Border panic over the pandemic: mediated anxieties about migrant sex workers and queers during the AIDS crises in Turkey

Abstract

Looking back to remember the "arrival" of AIDS in Turkey, this article explores how the spread of the new disease fueled border panic in Turkey from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. Drawing on a rich array of material from the archives of national newspapers and magazines, this article analyzes the media discourse on migrant sex workers from the former USSR and the first HIV-positive men. It shows how both groups were seen as intruders bringing the virus from outside Turkey's borders to its territory. In both cases, I argue, fear of the spread of the virus across borders became entangled with anxieties about the movement of ideas, images, lifeworlds, and meanings relating to sexuality that were discursively constructed as fundamentally alien to Turkish ones. The movement of sexually and racially "other" bodies across borders was seen as a threat to the fragile construed border between "Turkishness" and "foreignness".

Border countervisuality: smartphone videos of border crossing and migration

“…In other words, the overseer was an early embodiment of the complex colonial power of visuality that strategically withdrew from its object of vision in order to observe from a distance for the purpose of domination and surveillance (Mirzoeff, 2011: 17). In today's world of anti-immigration politics and "border panic" (Bayramoğlu, 2021), we can discern a similarly angled gaze on migration: a perspective that observes, interprets, and seeks to control migrating subjects from a distance. As an exciting growing body of literature on media and borders is beginning to show, mediated visualizations of borders, border crossing, and migration play into such surveillance regimes.…”

“…This and other videos show migrants singing, clapping, gesturing victory signs, joyfully screaming, whistling, embracing each other, and showing solidarity. In this sense, harraga videos evoke emotions that stand in opposition to the panic, fear, compassion, anger, or despair mobilized in other contexts in which borders are mediated (Bayramoğlu, 2021; Chouliaraki and Musarò, 2017: 536). The affective moments brought forth in harraga videos diversify the imagery of migration to encompass more than just suffering, death, and desperation.…”

The sexual politics of border control: an introduction

“…In understanding the intersection of borders and sexuality we further need to pay close attention to the ways in which biopolitical regimes of border control have long operated through the threat of sexual and viral contagion. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the fore once again how border figures serve as a tool to manage the collective health of the nation and play a key role in their securitization especially in regard to sexually transmitted diseases and viruses such as HIV (Ahuja 2016;Bayramoğlu 2021). An instructive example in this regard is the detention of Haitian refugees at Guantanámo Bay between 1991 and 1994.…”

Remembering hope: mediated queer futurity and counterpublics in Turkey’s authoritarian times

“…While violent regimes imposed to curb non-normative sexualities and gender identities continued to shape society and media, 61 a contradictory, more liberal discourse on sexuality began to influence Turkish culture in the late 1980s. An explosion of printed lifestyle magazines went hand in hand with the burgeoning of a more open discourse on sexuality: people started talking in public about previously taboo topics such as masturbation, erotic fantasies, and homosexuality.…”