Trans bireylerin öznelliği: Benlik, öteki ve ulus üzerine anlatılar

This thesis analyzes how transgender individuals living in the cosmopolitan city of Istanbul make sense of their gender formation processes. Through the subjective narratives of 11 pre-op MtF transsexuals and 10 homosexual cross-dressers, I argue that there are diverse ways of explaining one?s gender subjectivity that defeat the classifications of the medical field. However, their perceptions of each other feed upon the conventional images of femininity and masculinity. While the cross-dresser informants perceive transsexuals as individuals born into the wrong body, for the transsexual informants the gender subjectivity of cross-dressers proved to be unexplainable. As a general pattern, the transsexual informants tried to distance themselves from the cross-dressers because the latter group is associated with sex work. This study also sheds light upon the both groups? narratives on the encounters with four institutions; the family, the military, the medical field and the nation state. These narratives revealed that these encounters culminated to uneasy and disruptive impacts on the self-images of the both groups. Their narratives demonstrated a multifarious pattern depending on political activism and ethnicity. In both groups, those who participated in the LGBTT movement and those who identified themselves as Kurdish provided subversive narratives on current political debates. Within the complexity of political fabric of Turkey, this study shows that the oppressed groups tend to transgress the limits of the national ideal only through the space created by political activism. Moreover, incorporating the questions of transgender and ethnic identities in understanding the way the discourses of nationalism operate, this thesis contributes to the literature on gender and ethnicity studies.