Homonationalism and Western progressive narrative: locating ‘conservative heartlands’ with Zenne Dancer (2012) and its Western reviews

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the Turkish film Zenne Dancer (2012), which is largely based on what has been called a first gay honor killing in Turkey. We employ a framing analysis to both the film's content and its Western reviews to compare how different media texts frame the murder. The results indicate that while both the film and the reviews recognize tradition, understood here as native and archaic values as well as Islamic religion, as a key factor behind the murder, they locate this tradition quite differently: the film relegates it to the eastern Turkey, and thus implicitly to Kurds, while the reviews tend to extend it to the entire country or even the whole Middle East. We relate these results to the Western progressive narrative that positions the West as a civic and moral ideal that could be achieved by others over time. In particular, we employ Puar's concept of homonationalism to show how different media texts challenge or exploit the Western imperative to ‘come out’ and what effects it has for the East–West juxtapositions.

Keywords:

• film
• homonationalism
• Islam
• Middle East
• Turkey
• orientalism

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Evren Savcı, Tim Savenije, Ahmet Gürata, Çağla Karabağ as well as the anonymous reviewers and editors of the Asian Journal of Communication for their insightful comments on the first draft of this article.

Notes on contributors

Lukasz Szulc is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Kevin Smets is a postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Department of Communication Studies, University of Antwerp, Belgium.

Notes

1. The film was officially released in 2012, but screened a few times already in 2011 (including at the Pink Life Queer Fest in Ankara in November 2011), which explains why some of the reviews in our sample date from 2011.

2. Ahmet's murder was not the first gay honor killing, but the first one to be discussed so widely in national and international media. In her work on ‘sexual others’ and the Turkish nation, Savcı (2011, pp. 134–163) makes an insightful analysis of the discourses surrounding the case.

3. For further examples see Arslan (2011) and Dönmez-Colin (2014, pp. 263–264).

4. The bear subculture gathers large and/or hairy gay and bisexual men as well as their admirers.