Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam

Join us for a colloquium with with Dr. Evern Savci of Yale University.

The colloqiuium, Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam with Dr. Evern Savci of Yale University in Susquehanna 4116 from 12:00-2:00 PM, on April 12, 2023.

RSVP here: https://go.umd.edu/Savci

In this talk, Evren Savcı will speak about her book  Queer in Translation, which intervenes in queer studies’ separate, and in fact diagonally opposing approaches to neoliberalism and Islam by using the case of Turkey’s AKP governments since 2002. She theorizes “neoliberal Islam” as a unique regime that brings together economic and religious moralities that work to deploy marginality onto ever expanding populations instead of concentrating it in the lower echelons of society. She suggests that sexual liberation movements are the most productive places from which to theorize neoliberal Islam as  well as to imagine resistances to it, since those on the gendered and sexual margins have experienced the effects of such marginalization for longer and more intensely.

Evren Savcı is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. Her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam (2021, DUP) analyzes sexual politics under contemporary Turkey’s AKP regime with an eye to the travel and translation of sexual political vocabulary. Her second book project turns to the political economy of monogamy. In it, she discusses the establishment of it as a central tenet of civilized sexual morality, and attends to the current neoliberal incorporation of its alternatives and restoration of it distributive logic. Savcı’s work on the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism and religion has appeared in Journal of Marriage and the Family, Ethnography, Sexualities, Political Power and Social Theory, Theory & Event, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and GLQ, and in several edited collections. Savcı received her Ph.D. in Sociology from University of Southern California, and her master’s and bachelor’s degrees in Sociology from University of Virginia. Following her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral fellow at The Sexualities Project at Northwestern (SPAN).