Queerly Turkish: Queer Masculinity and National Belonging in the Image of Zeki Müren

Abstract

This article offers an explanation for the lasting appeal of Turkish cross-dressing singer Zeki Müren (1931–96). His performances on stage, film, and television interweave avant-garde, modern, and old-fashioned elements. The success of these performances registers Turkish society’s ambivalence about modernity, masculinity, and sexuality. Müren’s queer performances conjure an imaginary public that spans the divisions within Turkish culture, such as that between nostalgia for the Ottoman past and aspirations for national belonging based on European models. The article concludes by examining some recent appropriations of Müren’s image, to show that Müren continues to represent an imaginary, unified Turkish society.

Notes

1. The punitive violence meted out to rape victims is a frequent subject of Turkish journalism and popular entertainment. The 1972 Turkish melodrama Namus (meaning “sexual honor”) portrays the self-destructive measures that a woman might go to in order to preserve her namus after being raped. The protagonist first tries to persuade her rapist to marry her. Then, she hides the incident from her family even after he abandons her in Istanbul by selling her into prostitution. She avenges herself by killing him when he is on the verge of raping her sister—and when she herself is dying of complications from stress and medical neglect.

2. Stokes notes that Turks did not hear Müren’s voice as sounding queer, only very nazik (polite) (64).

3. Persian and Turkish both use gender neutral pronouns (Tekelioğlu; Andrews and Kalpakli).

4. Here I am adapting Josh Kun’s notion of “audiotopia,” which is a way of listening to popular music and identifying with it that “makes audible racialized communities who have been silenced by the nationalist ear” (Kun 25).

5. The prevalance of this plot pattern was confirmed in conversation with Berkin Solak.

6. Müren would comment later that (devout) Anatolians believed that he had mastered religious chants and even learned to recite the Koran from memory, but he claims that the movie Katip was his only experience with religious chanting (see Bengi 144).

7. Düğün Gecesi follows a similar structure: Müren plays a contemporary singer. While “Zeki” is young, his father marries him to a well-off farmer’s daughter, whose provincialism he abhors. She disappears and travels to America, while he builds his career and falls in love with another woman (played by Ajda Pekkan, now a major Turkish pop star). Years later, his wife disguises her name and appearance and approaches Zeki as an enterprising business woman offering him “patronage” while gradually seducing him away from his Istanbul girlfriend. Derya Bengi rightly notes that in this case the “other woman” is the Istanbul girlfriend, not the producer (Bengi 137). In this rare case, the “other woman” is less wealthy than the first.

8. Evidently, Müren saw himself as exceptionally privileged. His friend Göksenin Çakmak reports Müren walking up an unknown man at the beach and grabbing his genitals. He said to the man, “I am the only one in Turkey who they let do this. No one else is allowed” (Çınar).

9. The Turkish government does not outlaw homosexual acts, but it disallows homosexuals from performing mandatory military service. This “prohibition” is only enforced, however, if one procures an amateur pornographic video of oneself engaged in anal sex.