Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam

Speaker: 
Professor Evren Savci, Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Yale University
Event Date: 
January 26, 2024
Event Time: 
12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
2239 Lane Hall
Event Accessibility : 
Lane Hall: Ramp and elevator access at the E. Washington Street entrance (by the loading dock). There are accessible restrooms on the south end of Lane Hall, on each floor of the building. A gender neutral restroom is available on the first floor.
Event Tags: 
gender
women's studies

Please save the date for Prof. Evren Savcı's lunchtime book talk "Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam." Lunch will be provided so please RSVP at this link by the end of day Wednesday, January 17, and let us know if you have any dietary restrictions. 

Please note that while the event will be held in person, a Zoom link can be provided on request. Email us by the end of day on 01/25 at rovelsqr@umich.edu or ssaluk@umich.edu and we'll send it to you. 

Abstract:
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 theorizes “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 suggests that sexual liberation movements are the most productive places from which to theorize neoliberal Islam as well as to imagine resistances to it.

Bio:
Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. She is also the co-editor with Rana M. Jaleel of the South Atlantic Quarterly special issue "Transnational Queer Materialism” (January 2024). Her second book project turns to the political economy of monogamy. In it, she discusses the establishment of it as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality, and attends to the current neoliberal incorporation of its alternatives and restoration of its distributive logic. Savcı’s work has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and GLQ, and in several edited collections.