In June 2016, at Zarifi, a popular meyhane (traditional tavern) in Istanbul's Beyoğlu district, an audience comprised mainly of locals slip money into the bejewelled belts of male belly dancers like Diva (Ali Murat Sahiner) between bites of meze and shots of rakı. Like most zenne, as such dancers are known, Diva is young, lithe and boyish. With hair immaculately sculpted, eyes thickly rimmed with black eyeliner, lips brightly coloured, and chest aglow with glitter and oil, he rouses the entire room, shimmying provocatively toward individual tables, where people clap to the rhythm of the music, cheer their appreciation, and often join in the dance. The coins on the belt of Diva's skirt jingle brightly, and his perfume permeates the air. Lips slightly parted and formed into a faint smile, he commands attention with his gaze, inviting the audience to look at him and appreciate his beauty, and animating the polymorphous desires that live solo dance, in particular, puts into play.
The above scene is not the image of Turkey that has been portrayed in the media in recent years. But in Istanbul, Bodrum and Berlin, a growing number of zenne dancers – historically known as köçek – are displacing female belly dancers in clubs, meyhanes, cabarets, private events and resorts.Footnote 2 As Turkish dance scholar Metin And notes, at the beginning of the nineteenth century ‘there were some 600 dancing boys in the taverns of Constantinople’.Footnote 3 However, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and then more decisively when the Ottoman Empire was transformed into the modern Turkish republic in the 1920s, male belly dancers fell out of fashion. The tradition of dancing boys in the former Ottoman Empire was largely eclipsed by the changes in societal structures and the containment of sexual desires that accompanied processes of modernization in the Ottoman Empire and, later, in theTurkish republic.Footnote 4 In the twenty-first century, however, zenne dancers are back on Turkish stages and screens, part of the growing interest among Turks in the Ottoman past and the increasing global visibility of queer subjects and the political issues to which this gives rise.
What does the current revival of male belly dancing tell us about the relationship between modern ideologies of sex and gender and narratives of modernity as they have taken shape in Turkey? With its unique geographical, ideological and cultural position at the intersection of Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia and its historically decisive political shift from Ottoman imperialism to secular nationalism in the twentieth century, Turkey productively complicates the ideological polarization of the West and the Muslim world, even as the country is presently experiencing internal and external conflicts relating to that polarization. These conflicts include increasing authoritarianism under the Islamist Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi, AKP), which has been challenged by both Kemalist nationalists and left-wing groups through the occupation of Gezi Park, an echo of the Occupy movements and the Arab Spring; eroding relations with the European Union; entanglement in the instabilities roiling the region, which have involved Turkey in a complex set of geopolitical alignments with global powers; instabilities associated with the influx of Syrian refugees; resumption of armed conflict between the Turkish state and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and renewed aggression towards the Kurdish population more generally; and, finally, a coup attempt in July 2016, which resulted in increased popular nationalism, a crackdown on academics and journalists expressing dissent against the AKP, and the detainment of military, educational, and government officials associated with the religious leader Fethullah Gülen. By comparison, the zenne dancer may seem an insubstantial figure on which to focus. However, the meanings of this performer in the cultural archive and collective memory of the nation help put into sharper focus the anxieties surrounding gender and sexuality that underlie many of the nation's broader anxieties regarding modernity, democracy and its own history. Moreover, that insubstantiality has its own force. Re-emerging in the twenty-first century as an embodiment of competing definitions of sexuality and modernity in contemporary Turkey, precisely at a moment when Turkish national identity is a hotly contested issue, I shall argue that the zenne dancer is queer ghost, returning to haunt (and seduce) the present.
The zenne: historic figure and queer icon
The zenne dancer embodies the contradictions of contemporary Turkish culture, which includes a variety of same-sex practices, along with sexual taxonomies that have developed in collusion with discourses of modernity. As Will Roscoe and Stephen O. Murray explain,
the contrast between ‘Western’ and ‘Islamic’ homosexualities is not so much one of visibility versus invisibility or modern freedom versus traditional repression, but of containment versus elaboration, of a single pattern of homosexuality defined and delimited by institutions and discourses closely linked to the modern nation-state versus the variety, distribution, and longevity of same-sex patterns in Islamic societies.Footnote 5
The history of male belly dancing and its contemporary re-emergence highlight these competing sexual epistemologies. The Ottoman Empire – an Islamic political and geographical entity founded in 1300 by Turkic tribal leader Osman I that, by the early nineteenth century and until its demise in 1922, spanned modern-day Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Palestine, Serbia, and Romania – was made up of heterogeneous populations and included a spectrum of desires and sexual practices.Footnote 6 The Ottoman elites began major reforms (tanzimat) in the early nineteenth century, under Sultan Abdu'l-Aziz (1861–76) and Sultan Hamid II (1876–1908), in response to European pressures to end the international slave trade and conform to the political, economic, social and legal systems of the Western-defined nation state. The suppression of harem culture, and the slave trade on which that culture depended, was a central part of these early reforms, which accelerated in the first decade of the twentieth century, when the political movement, the Young Turks, formed in opposition to the constitutional monarchy of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 7
Dancing boys, or köçekler, first emerged as entertainers for the Ottoman court, and their decline in popularity must be seen as part of the changing structures of the modernizing empire. Accounts and representations of köçekler come from the writings of European visitors describing performances, from the poems of Ottoman-era writers praising the beauty of dancing boys, and from murals in Topkapı Palace depicting them dancing for the Sultan and at social ceremonies. Historically, there were both male and female (çengi) belly dancers in the Ottoman Empire, but cross-dressing belly dancing boys proliferated between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, when it was deemed improper for women to perform publicly.Footnote 8 Thus, while the wives, female relatives, concubines, and eunuchs were secluded in the harem, boys took their place as performers in the court. Recruited at the age of seven or eight from the dhimmī class – non-Muslims who were of Greek, Armenian, Romani and Jewish ethnic origin – köçekler would begin dancing at Topkapı Palace at the age of fourteen, serving as both entertainers and sexual servants.Footnote 9 Köçekler grew their hair long, dressed in female costumes, danced suggestively, and imitated the gestures of upper-class femininity. Once the practice of young male dancers spread from beyond the palace walls and into the city's taverns, troupes (kol) formed and toured throughout the empire. Enthusiasm for the boys in meyhanes would often result in shouting and fights among the male spectators who courted them. Indeed, as And notes, ‘the popularity of the dancing boys led to so much trouble and quarreling among the Janissaries [the Sultan's army] that, in 1837, Sultan Mahmud forbade their appearance’.Footnote 10 Dancing boys thus lost the official support of their imperial patrons and, as the harem culture faded, so too did the köçekler. Although men continue to belly dance among themselves today in the rural communities of Turkey, as well as in Morocco and parts of the Middle East, more public performances have been discouraged in modern Turkey. In a new republic conscious of the Western system of sexual classification – homosexuality/heterosexuality – and of the image of the publicly displayed female body as the emblem of modern attitudes towards sex and gender, the köçek fell out of popularity and the belly dancing woman took his place in the modern Turkish republic.
Postcard of an Ottoman köçek dancer, nineteenth century. Photo: ND Phot. Source: Belly Dance Museum, at http://belly-dance.org/shop.php?Id=122.
The twin processes of modernization and westernization in Turkey are associated mainly with the massive reforms instituted by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923, which gave rise to the modern Turkish republic. This swift transition involved a decisive adoption of Western models of government, education, and industry, if not Western morality. The westernization process was always selective and strategic – and subordinated to Atatürk's authority as the nation's founding father. Atatürk's republicanism enforced the assimilation of the diverse cultures and religions of the Ottoman Empire into a homogenized Turkish cultural and national identity and an Islamic religious identity and contained sexuality within the patriarchal institutions of the modern nation state: family, religion and the military. Kemalist secularism extended to dress as well. In 1925, Atatürk instituted a ban on religious attire (the face veil, turban and fez), and women wearing headscarves were prohibited from attending universities and working in the public sector as teachers, lawyers, doctors and public servants.Footnote 11 The veil reforms, in particular, were aimed at encouraging women to participate more directly in public life as professionals. However, on 9 February 2008, the AKP removed the ban on religious clothing, and there has been a subsequent marked increase in veiling practices throughout Turkey and a surge of interest in Islamic fashion, demonstrated by Modest Fashion Week in Istanbul in May 2016, which showcased the conservative-chic collections of seventy designers from around the world.
The enforced secularism and the subsequent return of suppressed cultural and religious practices illustrate the dialectical ‘push–pull’ movement of Turkish modernity, and are indicative of the fact that, until recently, modernization in Turkey involved severing all ties to its imperial past.Footnote 12 In 1923, the military was established as the secular Kemalist force keeping in check religious influences in government, while its accompanying rituals became, as Yael Navaro-Yashin explains, a primary ‘rite of secular statist initiation into masculine adulthood’.Footnote 13 Turkish men are required to serve two years in the military, and although under the AKP the military has been gradually divested of its power, its disciplinary structures, homosocial bonds and respect for hierarchy continue to inform Turkish masculinity. The easy affection among men and pervasive male gaze regulating the public sphere establish a thread of continuity with the Ottoman past by way of a social ideology governed by masculine authority. Amid the changes and continuities incited by modernization, female belly dancing, or oryantal dans, as it is called in Turkey, has remained important to modern Turkish culture as a festive part of social ceremonies such as weddings, circumcisions, birthdays and anniversaries, and as a ‘folk’ performance popular among tourists. While women belly dancers have dominanted in Turkey and elsewhere, the zenne dancer has been usurping their popularity in the last several years. At once modern and traditional, the zenne offers multiple points of identification within Turkey's varied social landscape, appealing to both younger urban Turks looking for a trendy night out and more conservative Turks who would prefer to see a man scantily clad and dancing seductively rather than a woman.
One way of thinking about the revival of zenne dancing today is as part of a series of global transformations in the visibility of gay, lesbian and trans people in popular culture and public discourse. But it is also an unpredicted consequence of AKP's purposeful revival and romanticization of Turkey's Ottoman past. AKP president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's deeply conservative vision of ‘New Turkey’ is redefining what modernity means to its citizens, in part, by invoking a glorified Ottoman past ahistorically remembered as more pious than the present. In relation to gender and sexuality, Erdoğan's position is unambiguous: his regime has denounced the LBGTT community as social deviants who are spoiling public morality, a position that has resulted in a seemingly related sharp rise in violence and prejudice against gay, lesbian and, especially, trans people.Footnote 14 Sociologist Hakan Ataman explains, ‘homophobic and transphobic attitudes and behavior in Turkey have significantly been motivated by Turkish nationalism, traditional family values, culture and conservativism’.Footnote 15 Rasim Özgür Dönmez confirms this, stating in no uncertain terms, ‘Turkey's democratization can solely be provided by the deconstruction of the state's and the regime's hegemonic masculinity in order to change the symbolic gender identities of state and social relations’.Footnote 16 Groups serving the rights of minorities have come under threat as they are perceived to be dissenting from the moral majority. For example, Lambdaistanbul, Turkey's largest LGBTT organization, was founded in 1993 and became an official organization in 2006, only to be dissolved in 2008 by a court order that deemed the group to be against ‘law and morality’.Footnote 17 The rise of the anti-nationalist, left-wing People's Democratic Party (HDP), which advocates for minority groups, such as Kurds, LGBTT people and Alevi Muslims, defined a newly emerging political ideology in Turkey, a fusion of queer and leftist politics. However, on 4 November 2016, the co-leaders of the HDP, Selahattin Demirtaş and Figen Yüksekdağ, were arrested in their homes, charged by the Turkish government with supporting the PKK. It is within this vexed context that the zenne has re-emerged, at once historical figure and queer icon.
The style, class and geography of zenne dancing
The zenne dancer has been revived as a figure rich in intrepretive possibility, even as he is also inevitably part of the socio-economic fabric of Turkish society. Sexuality, social class and forms of labour are all closely linked in Turkey, and these relationships can be mapped onto public spaces in Istanbul. Lubunya, a slang term used in Turkey that includes a spectrum of queer sexualities from gay men to trans women, constitute not so much an identity as a socio-economic class. Lubunya often work at night, as sex workers or entertainers. Zenne dancers are among the most privileged of lubunya, perhaps because of their unequivocal, if effeminate, maleness. Trans sex workers and drag performers, in contrast, are ghettoed in areas like Tarlabașı, an area located adjacent to the busy commercial strip, Istiklal Caddesi. Home to Kurds, Romani and the trans community, Tarlabașı is part of the entertainment and shopping district of Beyoğlu, which is deemed an ‘illegitimate’ area, or in Turkish gayrimeşru. Ece Saltan explains that this word has two meanings in Turkish, ‘unlawful’ and, interestingly, ‘out of wedlock’, an etymology that gestures toward the intimate relationship among sexuality, moral law, and public space in Turkish culture.Footnote 18 Beyoğlu is itself divided into class-marked zones: the derelict section of Tarlabașı, the busy commercial and tourist area around Istiklal, and the up-scale neighbourhood of Cihangir. Likewise, the district's residents, consumers and forms/performers of labour are divided into these low, middle and upper classes. At the intersection of these three areas is Taksim Square, the heart of modern Istanbul and the monumental centrepiece of the Turkish republic. Within these areas, we can trace the re-emergence of the contemporary zenne dancer.
The zenne offers audiences a chance to revel in a uniquely Turkish form, while at the same time providing an avenue for young gay-identified men to express their sexuality in a safe way. A career on the professional circuit typically begins at restaurants – or less desirably, cabaret – and from there moves to private performances and, ultimately, television appearances. Most zenne are self-taught. However, as more young men become interested in the form, older dancers are setting up classes aimed at training the next wave. The costumes of zenne dancers are similar to those of their female counterparts: loose-fitting gauzy pants (şalvar) or skirts trimmed with shimmering coins and chest pieces adorned with sequins and tassels provide both visual and aural pleasure. Props are an extension of the performer's body: veils, wings of Isis and zils emphasize the contours of the dancer's body and the rhythm of his movements. Zennes also imitate their female counterparts in their movements. The basic vocabulary of belly dance includes: lifts and drops, slides, shimmies, twists, circles, figure-of-eights and undulations. Women generally perform these movements slowly, using their hips, lower body and arms, while men perform faster, sharper articulations focused on the torso and shoulders. Women often turn their backs to the audience, using veils to play with the boundary between concealment and exposure, while male dancers shimmy directly towards the audience, avoiding gestures of vulnerability and surrender, such as turning their backs to the audience or raising their arms above their heads. In the abstract, these movements – their style, speed and location – are highly gendered. In performance, however, the control and directness suggested by the masculine style, and the coy seductiveness of the feminine style, are easily – and often – intermixed.
Among the hundreds of zenne dancers in Istanbul, Segah Demirdelen is one of the city's most celebrated. Segah dances at private events and at Club Chanta (recently renamed Opera Club), a cross-over gay club also located in Beyoğlu, though on the ‘other side’ (geographically and socio-symbolically) of Istiklal Caddesi from Tarlabașı. Segah's audiences – which include a large proportion of women and gay men – revel in the sensuality and precision of his movements. In an interview, he has claimed that he modelled his dance style on the female belly dancers he saw perform as a child: movements that focus mainly on the lower part of the body, especially hip rotations, smooth belly rolls and undulating arm movements, comprise his aesthetic. He also refers to the Colombian pop star Shakira, whose signature belly dance has become part of her celebrity image, as a major influence on his dance aesthetic.Footnote 19 Segah claims, ‘When I dance, I create a kind of gender confusion. I am a man – with a beard! – but I'm dancing just like a woman. And that really shocks people. They're shocked into enjoying it’. His beard is unusual, a divergence from the traditional boyish zenne. Metin And notes of the köçek, ‘boys [could] dance as long as they preserve their good looks and . . . conceal their beards’, adding that ‘dancing boys were so loved and praised by their audiences’ that poets wrote poems praising the art of their dance and their beauty.Footnote 20 Dror Ze'evi explains further that, in the Ottoman context, beardless men were ‘objects of loving contemplation’ for older men. Male sexuality was viewed in two distinct phases in Ottoman culture: until puberty, boys were thought to possess an untamed sexuality that could be used to attract older men (although the boys themselves could be attracted to either men or women); but once a full beard developed, men were expected to be the desirer, not the object of desire.Footnote 21 Segah's deviation from the aesthetic and gender conventions of the zenne dancer and the deliberate dissonance between the artifice of the display and the body of the performer suggests something close to drag. However, it is not only the incongruity between male body and feminine appearance at play in Segah's performances, but also the incongruity between a boyish sensuality and an adult masculinity. Although Segah had intended to get an exemption from military service, which is done by showing photographic evidence of homosexual acts, he was not comfortable being out to his father, so he served for eight months before being released. ‘I didn't mind’, he says. ‘I had more lovers there than anywhere else’.Footnote 22 Thus, even as Segah's bearded appearance and feminine movements confuse performances of gender, his reluctance to come out to the military and to his father illustrates the vexed status of queer subjects in Turkey's central institutions.
Zenne by © Mathias Depardon. Zenne Segah performs onstage at Club Chanta. Segah dances at private parties and clubs, sometimes performing several times a day. Istanbul, Turkey.
Zenne dancers, however, inhabit a fantasy realm onstage, wherein the rules gov-erning sexuality and gender are temporarily suspended, or at least reconfigured, and the erotic nature of the dance is contained by the conventions governing audience–performer interactions and aestheticized through props and costumes. As a performer, the zenne is both active subject and passive object, and his audiences also oscillate between these same positions as both active and passive spectators. Part of the next wave of zenne dancers in Istanbul, zenne Baha deliberately fuses different traditions and approaches. A student of Diva and a newcomer at Zarifi, Baha also dances at private events, supplementing his income by teaching private classes to women. His costumes range from brightly coloured billowing skirts to elaborate masks and showgirl-style head pieces to go-go-inspired fringed pants and faux-leather vests. Compared to his more established counterparts, Baha's dance style is improvisional, focusing more on audience interaction than on technique. He dances flirtatiously with both men and women, maintaining the delicate balance between seduction and distance and inspiring a spirit of revelry. What Baha lacks in technique he makes up for in his ability to galvanize a crowd and get them all shimmying. As competition among zenne dancers increases, the form will doubtlessly be reinvented as dancers find new ways to differentiate themselves and the fantasies they foster.
Zenne Baha dancing with a bride-to-be at Zarifi. While the men and women mostly danced in their own groups at this wedding party, zenne Baha moved easily between them. Author's photo.
In places where the zenne is more of a rarity, the emphasis is less on developing a distinctive aesthetic and more on maintaining (and marketing) an enduring fantasy. The popularity of Turkish German zenne dancer Zadiel (Mehmet Sasmaz), for example, illustrates how orientalist scripts have been reinvented in cities with large Turkish populations, where the history of the zenne converges with Western homosexual communities and practices. The political ties between Turkey and Germany date back to 1790, when a peace treaty was signed between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Ottoman Empire. This alliance led to enduring military, economic and cultural relations between the modern nation states of Turkey and Germany. Today, three million Turkish citizens live in Germany, many working as domestic and manual labourers, and every year four million German tourists visit Turkey.Footnote 23 The labour flows that accompany this political and economic relationship inevitably include artistic forms, like zenne dancing. Born in Berlin and of Turkish ethnic background, Zadiel trained as a dancer with Horacio Cifuentes, founder of Oriental Fantasy Productions, a Berlin-based dance company that creates shows replete with harems, veiled women and dancing men. Today, Zadiel moves primarily among Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Bodrum, a Turkish Aegean resort town popular with British, German and Russian tourists. Zadiel both replicates and updates this orientalist scene from within the context of global neo-liberalism, which involves the circulation of images, affects and fantasies, as much as of capital. Commanding five hundred euros for twenty minutes of dancing in Berlin, Zadiel markets and distributes his ‘brand’ in DVDs and private classes aimed at both women and men. As he describes the international belly dancing circuit, ‘The supply of male dancers is low. It makes me all the more exotic and raises my marketability’.Footnote 24
Less of a novelty when he performs in Turkey, Zadiel can nonetheless be distinguished from his Istanbul and Bodrum counterparts by his mature age and more masculine appearance and aesthetic. Not only does he wear less make-up and more minimal costumes, but also Zadiel's dance style is coded as more masculine, focusing on upper-body movements performed to a fast, regular beat. His dances are choreographed to the rhythm of the drum (doumbek), rather than the string or wind instruments, and his style is characterized by precise, rapid articulations of his chest and torso, along with sharp pelvic tilts. Zadiel admits that he performs in a more traditionally feminine way when he comes to Turkey – slower, more fluid movements focused on the hips, rather than the chest and torso – but insists that his German audiences expect a more ‘masculine style’. Eschewing discussion of his sexuality, Zadiel claims that it has nothing to do with his dancing and that ‘art is not necessarily sexual’.Footnote 25 Emphasizing the artfulness of belly dancing is a frequently deployed defence against the (homo)erotic associations of the dance. The zenne sublimates sexual difference into a fantasy of cultural and historical difference, but the meanings he animates differ depending on the geographical context, the audience's identifications and expectations, and the historic echoes of similar encounters.
Representations of the zenne in film, television and theatre
No longer only a revitalized dance form, the zenne has, over the last several years, been transformed into a shifting series of malleable representations circulated in film, television, theatre, social media and gallery exhibitions. The 2016 Istanbul Design Biennial, Are We Human?, included an installation called Köçek Dance Floor, a collaboration between Turkish artist Asli Serbest and German artist Mona Mahall that uses the köçek as a point of access into other subjects and affects disavowed by Turkey's decisive modernization. The artists describe the project as follows:
Köçek Dance Floor presents the practices, spaces, costumes, objects, and music of the köçek, the young male dancer of Ottoman times. Evading traditional categorizations of gender, the figure of the köcek is a reminder of how the Western understanding of sexuality was imported onto pre-colonial Islamic societies during 19th c. modernization. Composed of a series of videos around a dance floor, the installation creates an open and ambiguous environment that invites visitors to mobilize their bodies.Footnote 26
Encouraging viewers to move within an environment constructed to look like a dance club, the installation suggests that interacting with this history might activate the particular histories embedded, but at rest, in our own bodies. In this way, the installation unleashes a rediscovered archive of potentialities in the present.
It was Mehmet Binay and Caner Alper's 2012 feature film Zenne Dancer that brought the zenne – as a historical figure – back into public consciousness in Turkey. Inspired by the story of twenty-six-year-old university student Ahmet Yildiz, who was shot in Istanbul in 2008 in what has been called Turkey's first gay ‘honour killing’, the film explores relationships among three men – Daniel, a German photographer; Ahmet, a Turkish man from a conservative eastern city in Turkey; and Can, a zenne dancer. Ahmet (Erkan Avci) moves to Istanbul where he can live somewhat freely as a gay man. There, he befriends Can (Kerem Can), and Daniel (Giovanni Arvaneh), who comes to the gay nightclub where Can dances, wanting to photograph him. When Daniel and Ahmet begin to develop an intimate relationship, a detective hired by Ahmet's mother starts to follow Ahmet, serving as a not-so-exaggerated version of the regulatory gaze of the Turkish public sphere. When Ahmet's mother finds out that Ahmet sleeps with men, she orders her husband to kill their son.
Zenne Dancer both highlights homophobic attitudes embedded in Turkish culture, and raises troubling questions about the implications of importing Western attitudes towards homosexuality into a Turkish context. In Turkey, many people consider being openly gay a liftestyle choice and associate it with a Western-influenced morality. In contrast, the rituals of family, religion and military maintain hegemonic heteronormativity for most Turks. The Turkish military makes exemptions for mandatory service in cases of homosexuality, which is classified as a mental illness. In cases of exemption due to sexual orientation, the man must provide photographic evidence or submit to a rectal examination. Surprisingly, the film plays this requirement for laughs, showing a dragged up Ahmet walking into the recruitment office and eagerly giving over photos of him and Daniel having sex. That the military is an object of satire in the film is reinforced by the concluding statement in the final shot: ‘The Turkish Military is in possession of the largest pornographic collection in Europe.’Footnote 27 The tragic elements of the film revolve around family dynamics: absent fathers, psychologically damaged brothers and overbearing mothers. Even as the male figures operate officially as the supreme regulatory force, it is the mother (anne), whether lovingly devoted or violently oppressive, who rules the moral universe.
The desire between Daniel and Ahmet seems on a superficial level to replay a familiar orientalist dynamic, but the finer details of script and casting reveal a mutual fantasy. Daniel sees in Ahmet his mirror image: they both wear beards and are of similar height, weight and general appearance. Ahmet is also someone Daniel thinks he can save, unlike the children he failed to save from a land mine in Afghanistan, as his flashbacks tell us. It is Daniel who insists that Ahmet come out to his family, insisting naively, ‘They are your parents. They love you’. Meanwhile, Ahmet himself morphs into the caring mother he perhaps wished for, urging Daniel to eat his home-made food and shave his beard so that he sports only a moustache, like Ahmet's own father. Thus we see Ahmet, a Turkish man from a conservative city and family, find a bit of freedom as a gay man in Istanbul and, more specifically, in the club where the zenne performs, even as he still cannot emotionally escape the control of his family. Meanwhile, Daniel represents the liberal westerner on a mission to save the vulnerable and less powerful, only to be revealed as lost himself. He talks via Skype to his German wife, who is a caricature of vacuous hyper-femininity, and we understand that he feels out of place in his privileged role of the white, Western, ‘hetero’ male. Neither man is comfortable in his socially assigned role, and each seeks refuge in his desire for the other.
The zenne dancer, Can, is a fantasy figure and unifying force between these two men, existing somewhere between the real and the longed-for, public and private, past and present. Fantasy sequences depicting Can dancing in a dream-like setting imply that he is something close to a mythic figure. A flamboyant character with a loving mother and a brother psychologically damaged by his service in the military, Can is the embodiment of everything Ahmet was refused growing up: for example, we see a flashback scene in which Ahmet dances in his sister's tutu, with feathers floating down on him, only to have his mother find him and beat him severely. Can also exemplifies a kind of ‘out’ sexuality that only exists within a few precious spaces, such as the club at which he dances, which operates in the film as a utopian space of safety and community. Hanging on Can's dressing room wall is a calendar depicting an Ottoman-era homoerotic scene, a detail that implicitly historicizes both Can's sexuality and his dance practice within a specifically Turkish context. Outside the club, however, gay bashings are an omninous threat. In one scene, Can walks home from work down a dark street, quickening his pace in fear that the young men walking behind behind him are going to jump him. He is wrong, in this case, and yet we understand that his fear is based on past experiences. A few scenes later, we see him return home to his apartment with a bruised and bloodied face, further reinforcing the pervasive threat of violence.
Although homosexuality is not illegal in Turkey, homophobia is common, and it is difficult to live publicly as a homosexual outside certain areas of Istanbul.Footnote 28 Even in relatively safe areas, however, homosexual, transsexual and transgendered people are frequent targets of violence and harassment by police. Violence against trans people, in particular, became systematic after the military coup of 1980, when they were forcibly ‘“exiled” to Eskişehir, a mid-Anatolian city’.Footnote 29 Those who remained in Istanbul were the targets of surveillance and violence. As Saltan reports,
Trans folk in Istanbul are visible day and night . . . The neighborhood has been different each time but the violence trans folk have experienced has been the same since the 1980s: their homes were stoned, burnt down, evacuated. They have been murdered, physically and verbally abused, dismissed from their apartments, streets, and neighborhoods.Footnote 30
Due to the religious laws governing female honour, and prejudice against passive homosexuality, many sex workers in Turkey are transvestites. The ambiguous position of transvestites in Turkey – whether working as sex workers or as popular entertainers – is wrapped up in the broader residual history of same-sex practices. On the one hand, they are celebrated, as the köçekler once were; on the other hand, they are degraded as a sign of public corruption and sexual deviance.Footnote 31 A progeny of this same history, the zenne is refracted through the modern imagery of theatricalized gay male identity, making him less threatening, because more distant and phantasmic. In the final scene of Zenne Dancer, after the tragic climax in which Ahmet's father shoots his son on a dark Istanbul street, we see Can teaching children – boys and girls – how to dance like him, the zenne guiding the way to a more accepting future. It is a sentimental ending, to be sure, but the film represents the zenne as a utopian figure and fantasy site, where longings can be safely felt and forms of belonging, however implausible, can be imagined.
In 2006, when Binay and Alper started researching zenne dancers for their film, they saw it as a ‘vanishing culture’ – found only in rural areas and in a few underground gay clubs in Istanbul:
‘We are very much under the influence of Western entertainment and culture and show business’, says Binay. ‘Oriental’ dance is no longer as popular in Turkey as it once was. Even among Istanbul's sizable gay community . . . ‘people would rather watch drag shows or go-go boys. Male belly dancing was something [from] the past’.Footnote 32
Now, however, going to see a zenne dancer is considered a fashionable night out for young professional Istanbulites. Moreover, the zenne is a status symbol at private events. Expensive to hire, he signifies the sophistication and wealth of his patrons. Something of a cross-over figure, the zenne has even entered more mainstream media contexts, such as on the Turkish version of the US reality television franchise So You Think You Can Dance? (Dans Eder Misin?), which ran from 2007 to 2012. Zenne dancers became an audience favourite on the show, attesting to the growing interest in this performance tradition in Turkish pop culture.
Promotional poster for Son Zenne. Photo: Fethi Karaduman. Graphic Design: Berkcan Okar.
While the Binay–Alper film brought large-scale attention to the zenne and turned him into something of a Turkish queer icon, a recent play by Istanbul playwright Serdar Saatman depicts the zenne as a tragic figure. Staged in 2015–16 at Bo Sahne, a small theatre in the up-scale neighbourhood of Cihangir in the Beyoğlu district, Son Zenne (The Last Zenne), revolves around a zenne dancer who embodies both a repressed past and the promise of a ‘modern’ present. Set backstage at the son muzikhol (the last music hall), the play depicts a series of confrontations and convergences between a beautiful zenne dancer, who opens the play by performing a veil dance for the audience; his lover, whose moustache implicitly signifies the hegemonic masculinity of Erdoğan's Turkey; and a young woman from rural Turkey, who is referred to only as the Girl (Kız). Escaping after killing a father who was molesting her, the Girl comes to Istanbul and seeks refuge in the dressing room of the zenne dancer. The entire play takes place in this liminal space of seclusion and transformation, which is filled with feather boas, belly dancing costumes, beefcake photos, a picture of Richard Gere, a velvet-covered divan and an immaculate white bed, which is set up as a shrine to the zenne’s mother, who shunned her son after he came out as gay. The zenne and the Girl chastely share the bed, becoming like siblings and finding comfort in their shared sexual traumas. He teaches the Girl how to talk, shop and dress like a city girl: tight dresses, high heels and curse words. In these scenes, the zenne appears as fully westernized, dressed in trendy clothing and playing the caricature role of urban queer who teaches the Girl how to be a modern woman. But his lover returns, swinging his tespih (Muslim prayer beads), while demanding sexual favours from the zenne dancer, coercing him into selling drugs, and tormenting him by destroying his passport – and thus destroying his dreams of moving to Berlin to reunite with his mother. Displaying both a hyperbolic masculinity and religious hypocrisy, the lover embodies two competing forces of contemporary Turkey: secular nationalism and Islamic authoritarianism.
The ending is tragic; the zenne dancer is killed by his lover, just before he himself dies from a shot fired by the Girl. Concluding with this deadly stand-off between patriarchal nationalism and queer modernity, the play suggests that, while the Girl has a chance of survival in modern Turkey, the zenne does not. As both a sign of a lost pre-republic past and an impossibly modern present, the zenne ends up an abject figure caught in the deadlock between a global sexual democracy and an increasingly repressive Turkish nationalism and conservative religious morality.Footnote 33 The Girl becomes his apotheosis, a force of retribution and sign of futurity. The zenne’s death, perhaps, calls the audience to recognize the homophobic and patriarchal ideologies underpinning Turkish modernity, along with the reactionary forces rising in Turkey to contain the liquidation of traditional values that accompany the juggernaut of global capitalism. Representing the queer subject as modern martyr, the zenne’s death also suggests the impossibility of returning to history as a salvation for the present.
Return of the repressed, or back to the future?
The zenne has thus become a multivalent figure that enables diverse identifications and desires to be expressed and imagined. By invoking continuity with an Ottoman past and projecting that past into a hoped-for future, the zenne embodies a utopian fantasy, performing illegitimate desires that are nonetheless authorized by history. As this figure has circulated in popular culture, he has been taken up as a symbol of inclusivity, not merely of sexual difference but of many of the differences that the modern Turkish republic worked hard to obscure. Zenne Dancer director Binay explains,
all sorts of minorities are coming out of the closet now . . . The Pandora's box has been opened. Whether it's Armenians, Alawites, the Kurds, everybody has things to say that they couldn't have said for the last decades or centuries . . . The LGBT issue is part of the bigger picture.Footnote 34
Four years after Binay's remark, that Pandora's box has been closed again, for now. In the wake of the July 2016 coup attempt and subsequent state of emergency, many forms of difference and dissent – religious, cultural and sexual – from the status quo of ‘New Turkey’ are being treated with increased suspicion, if not outright persecution. Amid the unrest, however, the zenne continues to gain in popularity, signifying both a pre-republic past and a utopian future.
Zenne dancing and the ambiguous sexualities with which it is associated are attached to a complex historical, religious and cultural context, wherein modernity and secularism are often in tension with obligations to preserve the honour of family and uphold religious law. By tracing the various movements of this figure in contemporary Turkey, I have sought to emphasize the force of a distinctly embodied history in the present, a ‘temporal drag’ that Elizabeth Freeman has theorized as a ‘countergenealogical practice of archiving culture's throwaway objects, including the outmoded masculinities and femininities from which usable pasts may be extracted’.Footnote 35 In zenne dancing, we can see the coexistence of differing systems of social and sexual classification, re-emerging as unfinished histories in the unsettled present.
The revival of the zenne suggests that history can be used as a source of agency, the very material with which to imagine and fashion possible futures. The popularity of the zenne across the cultural spectrum in Turkey suggests attachments to culture and identity that are rooted in the past but remembered differently in the present. The uses to which history is put in the present, then, are always unpredictable – and never disinterested. On the one hand, the zenne represents the endurance of patriarchal codes of public display, which celebrate male bodies and regulate female bodies. On the other hand, he embodies the possibility of imagining more diverse forms of erotic desire (and perhaps even more diverse forms of ethnic and religious identity). The zenne dancer is at once nostalgic relic, utopian figure and tragic martyr. In his performances, history appears in drag, in all of its extravagance and radical difference. And from the zenne’s recycled repertoire of movements, ornaments and affects, new fantasies of both past and future are formed.
