Inking The Body: Perspectives On Tattooing In Turkey’s Queer Communities

Official URL: https://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b3199996

This thesis aims to explore the narratives of tattooed LGBTQ+ individuals in Turkey, examining their experiences of embodiment and queerness through the lens of their body art. It attempts to reveal the transformative capacity of tattooing as a uniquely fluid practice, from the initial creation of the tattoo to the experience of daily life in a tattooed body. Despite the context in which both queerness and tattooing face significant stigmatization within hegemonic power systems, tattoos can open opportunities for individual self-making and imagining queer futurity. The research is based on six in-depth interviews with tattooed, self-identified queer people, two visits to tattoo studios in Istanbul as an observer, and extensive academic review. The tattoo studio is examined as a place of both harm and healing with the goal of making sense of the conflicting encounters that may occur in these localities and how these encounters are understood by my participants. Analyzing the symbols and meanings attached to tattoos, the thesis presents some of the ways people employ tattooing to affirm their queerness, including the under-studied idea of tattoos without narratives. Lastly, I consider the ways tattoos interact with conceptualizations of flexible temporality and aging as a queer person. This thesis ultimately aims to present diverse experiences of queer embodiment and demonstrate how tattoos create new possibilities for each queer existence.