and personal 

aspirations. This diversity also invites the viewer to a dynamic scalar 

register of interpretation that shifts from personal to regional/national to 

global. This decolonized feminist setting of collaboration invests in the 

very failure of closure, and the refusal of discursive containment, the 

productivity of which occurs with the deliberate crossings of fiction, 

storytelling, and ethnography (Visweswaran 1994).    

 

In describing their gender identity, some of the participants claim 

ownership of “womanhood.” Others are more thorough in their 

descriptions of why they identify as a trans man or a trans woman. Some 



participants, however, stress the ways in which they acquire an identity as 

a political choice, despite their reluctance to reproduce normative gender 

categories. Reflecting on their sexual orientation, some participants give 

a clear account of their heterosexuality, while others describe their 

versatility in object choice or refrain from defining their orientation in a 

gender-specific way. In her playful response, Sema says: “I like human 

beings and to me there are two types of people: those who attract me and 

those who don’t. So I’m attracted to those who attract me and I’m not 

attracted to those who don’t attract me.” (AI Turkey 2012)  

  

Commenting on the role of religion and spirituality in their lives, the 

participant activists reflect on their family backgrounds and their current 

approach to faith. Their backgrounds range from conservative Muslim 

families to more liberal/secular ones. While the majority of responses 

range from identification with atheism and deism to identification with 

Islam, most of the participants clearly state that the idea of a religion 

contradicts their being and their happiness. Şevval says:  

 

The environment I grew up in wasn’t religious. … I think that 

religious pressure and prejudices as well as the radical belief are 

the grounds for a big part of the tragedy that the world sees. The 

traditional family structure is also nourishing a lot of bad things. 

Acquiring a binary gender system as well as categorizations such 

as black–white, good–bad, sin–moral are fruits of that. These affect 

us a lot. … I identified myself as an atheist at the age of nineteen 



relying on the level of intellect I had at the time. Since then, there 

is no religion in my life. (AI Turkey 2012) 

 

Some other participants, however, draw a distinction between Islam as 

religion and Islam as a geopolitical ideological construct. These 

participants express their discomfort about the ways in which Islam is 

experienced on a sociocultural level. Selay says: 

 

I believe in God and Islam. I always open my hand for God and 

pray. I believe in our prophet. But I definitely don’t believe in what 

they call Islam now in 2011. If this is Islam, then I am not a 

Muslim. Lynch, abuse, murder … these are what’s going on. But 

Islam is the most tolerant religion. You shall not abuse anyone, you 

shall not despise anyone, you shall not outcast anyone. … This is 

what I know of Islam. That is the religion I believe in. (AI Turkey 

2012)    

 

A similar diversity is at work in the participants’ responses to questions 

on the ways in which they relate to family, transnational solidarity, and 

work. Although the level of belonging to their biological families vary, 

most of the participants have a strong sense of community, friendship, and 

solidarity, which they prioritise as family. “What brings us together may 

be politics but we share an emotional bond too,” says Şevval, explaining 

her conception of family (AI Turkey 2012). Referring to the precarity of 

trans people, some participants explain how they need to re-appropriate 

“family” and invest in alternative forms of kinship within their own 



community. However, in some interviews, the participants also 

demonstrate a strong sense of a transnational solidarity as a crucial part of 

their values of activism. “No matter where we are on this world, we TTs 

[transvestites and transsexuals] are the biggest family,” says Belgin (AI 

Turkey 2012). Similarly, Sinem explains why the potential global reach 

of Le Roux’s project matters to her:  

 

I would like this exhibition to reach out to as many trans people as 

possible, and raise awareness in them about trans activism. There 

are about ten thousand trans people in Turkey but the activists 

make up to barely fifty people. … Trans people have a fear of 

taking political action. … It might be encouraging to see other trans 

people fighting for their rights. The murder of David Kato affects 

me too. I cried for him. If the struggle of a Turkish trans person can 

be seen somewhere in Africa, South America, or Bangladesh, the 

trans, the sex-workers, the human rights activists can feel a little 

inspiration and come out knowing there are many others like them. 

(AI Turkey 2012)    

 

Talking about their occupations and professional backgrounds, the 

majority of participants consider sex work as an occupation which 

functions almost as a forced option for trans women due to the structural 

homophobia and transphobia in Turkey. However, in parallel to the 

strategic diversity Le Roux seems to target in this project, the attitudes in 

the participants’ responses to sex work vary as well. While some 

participants consider sex work as the only way for them to earn a living, 



others express their sense of pride and empowerment as sex workers, and 

argue that it should be acknowledged, rather than stigmatized, as a form 

of labour. Although the majority of trans women in this project have sex 

work in their personal history, a fair number of them now work in human 

rights organizations.  

 

The ethic of collaborative ethnography, the primary address aimed at 

activists, and the strategic diversity in Le Roux’s artivist practice intervene 

in “a politics of pity … [that] situates the sufferer as passive and the one 

who observes the suffering as obliged to act” (Kara and Reestorff 2015, 

5). Besides the content and Le Roux’s discourse of representation, the 

project also generates a multimedia platform. It is exhibited as an 

installation containing the compilation of video interviews and Le Roux’s 

paintings of each participant. In addition, the videos have been published 

via the Youtube account of Amnesty International Turkey. The transcripts 

of the interviews (and additional materials, including the first-person story 

of the intersex activist Belgin and interviews with three parents of trans 

people) are made available in the exhibition monograph published online 

on the project’s page on Tumblr (see Le Roux 2012).    

 

Le Roux’s portrait paintings, as part of the project, contributes to her 

discourse of documentary artivism which, through documenting the 

activists themselves, pursues a match between form and content. Le Roux 

incorporates a selection of the participants’ own words into each painting 

and makes their bodies part of their own slogans, which could also be seen 

as an attempt to create a collaborative setting in the process of portraiture. 



Refusing to position herself as an artist who “gives voice to and empowers 

people whose voices are not heard” (Le Roux and Şeker 2013, 259; my 

translation), Le Roux notes that her choice to make portrait paintings as 

part of the stories told in the first person is a way for her to show her 

personal respect and admiration for the courage of people standing against 

prejudice and injustice (Le Roux 2012, 142).   

 

My account of Le Roux’s methodological approach in Proudly Trans in 

Turkey resonates considerably with Whiteman’s coalition model, which 

proposes ways of understanding and interpreting the political impact of 

activist documentary films and videos. Such interpretation, according to 

Whiteman, must “incorporate (a) the production as well as the distribution 

process; (b) the full range of potential impact on producers, activist 

organizations, and decision makers; and (c) the efforts of social 

movements to create and sustain alternative spheres of public discourse” 

(2004, 51–52). Le Roux’s collaborative ethnographic framework and 

multimedia approach facilitate a notion of political effect/impact that 

“directs our attention to the potentially important role of activist groups, 

initially as participants in the production process and then more 

importantly as catalysts in the distribution process, when documentary 

films become tools available to activist groups as they seek political 

impact” (Whiteman 2004, 51).   

 

The ethics of collaboration, as well as the focus on activism as the primary 

documentary subject, in both Binder’s Trans X Istanbul and Le Roux’s 

Proudly Trans in Turkey, demonstrate critical efforts to articulate a 



discourse of representation that goes beyond the global humanitarian 

framings of victimhood in conventional rights-based documentaries. 

While these projects demonstrate powerful interventions in the hegemonic 

conventions of the ethnographic gaze—which appropriates others through 

inventing an authentic foreignness—the presentation of the cultural 

alterity on screen still seems to prioritize a global/transnational gaze (by 

critiquing it from within) rather than various modes of a local/regional 

gaze. Avoiding a critical look at the inner tensions and conflicts of 

LGBTQ activism in Turkey, these projects choose to represent a 

community of people whose political struggle and personal empowerment 

need to be acknowledged and celebrated globally. This investment in 

global intelligibility may be said to risk, if not dilute, the ethical 

accountability of its regional political impact. 

 

Coming out and instrumental parenthood in Can Candan’s My 
Child (2013) 
The post-2000s consolidation of the LGBTQ activist movement, the 

increased public visibility of LGBTQ cultures, and the proliferation of 

discourses on gender and sexuality in contemporary Turkey could be 

taken as symptoms of the early, inclusive years of the AKP’s (Justice and 

Development Party) governance and its “conservative-liberal synthesis” 

(Birdal 2013, 120). However, the ideological ground of the LGBT 

movement “significantly challenged [this synthesis] … and reveal[ed] the 

fault-line between a liberal narrative based on universal human rights and 

democracy, and a conservative narrative based on particular values and 



identities” (Birdal 2013, 120; see also Çakırlar and Delice 2012). In his 

detailed analysis on the ways in which LGBTQs operate, increasingly, as 

the “constitutive others” of AKP’s political model, Birdal argues as 

follows:  

 

While politicians must respond to these demands of identity 

politics, they must do so without alienating and othering certain 

identity groups. Thus, in order to maintain social peace, 

conservative democracy needs to create a pluralistic political 

environment in which all identity groups feel mutual respect. This 

environment is reinforced by “national values” (milli değerler), a 

central pillar of Turkish conservatism. This reliance on a set of 

substantive values is the crux of conservative democracy’s 

incompatibility with liberal democracy (2013, 120–1). 

 

As the obsession with “national values” in Turkish politics has 

consistently accommodated references to “family values” and “general 

morals” in various legal constitutions of censorship, misogyny, and 

transphobia/homophobia, the formation of the voluntary support and 

solidarity group LISTAG (Families and Friends of LGBTIs in Turkey) 

facilitated an interesting platform for regional activist practice. It 

mobilises the parents of LGBTQ people in Turkey and subverts the 

conservative discourse of “family values” from within by including 

mothers and fathers of LGBTQ people as active collaborators of the 

LGBTQ movement. Can Candan’s documentary My Child narrates these 



parents’ own “coming out” stories—coming out as parents of LGBTQ 

subjects, and coming out as supporters of LGBTQ activism. 

 

My Child has an episodic narrative structure where the choices of mise-

en-scène and framing, across episodes, register a sense of “coming out” in 

an audiovisual context. The film starts with shots of the families’ living 

rooms—as markers of domestic family settings—where the parents tell 

their stories in front of the camera in a talking-head format. While giving 

an account of their (ethnic and sociocultural) backgrounds and their 

experiences as young mothers and fathers, these parents demonstrate, in 

their storytelling, a critical awareness of the ways in which they, from the 

early years of parenthood, were implicated within a patriarchal 

conservative national culture and its norms of gender/sexuality. Nearly 

half of Candan’s feature contains inter-cut mid-shots of talking heads 

which document the parents’ struggle in coming to terms with their 

children’s sexual and/or gender identity (i.e., homosexuality and/or trans 

identity) and their “coming out.”          

 

The intimate “confessional” setting with talking heads then shifts to a 

vérité framework documenting LISTAG’s social organization as a group, 

including group meetings, workshops with CETAD (Society for Sexual 

Education, Treatment and Research), dinner parties, and Istanbul Pride 

events. In the group meeting, the members discuss issues regarding 

dissemination and organization, including brochures, helplines, training 

workshops for parents of LGBTQs, budget concerns, LISTAG’s 

forthcoming visit to parliament, and potential international networks with 



other groups of parents. The film moves from the meeting to a workshop 

with CETAD, where volunteer psychiatrists provide the parents with 

various definitions of and distinctions between the concepts of sex, 

gender, and sexual orientation, and the ways in which LGBTQ subjects 

could be framed within these identity markers. 

 

The film then moves to a dinner party where LGBTQ activists meet the 

parents and discuss various issues, including hate crimes against gay and 

trans people, the safety of LGBTQs in workplaces and schools, the non-

inclusion of sexual orientation in the constitution, anti-discrimination 

legislation, and the coverage of LGBTQs in the mainstream media. Next, 

the film shows the day of the Istanbul Pride. While preparing their banners 

for the pride march, parents watch the news covering their visit to 

parliament. This is followed by Mehmet’s and Metehan’s comments on 

the transformative power of LISTAG’s presence which, through its 

strategic appropriation of family and parenthood, reinforces the visibility 

of the LGBTQ movement and its demand for rights in the mainstream 

public:  

 

Instead of choosing an easier life in the society, you went there and 

stood in the center. Saying, “Here, we are!” That was a tremendous 

support. We went to the parliament, too. Nobody held our hands 

like that. They could do that only with a mother. (Mehmet in My 

Child [Candan 2013]) 

 



Two years ago, at the Pride March, there were two young men 

passing by. One said to the other: “The faggots are walking again 

… Wait, look at that man’s banner! It says ‘my son is homosexual.’ 

What a father! Bravo! I appreciate honesty.” I saw something melt 

away there. The guy’s discourse changed in two seconds! 

(Metehan in My Child [Candan 2013])    

   

There is a performative element in the ways in which Candan deploys an 

audiovisual narrative trajectory throughout My Child to provide a match 

between the documentary form and the parents’ stories of “coming out” 

(and of becoming activists). Starting with the mid-shots of talking heads 

in the intimate domestic settings of the parents’ living rooms, and ending 

with the crane shot of the Istanbul Pride march in Taksim, My Child 

narrates the parents’ gradually expanding relationality: the filmic form 

registers, in enacting, their own “coming out” story. The accelerating 

rhythm of the montage and the use of camera, sound, and mise-en-scène 

function as aesthetic tools to (i) mimic the politicized shift from the private 

(family/individual/closet/shame) to the public 

(streets/community/liberation/pride) and (ii) reflect LISTAG’s urge to 

grow, expand, raise awareness, and create change.     

 

In addition to the textual and formal operation of My Child as a 

documentary that accommodates an ethnographic drive to present a 

solidarity group (rather than a clearly defined community), the register of 

the film’s production and circulation deserves particular attention in order 

to understand its regional political impact. The project owes its success to 



its initial crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo, which became “a 

transformative apparatus in its public relations work” (Koçer 2015, 238). 

Comparing the project with Whiteman’s coalition model, Koçer argues 

that My Child’s crowdfunding not only paved the way for institutional 

donations, including those from Amnesty International, the British 

Embassy, and the Consulate of the Netherlands, but also “further 

engendered a social space that circumscribed the film’s audience [who are 

transformed] into an active public … through the circulation of discourse 

about [the film’s] collective financing in social and traditional media” 

(2015, 240). This collective ownership of the project turned My Child into 

a political instrument for the major opposition parties: the film was 

screened in Ankara as part of LISTAG’s visit to parliament, which 

enhanced the group’s visibility in the media and triggered further 

dialogues with parents from various locations in Turkey. While the 

multimedia platform of artivism in Le Roux’s Proudly Trans in Turkey 

resonates with Whiteman’s coalition model through its discourse of 

collaboration, spectatorial access, and representational diversity, My Child 

accommodates further potentials of political impact: by investing in the 

strategic value of non-LGBTQ parents of LGBTQ people, the film’s 

visibility in the media helped LISTAG expand its networks of parents, 

nationally and globally.  

 

The ethical accountability, the documentary/ethnographic gaze, and the 

dynamic of identity politics in My Child do not easily compare to Trans X 

Istanbul and Proudly Trans in Turkey, simply because Candan’s film 

prioritises a portrayal of a group of parents rather than a particular LGBTQ 



community in Turkey. Documenting the organization of a group of 

“catalyst-actors” rather than the actual actors of LGBTQ activism in a 

particular national context, My Child (as an instrumental discursive filmic 

text/object) (i) bypasses the issues and risks of a unitary LGBTQ 

representation and its ethical accountability in a local–global framework, 

(ii) becomes a catalyst media form itself, and thus (iii) facilitates a 

potential to grow and confuse its audiences within its intersectional 

framework. Although it has been screened in not only particular local 

events in various regions of Turkey (including Ankara, Artvin, Bursa, 

Diyarbakır, Kayseri, Samsun, Tunceli, and Van) but also various 

international film festivals as well as academic events, My Child as a 

project has prioritized its potential community-making impact in a 

regional context. Rather than adapting a global discourse of LGBTQ 

politics into a particular regional–national context, the film’s point of 

departure is the local. Thus, it expands from within the local, as it 

addresses the ways in which the regional organization of solidarity 

networks could result in creative intersectional discourses of queer 

dissidence—by politically appropriating and subverting ideologies of 

nation, tradition, religion, and family. 

 

Conclusion 
Through the analysis of three documentary projects, this study explores 

the ways in which the complex regional/local formations of sexual 

dissidence emerge, if not being instrumentalized, as objects of various 

ethnographic gazes and inquiries. Questioning the ways in which these 



documentaries tackle issues of access, political impact, spectatorial 

address, and the global and local complexities of sexual politics, this 

discussion demonstrated possible ways in which various forms/styles of 

documentary could contest, negotiate, and re-invent the ethnographic 

constructions of community and identity. Capitalising upon the 

geopolitics, ethics, and aesthetics of documentary mediation in regional 

and transnational contexts of academic/artistic production, this study 

explores the critical yet shifting meanings of “pride” and “empowerment” 

in LGBTQ documentary practice. Exposing the spectator to intersectional 

LGBTQ politics and its actors, the three case studies in this project provide 

a platform from which one could explore the limits and potentials of 

treating documentary subjects as active interlocutors of community and as 

performers of ethnographic knowledge. Binder’s focus on the 

intersectional operations of queerness, class, and neoliberal politics of 

urban regeneration in Trans X Istanbul, Le Roux’s ethnographic orienting 

of trans activism through “strategic diversity” in Proudly Trans in Turkey, 

and the inter-regional mobility in Candan’s making of My Child as a filmic 

object of activism demonstrate various possibilities and political 

paradoxes of representing LGBTQ activism in both regional and 

transnational registers of documentation and address.   

 

Nick Mai suggests that the global politics of sexual humanitarianism 

“recreate[s] the notion of a unified, West-centric and hierarchical 

humanity around essentialized and moralised understandings of 

secularism, gender and sexuality” (2014, 176). Sexual humanitarianism, 

according to Mai, “acts as a form of symbolic governance … by separating 



the extreme victimhood of targeted others from a moralized, globalised 

and unified humanity,” which “prevents [the privileged] citizens of the 

global North … from reflecting on their own increasing exploitability, 

commodification and alienation in neoliberal times” (2014, 176–7). In this 

sense, the transnational LGBTQ documentaries, within their various 

textual, discursive, and political operations, bear contradictory ideological 

affinities. While these practices accommodate the potential to intervene in 

the global symbolic governance of sexual humanitarianism, they also run 

the risk of reproducing its discourse of victimhood. Schoonover and Galt 

open a similar critical debate that addresses queer world cinema’s 

potential to “elaborate new accounts of the world, offering alternatives to 

embedded capitalist, national, hetero- and homonormative maps; revising 

the flows and the politics of world cinema; and forging dissident scales of 

affiliation, affection, affect, and form” (2016, 5). Resonating with this take 

on “queer worlding,” but departing from its comparative ethic of 

sampling-from-the-world, this article strategically fixes the geographic 

reference in its sampling/exemplification and then explores the 

geopolitical operations of its regional/transregional documentary 

references in terms of affiliation, address, representation, and 

ethnographic framing. 

 

Acknowledgements: 

 

This work is dedicated to the memory of Zeliş Deniz, Boysan Yakar, and 

Mert Serçe, who lost their lives in a car accident in 2015. Boysan and Zeliş 

have been inspiring and courageous figures of LGBTQ activism in 



Turkey, whose generous and fiercely inclusive queer work gave hope and 

strength to many people in the queer community. I also would like to thank 

Maria Binder, Gabrielle Le Roux, Can Candan, Metehan Özkan, and 

Sema Yakar for the generous support they have offered me for this study. 

 

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