Heteronational matrix

In a turn that sought to expand the modern approach of doing gender to include the postmodern approach of gender performativity, Deutsch (Reference Deutsch2007) encouraged sociologists to attend to undoing gender (Butler Reference Butler2004), which Deutsch defined as “social interactions that reduce gender difference” (122). Brickell (Reference Brickell2005) discussed how, according to Butler’s theory, “the division between men and women” exists only through the invocation of heterosexuality and that this restrictive invocation must be “undone” (32). Butler (Reference Butler1990) calls this compulsory invocation of heterosexuality vis-à-vis manhood and womanhood the “heterosexual matrix.” Butler defines the heterosexual matrix as a “grid of cultural intelligibility that assumes that for bodies to cohere and make sense there must be a stable sex expressed through a stable gender (masculine expresses male, feminine expresses female) that is oppositionally and hierarchically defined through the compulsory practice of heterosexuality” (208). In other words, within this compulsory heteronormative discourse, a man “to be a man one must be heterosexual and possess ‘manly’ and ‘masculine’ characteristics” (Eslen-Ziya and Koc Reference Eslen-Ziya and Koç2016: 801), and vice versa. However, Vrushali Patil (Reference Patil2018) warned us to be cautious against the “universalizing deployment of the heterosexual matrix regardless of time and space” in gender, sexuality, and queer studies (3).Footnote ²

Butler’s theory influenced many studies within the sociological study of doing gender. However, a close study of these studies published in Gender & Society, the global flagship journal of sociological studies of gender, revealed some nation-bound limitations primarily defined by the US context: First, they abstracted gender from its material environment to the extent of focusing on grocery stores but ignoring the neoliberal state.Footnote ³ Second, they valorized monologism (Fraser Reference Fraser2000: 112) by shifting the focus to only undoing language and discourses as a means to empowerment, with very little attention to how those agencies were crudely crafted by the neoliberal US state.Footnote ⁴ Third, they treated the US as the norm that does not have to be named,Footnote ⁵ manufacturing its own “methodological nationalism,” with its assumptions about agency, and “continually reposition[ing] the United States as arbiter and funnel for the legibility of theory elsewhere, and the arbiter of what is to come, to be learned” and “the prehensive force for everyone else’s future—the arrival point on a transnational journey of progress” (Mikdashi and Puar Reference Mikdashi and Puar2016: 216–217), while highlighting other national contexts. Some exceptions within the "doing gender" literature, typically studies on race or that adopt transnational perspectives, have documented the limitations of the assumptions above, showing how gender is intertwined with the nation and the nation-state,Footnote ⁶ further highlighting nation-bound dynamics at the core of the scholarship.

Consequently, I argue that it is necessary to address methodological nationalism—with its progressive twist—in theories on the social construction of gender, which position the nation either as the norm that does not have to be named or as an exceptional foreign case, regard the nation-state as irrelevant to agency in everyday spaces under liberal states but always present otherwise in states at the geopolitical margins, and treat one’s nation as the endpoint of a transnational journey of progress, in ways that arrest the development of what is to be learned from gender in its immediate environment.

Perception or experience of collectivity or community is intrinsic to nations (Yack Reference Yack2012). “Nation” is a historically dynamic concept used to describe different collectivities not necessarily related only to nation-states. Hampton (Reference Hampton2018) writes that “the centralizing processes of the state or state-building impose new forms of power and organization on traditional communities, overwhelm and appropriate elements of the traditional community of the nation, which it then reinvents in its image” (12). Within the multitude of expressions of collectivities rests either a sense or experience of a “daily plebiscite,” namely, “the affirmation of some form of sharing as a source of mutual connection, rather than from the mere existence of shared ancestors, beliefs, places, and the like” (Yack Reference Yack2012: 48). Yuval-Davis (Reference Yuval-Davis1997) calls the idea that “nation-states” correspond to clear boundaries of nations in one geography “virtually everywhere a fiction” (11). She notes that there are nations without a state, nations spread across different states, and diasporas outside national borders (12–18). Nations also overlap with religion and ethnicity, and Yuval-Davis claims it is “the demand for political sovereignty which separates the ‘Black Nation’ from other ‘black community activists,’ and ones for ‘Khalipha,’ the global nation of Islam, from other committed Muslims” (17). In other words, not only cultural heritage, consisting of affective ties and celebration of ancestry, but also subjective affirmation constitutes a nation (Yack Reference Yack2012). And, ironically, “exclusion” becomes a form of “sharing” for a nation (48). Exclusion happens in many instances of unsharing something, such as gendered affects and gendered constructions in everyday life.

Nira Yuval-Davis (Reference Yuval-Davis1997) writes that women and gender are internal to “reproducing nations, biologically, culturally and symbolically,” but “they are ‘hidden’ in various theorizations of the nationalist phenomena” (2). She argues that “gender relations have proved to be significant in all dimensions of national projects—whether it is the dimension of Staatnation, that is, the gender dimensions of the construction of citizenship; Kulturnation, that is, the gender dimension of the cultural construction of collectivities and their boundaries; or Volknation, in which the control of women’s body is for the control of the actual size of various majority and minority collectivities” (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis1993: 630). The relationship between nation and gender is not static, as nation-states are “being reconfigured in line with cross-border flows of capital, neoliberalism, and intra-, inter-, and extra-state violence” (Kim-Puri Reference Kim-Puri2005: 137), and this relationship extends beyond “the differences between (…) hetero- and homosexuality” (Puri Reference Puri2004: 15). V. Spike Peterson (Reference Peterson1999) reminds us to move beyond “knowledge regimes that privilege positivist binaries” about nationalism and instead foreground the study of “the production and effects of identities/identifications more generally” (36). As Fidelma Ashe (Reference Ashe2019) notes, militarized masculinities are “forged out of and brutalized by the exceptional conditions” of conflict and war (99), just as gender is shaped by the political, economic, and social conditions and contradictions surrounding it. For example, masculinity in the US is “tightly woven into two nationalist imperialist projects such as Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine” (Nagel Reference Nagel, Bulmer and Solomos2019: 117). Even Puritan settler men in colonial New England incorporated femininity and masculinity through practices such as voting, which was seen as intentionally subordinating their own will to God’s, thus feminizing themselves (Lombard Reference Lombard2003: 145), or symbolizing a man’s home as his manhood (156–157), thereby masculinizing and gendering particular social spaces.

Nation-states can work as templates for “assessing group placement” within and sorting out domestic others (Collins Reference Collins2001: 18). Nationalism naturalizes “the hegemony of one collectivity and its access to ideological apparatuses of both state and civil society” over other subordinate collectivities (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis2003: 10). Such national stratifications within are not incidental but structural (Puri Reference Puri2004: 6). Nation-states and nations can materialize in interactional contexts as “mini-nation-states” guaranteeing “homogeneity” in different forms (Collins Reference Collins1998: 68). Nation and nationalism can even “permeate our pleasures and desires” (Puri Reference Puri2004: 5). For both hegemonic and subordinate collectivities and nations, “gendered bodies and sexuality play pivotal roles, as territories, markers and reproducers of the narratives of nations and other collectivities” (Yuval-Davis Reference Yuval-Davis2003: 16). Some examples of this include claiming “national exceptionalism” regarding LGBT freedoms while cloaking over other exclusions within national borders (Moussawi Reference Moussawi2018: 176–187); European nations’ othering of refugees as sexually predatory and undisciplined aggressive threats (Slootmaeckers Reference Slootmaeckers2019: 253); and in the EU, using LGBT freedoms to gain legitimacy over non-EU countries while ending up “intensifying anti-gender resistance” instead (Slootmaeckers Reference Slootmaeckers2020: 357).

The global perceptions of progress as embodied in gendered practices have been critiqued. For example, Puar (Reference Puar2007) proposed the term “homonationalism,” defined as “a facet of modernity and a historical shift marked by the entrance of (some) homosexual bodies as worthy of protection by nation-states, a constitutive and fundamental reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality” (Puar Reference Puar2013: 337). However, Puar also critiques individualistic, confessional practices that distinguish “bad queers” from “good queers” in ways that ignore broader structures. She writes, “homonationalism is not ‘another identity politics, not another way of distinguishing good queers from bad queers, not an accusation, and not a position’” (337).Footnote ⁷ The paradigmatic focus on individuals’ relation to the act of “undoing gender” prioritizes “voice”—particular embodied acts of problematizing gender—thereby sidelining forms of agency that also problematize gendered norms through “silence” (Durgun Reference Durgun2019). My approach addresses these through the nation, as the most immediate context for the social construction of gender in everyday life, and also as the mediator of global and local contradictions.Footnote ⁸ From a feminist materialist lens, even when global finance hegemony exerts influence over traditional territorial sovereignty, women are called upon as “saviours of national economies” in the wake of financial crises (Roberts Reference Roberts2015), which also underscores the structural boundedness of gender to nation as its most immediate context, structurally intertwined with and complementary to the global financial hegemonies.

Building on these dynamic facets of nation and gender, I coin and propose the heteronational matrix as a sociohistorical perspective geared toward analyzing the multidimensional constructions of gender and sexuality embedded in and structured by the contexts and histories of nations and nation-states. Nations, as collectivities based on both mutual sharing and unsharing, shape masculinities and femininities in historically situated ways. For example, Puritan men in colonial New England simultaneously feminized and masculinized themselves in the political sphere (Lombard Reference Lombard2003: 149), guided by historically situated, nation-specific gendered meanings that shaped their actions and interpretations of colonial rulers during the events leading up to the American Declaration of Independence (151, 162). In other words, masculinity and femininity can be reconstructed in particular forms that are intricately related to the historical dynamics of nations as collectivities. A heteronational matrix perspective focuses on the social construction of gender not only through predominant analytical binaries, between masculinity/femininity or heterosexuality/homosexuality, but also on how such differences are woven into the sociohistorical dynamics of collectivities. From this perspective, states have a stake in the social construction of gender in ways that reproduce themselves as “progressive/liberal” in the West and “backward/illiberal” in the East. The interconnectedness of nation and gender also imbues knowledge production. However, the dynamism of gender constructions within collectivities, groups of states, and similar formations reflects particular temporal sharing(s) and unsharing(s) with the Other(s), moving beyond simplified binaries of heteronormativity versus non-normative configurations. Only by attending to the transforming relationship between nation and gender can we recognize how collective social constructions of gender and sexualities take specific forms at particular moments within the “historical dynamics” of nations (Turchin Reference Turchin2018). In conclusion, gender is shaped not only through the doing and undoing of heteronormativity or masculinity/femininity binaries, but also by the material and historical conditions and dynamics of nationhood.

Notes on gender and sexuality in Turkey

Same-sex sexuality and notions of belonging and citizenship in Turkey are deeply embedded in a complex historical and political terrain marked by post-Ottoman anxieties and securitization processes that sought to forge a unified, modern nation-state. The late Ottoman Empire’s encounters with the European International Society shaped postcolonial sensitivities about meeting certain “standards of civilization” (Bilgin and İnce Reference Bilgin and Ince2015: 501), while also prompting the Turkish Republic to systematically pursue a securitized national identity that privileged Sunni Muslim “Turkishness” (İnce Reference Ince2012: 185). Although the Turkish constitution asserts equal citizenship regardless of religion or race, in practice, these ethno-cultural nationalist boundaries have been “arbitrarily inclusive or exclusive depending on context” (Yeğen Reference Yeğen2017: 334; Gökay and Aybak Reference Gökay and Aybak2016; Yıldız and Müller Reference Yıldız and Müller2008), such as language reforms and campaigns like “Citizen, Speak Turkish!” aimed to “draw a contrast between the new secular nation and its religiously oriented past and neighbors” by “stripping” the Turkish language “of its Arabic and Persian loan words” or abolishing the Caliphate and the millet system “to subject all religious communities to the same laws and practices, ending centuries of differential treatment based on religious background” (Goalwin Reference Goalwin2017: 1160). Within this pervasively securitized milieu, same-sex sexuality—while not criminalized—remains a site of moral exclusion and insecurity, as sexual minorities are positioned as latent threats to normative constructions of Turkish identity. This interplay between politics, military, and secularism ultimately created what feminist anthropologist Ayşe Gül Altınay (Reference Altınay2004) calls “a military-nation,” in which military service was associated with a “civilizing mission,” introducing “backward” ethnic, linguistic, cultural and religious groups in Turkey to “civilization” (71) and defining “the contours of hegemonic masculinity” that offer “various rewards for heterosexual, Muslim, Turkish men” (85).

Against this backdrop, the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002, adopting a pro-West, pro-globalization, and pro-big business stance. It condemned the “(military) violence, authoritarianism, and lack of freedom” associated with the statist economy of the Kemalist era and promoted its own approach as one that “represented freedom, with its neoliberal approach” (Savcı Reference Savcı2021: 1–18), “projecting itself as the authentic victim and as (…) excluded by the state” (Lord Reference Lord2018: 239). Previously, the Turkish state followed an unofficial standing policy of ignoring LGBT individuals until 2010 (Hazar Reference Hazar2021), neither criminalizing nor recognizing them until forced to address issues like homosexuality in relation to compulsory military service or sex reassignment surgeries, while also repressing episodes of heightened or unprecedented LGBT visibility, such as the first pride march attempt in 1993. However, after 2010, the AKP government shifted from the Turkish state’s unofficial standing policy of silence on LGBT issues to publicly accusing LGBT activism of being a source of insecurity. In 2010, cabinet members and other AKP officials began attending pro-family and anti-LGBT conferences held by the party’s allies (Arat and Nuňez Reference Arat and Nuňez2017: 15). This turn contrasts with Ottoman history, where laws against sodomy/liwata/same-sex intimacy were rarely enforced beyond monetary punishment, starting from 1539–1541, until the abolition of same-sex criminalization through the adoption of the French penal code in 1854—unlike in the West, where punishment was usually death (Özsoy Reference Ozsoy2021: 1987). The Ottoman and Turkish Republican histories regarding same-sex sexuality, therefore, contradict the current AKP-era state discourse against it.

Modes of patriarchy through which “women’s issues have been articulated into neoliberal politics in post-1980 Turkey” (Coşar and Yeğenoğlu Reference Coşar and Yeğenoğlu2011: 557) include the “Republican patriarchy” of the pre-1980s, which treated women “as emancipated from the clutches of tradition, namely, the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic way of life” (Berktay Reference Berktay, Bora and Gültekin2001: 348–361 in Coşar and Yeğenoğlu Reference Coşar and Yeğenoğlu2011: 558); the Turkish-Islamic synthesis, which presents “an argument for a historically constructed organic connection between Turkishness and Muslimhood” (Güvenc et al. Reference Güvenç1991 in Coşar and Yeğenoğlu Reference Coşar and Yeğenoğlu2011: 559); and the liberal mode, characterized by “liberal patriarchal bargain concerns coming to terms with the competitive free market spirit” (Coşar and Yeğenoğlu Reference Coşar and Yeğenoğlu2011: 560). The AKP’s gender policies can be described as a “neoliberal-conservative patriarchy” with its proliferation of discourses around “nature and the morals of the society, and the natural order of the family” (561). Gender construction and political ideologies are woven together. Similar group boundaries also emerge in the social and political spheres, differentiated by “widely held understandings of Turkey’s national identity” such as Republican Nationalism, Pan-Turkic Nationalism, Western Liberalism, and Ottoman Islamism—the latter predominantly associated with the AKP regime. Ottoman Islamism emphasizes “Sunni-Muslim piety, deference of women, [and] absolute authority” (Hintz Reference Hintz2018: 35–38), while its social purposes include “spreading Islam in the public sphere,” “regaining Ottoman glory,” and stressing the “natural kinship with Muslim peoples”, namely, the global nation of Islam, the Ummah, “whose membership identity is not primarily rooted in ethnicity but in religion” (Giovine Reference Giovine2014: 40).

In the Turkish nation-state ideology, “the hetero-patriarchal family constituted the norm” (Eslen-Ziya and Koç Reference Eslen-Ziya and Koç2016: 799). The Misdemeanors Act (Kabahatler Kanunu), which criminalizes “transfemininity” and sex work, exemplifies “one level of state regulation” that renders these groups “sexually abject and excluded from proper citizenship and belonging in the nation” (Savcı Reference Savcı2021: 88). The contemporary mode of patriarchy under the AKP regime materializes in interactional contexts that position “gay men as not only feminine but also non-nationalist, constituting a double-otherness composed of the two most vulnerable otherizations [both femininity and non-nationalismFootnote ⁹] simultaneously” (Elif Gezgin Reference Gezgin2023: 2087). Similarly, political masculinities in Turkey manifest as distinct but temporary formations—Kurdish, Republican, Ultranationalist, and Political Islamist—that express particular political commitments and identifications (Özbay and Soybakış Reference Özbay and Soybakış2020). Furthermore, gay men seeking legal exemption from compulsory military service must obtain a “rotten report” (çürük raporu) or “pink discharge paper” (pembe tezkere), a process which formerly required visual proof of sexual intercourse as the submissive partner (Biricik Reference Biricik, Kronsell and Svedberg2011: 76). As crystallized in the military, effeminacy in men is considered abject—namely, “abjecting those who are not masculine enough” (Atuk Reference Atuk2019: 131). Moreover, perpetrators of violence against gay or trans victims may receive sentence reductions due to their “good conduct abatement” (iyi hal) and claims of “unjust provocation” (haksız tahrik) based on the victim’s alleged behavior (Homophobia and Transphobia Based Hate Crimes in Turkey 2019 Review 2020: 21). Excluded from full citizenship due to sexuality- and gender-nonconformity-based justifications, gay men find “zones of exception” where they are “tolerated,” whether in the form of specific districts (Ozbay Reference Özbay and Wright2015: 871) or cultural laboratories beyond state control, such as grassroots communities and even fortune-telling practices (Korkman Reference Korkman2015: 212). However, there are states of exception even from within the purview of the AKP leaders and the state, such as trans diva Bülent Ersoy, who weaves nationalism, religion, and moral economy (Altinay Reference Altinay2008) so impeccably that she is an esteemed guest at Erdoğan’s Ramadan iftar dinners at the Presidential Palace, further underscoring the dynamic interplay between nation, gender, and sexuality.

Findings

In the Findings, I analyze how the nation and nation-state shape everyday gender constructions among gay men, highlighting the heteronational matrix beyond masculinity/femininity and homo/hetero binaries. The first subsection examines gender accountability in neighborhoods as mini-nation-states, showing how local and material-national dynamics imbue the everyday social construction of gender. The second explores how individuals negotiate national belonging, ethnicity, religion, and politics under the nation-state as the mediator of material realities. The third focuses on micropolitical resistance, revealing subtle strategies gay men use to navigate and challenge the heteronational matrix.

Gender accountability in neighborhoods as mini-nation-states

In this sub-section, I explore how the nation, the nation-state, and their materialization in interactional contexts shape the everyday practice of “accounting for gender”: becoming a woman or a man in the eyes of others. Specifically, I examine how my respondents approach their most memorable gendered interactions, the frameworks through which they interpret those interactions, and the broader gender order’s imposition on their everyday gendered constructions. I illustrate how the nation, whether as a collective or through the nation-state’s materialization in interactional contexts, imbues gender and sexuality with its particular dynamics. For example, Mirza, a 20-year-old gay man, relocated from a global metropolis to a small conservative city for university. As one of his most memorable experiences, he suddenly exclaimed:

Mirza distances himself from the gendered imposition on his clothing, laughing at the way small-city residents look at his legs and asking, “What is masculinity phenomenon?” In doing so, he acknowledges the local gender order with a mix of recognition and dismay. He distinguishes between the schema through which the townspeople interpret his shorts and the schema through which he understands his own gender embodiment via clothing. This divergence makes him aware of a broader unity under a heteronational matrix: both he and the townspeople ascribe meaning to men’s shorts, albeit through different cultural logics mediated by historical socio-economic conditions.

Mithat, a 27-year-old Christian gay man from an upper-middle-class background, experienced downward mobility within Turkey’s social hierarchy. He moved with his mother and sibling from a secular city to a working-class neighborhood in a global metropolis. Though his close family accepted his sexual orientation, he exercised caution in expressing his religious and sexual identity in the new setting, explaining:

Mithat did not want to lie, so he “let the neighbors believe what they believe” about him. Internally, he negotiated how much to reveal about himself and his family, prioritizing their safety and avoiding disturbance. However, he remained acutely aware of his interpellation as both heterosexual and Muslim, identities he assumed were central to belonging in this collectivity. By withholding both, he and his neighbors implicitly marked their boundaries, positioning themselves as members of different collectivities within a heteronational matrix. Within this welter, collectivities such as Mithat’s neighbors draw group boundaries through specific forms of sharing and unsharing national symbols of manhood and womanhood. Meanwhile, Mithat navigates this community by withholding crucial information, a sign of agency negotiated amid collective pressures of the nation. In short, Mithat is materially situated in the historical dynamics of the collectivity, which calls for a reading of gender beyond masculinity-femininity binaries.

As the relationship between the state, capitalism, and sexuality shifts toward neoliberal conservatism, the neighborhood, as a mini nation-state, responds to the call of the nation reimagined by the AKP-dominated state discourse in the post-2010s. Ulaş, a 22-year-old gay university student, faced significant familial challenges after coming out. While studying and residing in a global metropolis, he initially believed physical distance would mitigate conflicts with his family over his identity. However, the recent national shift to neoliberal and conservative anti-gender politics manifested unexpectedly during one of his walks home:

Ulaş experiences a bifurcated self, shaped not only by heteronormativity but also by his material entrenchment in a heteronational matrix that compels him to navigate conflicting impulses. He recognizes the rise of chauvinistic religious discourse of the post-2010 Turkish ideological assemblage, recalling how a man shouted, “These are faggots. It is lawful [according to the Quran] to kill them,” after attempting to run over him and his boyfriend. In response, he rationalizes the situation, stating, “I did not have any behavior or clothing different from a hetero man!”, a critical and cynically stated node of comparison for men under the particular anti-gender discourse of the post-2010s. At the same time, he engages in a street-level moral calculus, acknowledging, “I need to be a bit more closeted in this neighborhood if I want to remain alive!” However, while deliberately negotiating closetedness as a form of passivity, he also exercises agency, acting swiftly to protect himself and his boyfriend: “I held his arm and pulled him back … we had to escape running!” Both agentic and closeted/passive, he envisions a future where he can resolve this tension, moving to another neighborhood where he can at least abandon one of these bifurcating behaviors, whether it be imitating the “hetero man” of the national subconscious while having undone heteronormativity in thought or running even when not at fault while you are also interpellated by the heteronational matrix. As a result, the heteronational matrix imposes a set of gendered and sexual dilemmas on Ulaş, who has long undone heteronormativity in thought but now contends with his entanglement within the heteronational matrix.

Referencing the national in the micropolitical sphere of everyday gender

In this subsection, through narratives of diverse individuals—rural Kurdish migrants, urban workers, secular liberals, and religious believers—I explore how their gender performances and sexual identities are negotiated amid the overlapping pressures of national belonging, linguistic and ethnic markers, community dynamics, and political ideologies. I analyze these negotiations under the nation-state as a mediator of materializing global and local contradictions. İnan, a Kurdish gay man, grew up in a village in a predominantly Turkish, conservative rural city, where his family had migrated for better opportunities and to escape clashes between state security forces and Kurdish nationalists. Since his village had no school, he commuted daily to a nearby predominantly Turkish town with other Kurdish children. Reflecting on his school years, he recalled navigating ethnic, linguistic, and socio-economic divisions among his Kurdish peers, the town’s outgroup, within the predominantly Turkish school and the broader socio-political landscape of Turkey, saying:

İnan notes that he was interpellated as “the girl of the class” due to his gender nonconformity. However, adding another dimension to his social positioning, he highlights how “knowing better Turkish” shielded him from exclusion by his Kurdish peers, while “being a nice kid helping every [student] with their courses” provided a layer of protection among his Turkish peers. In other words, everyday gender was strategically intertwined with broader social dynamics that shifted alongside the nation. Within these relationships, İnan recognizes that he is expected to take on alternative roles—leveraging intelligence, kindness, and sociability to navigate exclusion—even if he does not believe such performances should be a prerequisite for equal treatment as a gender-nonconforming child. He ultimately seeks to survive by utilizing whatever tactics of survival remain viable within the national framework. Thus, while İnan rationalizes the material conditions and strategies necessary for survival in a heteronational matrix, he does not fully internalize them, leaving open the possibility of resistance. The issue, then, is not merely undoing heteronormativity—something İnan carefully does in retrospect—but reckoning with his own material entanglement in the collectivity called the nation, which holds explicit or implicit stakes in everyday gender and sexuality.

The stakes that nation-states and nations hold in the social construction of gender encompass political and ideological dimensions and are intrinsic to their social and political reproduction. Tan, a 21-year-old student residing in City North, works during the summers to support his academic expenses. Over time, he has developed an increasing awareness of the mistreatment faced by LGBT individuals. He recounts a specific interaction from his summer job in the tourism sector, saying:

Tan regulates his visibility, such as by being “out to receptionist girls but not the hotel manager,” based on context and audience. In other words, he navigates social life while constantly monitoring how visible he can be to others. Regardless of this self-regulation as a means of engaging with social life as a gendered person, he also noted that he could “defend trans women and homosexuals” and be defiant in the face of direct misinformation. However, such interactions interpellate him as “homosexual” simply because he “defended them” in a way deemed uncharacteristic of a heterosexual man. In other words, the heteronational matrix associates advocacy for LGBTI+ rights with not belonging to heterosexuality as constituted in Turkey. Here, sexuality and gender—homosexuality versus heterosexuality, masculinity versus femininity—are reconstructed not only through heteronormativity but also politically within the nation, such that particular ideas one supports in the national context, rather than one’s visible sexual acts, can trigger an inquisition into one’s sexuality. For example, within the specific historical dynamics of a nation, defending the human rights of abjected groups can, in some cases, prompt an inquiry into one’s manhood and even sexuality.

The social and political reproduction of nations and nation-states also requires nation-bound normativity concerning what is expected in terms of “progress,” underscoring a state’s or group of states’ legitimacy and exceptionalism within discourses about progress, such as liberal frameworks derived from the Global North. As nations consist of diverse collectivities, there are also local interlocutors who advocate Western liberal frames of progress. However, since gender is constructed from within its immediate context, mediated by nations or the nation-state, collective constructions of gender in everyday life can diverge from the predominant frameworks about them as well. For example, Mithat, the 27-year-old gay Christian, is a white-collar worker. Mithat did an exchange study in the United States as a high school student:

Mithat mentions how strong he was in his convictions, namely, having undone heteronormativity in his life. He exclaimed, “I am not rotten!” in response to the popular categorization of effeminate homosexual men within military service. However, this personal-political framework, through which he analyzed his life, changed, prompting him to say, “I wouldn’t say that in my state of mind right now.” What transformed is analyzing his everyday gendered experience through not only an anti-heteronormative framework, but also a lens that connected how nationalism, gender, and sexuality are interwoven. Thus, he stresses to me that he “wouldn’t say that in [his] state of mind right now.” In other words, his embodiment of gender and sexuality takes place not only in conversation with the heterosexual matrix but also within the specific heteronational matrix he has come to recognize not as an abstract idealist stance but a stance that explicated the workings of nationalism through gender.

However there are other frames for gender constructions in the heteronational matrix that make references to other intersubjective notions of what ought to guide gender constructions of gay men belonging to “nations,” such as the global nation of Islam. Yusuf, a 25-year-old Muslim gay man, talks about his doing gender that led to his acceptance in his Islamic community:

With political Islam’s challenge to Turkey’s secular modernization as a backdrop, Yusuf exclaims against the secular framing of LGBT life, stating, “Is [homosexuality] an obstacle in front of my faith? No.” He adds, “I have never put homosexuality before our faith,” and “religion is primary.” The undercurrent of secular modernism critiqued by some strands of the intelligentsia, along with the broader secular-political Islam opposition, shifts Yusuf’s statement beyond a critique of heteronormativity to also challenging the secular lens through which same-sex sexuality is understood. However, Yusuf is different in that he emphasizes his strong adherence to religious duties, his community, and his commitment to being “nice, genial, and compassionate” while openly gay within his religious family, neighborhood, and to his imam. While no longer concealing his identity, he still expresses sincere fear, asking, “Why would I burn on the other side?”, stressing his religious conviction. Circling back, he critiques the secular organization of LGBT life in Turkey, stating, “Do others (secular gays) think they do something wrong, so they act like that? I have never put homosexuality before our faith. We would never put either homosexuality or Turkishness before our faith.” In doing so, he positions himself against secularists, Turkish culturalists, and secular LGBT activism, which, in his framing, stand in opposition to the global nation of Islam. Rather than accepting the primacy of the Turkish nation or the gay “nation,” he continuously stresses religion as his primary identity, structuring his sexuality and doing gender through abstinence. This highlights two competing directions in Turkey’s social and political dynamics, underscoring the tension between political Islamists and secularists while elevating Islam above both Turkishness and secularism. By doing so, he moves beyond merely resisting heteronormativity to actively engaging in contemporary contestations over nationhood through his ordering of gender and sexuality. In other words, he navigates a contemporary ideological struggle in Turkish society by utilizing his sexuality and everyday gender construction—engaging not just in undoing heteronormativity but in nation-imbued contentions through gender and sexuality.

Resisting the heteronational matrix

In this subsection, I explore the micropolitical strategies through which gay men navigate and resist the constraints imposed by the heteronational matrix within diverse social contexts, having recognized it as existing beyond merely hetero-homo or masculinity-femininity binaries. Mirza’s playful yet deliberate use of coded behaviors and fashion cues reveals how repression fosters inventive communicative practices that slip beneath normative surveillance. Similarly, İnan’s cultivation of a hardworking, ascendant persona grounded in a nationalist valorization of labor acts as a protective cover, managing others’ curiosity without outright concealment. Mithat’s deliberate and phased reveal of his gender and sexual identity through both verbal and non-verbal signs exemplifies a conscious “game” of engagement with and resistance to the political-economic and ideological demands of the nation. Together, these stories illustrate how undoing heteronormativity extends into micropolitical navigation of a heteronational matrix, where agency is exercised through nuanced negotiation of visibility, identity, and belonging.

Returning to Mirza, the young college student who moved from a global metropolis to a small college town, he navigates the political, economic, and cultural norms of his new environment in order to meet another peer, whom he attempts to discern as gay. He said:

Mirza presents his reasoning upfront, saying, “heterosexuals like (grunting and thumping his chest to make a parodic imitation of traditionally masculine men) wouldn’t drink banana-flavored milk in public, leaning onto a wall.” He strategically incorporates this specific behavior into a process of uncertainty and anticipation, asking “what if” the person is interested in the same sex. This space of uncertainty and anticipation is possible because he knows what the traditional heterosexual gaze in his small city fails to perceive within its national context. By recognizing the heterosexual other as also constituted within this national context, he attempts to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty by rationalizing behaviors from the ground up within this national context. He also wears ice-blue pants to communicate more directly with the other of interest, successfully slipping under the radar of heteronormative policing. The higher the repression and silence, the more diverse the ways of communicating and maneuvering around it. This reveals not only how Mirza and his boyfriend undid heteronormativity in their cognitive schemas but also how they navigate the micro-political-economic patterns of everyday life, manipulating and humorizing them, grunting and thumping his chest to imitate heterosexual men among themselves. In doing so, they undo not just heteronormativity but also nationally defined and constructed constraints. Namely, they engage with the heteronational matrix.

Some individuals strategically draw upon deeper, shared national narratives: as mentioned earlier, İnan, the Kurdish white-collar gay, manipulates one such historical national narrative to carve out a space of freedom for himself in his workplace. He says:

İnan offers a quasi-clinical recounting of his work-related accomplishments, then juxtaposes it with his external image, such as “building up a message” that says “You cannot ask me this” in reference to inquiries about his sexual life. Most importantly, he emphasizes how “clawing one’s way up with their labor,” especially from Anatolia to metropolitan areas, aligns with a national narrative that celebrates hard work and, in his case, creates a protective shield. He manages the flow of information strategically, stating, “I neither hide nor tell,” and “You cannot ask me this.” He acknowledges the oddity of the situation, laughing about how “9 years” went by this way. By ensuring his tangible work-related achievements are visible while omitting personal details, he maintains distance between himself and others. In conclusion, İnan does not engage with heteronormative ideas, which he laughs off, but rather with the dynamics of the heteronational matrix, which enables him to project a worker persona backed by a national narrative that valorizes “clawing one’s way up.”

Moving to a working-class neighborhood, Mithat, a gay Christian, had to withhold information about himself first, then negotiate a place for himself in the new community by navigating the heteronational matrix in which gender, religion, nation, and political economy are interfused:

By carefully analyzing the socio-economic and neighborhood dynamics—and with an acute awareness of how religion, secularism, and heterosexuality are interfused in national narratives of manhood and womanhood—Mithat strategically breaks from assumptions about his heterosexuality and Muslimness through what he calls “a conscious and cunning game” played against the neighbors. He methodically discloses aspects of his identity, remarking, “I go on with my tiny shorts, or with more feminine behavior or with more masculine behavior or talking about a new guy I recently met, in the shuttle, without ever hesitating.” In this gradual departure, he employs non-verbal signifiers such as an LGBT tote bag—which succeeds as a signifier only within the political-economic structure—stating, “They don’t understand what it is. However, they would understand if they had searched the internet.” Although the neighbors might have grasped his cues with further inquiry, Mithat continues to advance his self-disclosure, easing the initial tension of withholding information to allow for ambivalence in his behavior and non-verbal cues. By using a T-shirt with an open chest, different shoes, small cross earrings, and a huge cross necklace, he communicates a nuanced message that breaks free from the constraints of local assumptions; ultimately, when he observes that “they stopped asking me about girlfriends,” it signals the success of his methodological self-disclosure and demonstrates his acute awareness of the heteronational matrix as well as his ability to engage with its political-economic dynamics to carve out space that showcases his agency.