THE AFTERLIFE OF GENDER: Sovereignty, Intimacy, and Muslim Funerals of Transgender People in Turkey

Family and sexual/gender difference play significant roles in the organization of Sunni Muslim rituals of death, practices of mourning, and discourses of grief in Turkey. In these ritual practices, family members hold obligations and rights to the deceased, including washing, shrouding, burying, and praying for the body. These funeral practices represent the dead body in strictly gendered ways. However, when the deceased is a transgender person, his/her/their body can open a social field for negotiation and contestation of sexual and gender difference among religious, medico‐legal, familial, and LGBTQ actors. Addressing the multiplicity of such struggles and claims over the deceased body of transgender persons, this article presents a mortuary ethnography that is formed through entanglements between Islamic notions of embodiment, familial order, gender and sexuality regimes, and legal regulations around death in Turkey. Rather than taking sex, gender, and sexual difference as given categories, I address them as a social field of constant and emergent contestation, which in turn marks the gendered and sexual limits of belonging in regimes of belief, family, kinship, and citizenship, and in practices of mourning and grief. I argue that death at the thresholds of sexual and gender regimes presents a space to discover novel connections between sovereignty and intimacy and to examine their coconstitution through the registers of violence endured by the gendered/sexed body.