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Aslı Zengin is an assistant professor in the Department of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Rutgers University. Zengin's research lies at the intersection of ethnography of trans, queer, sex worker, and sex/gender transgressive lives; scientific and legal regimes of sex, gender and sexuality; critical studies of violence and sovereignty; death, funerals, cemeteries, and afterlives; as well as transnational aspects of LGBTQ and feminist movements in the Middle East, with a special focus on Turkey.

Before joining Rutgers, Zengin was the Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pembroke Center at Brown University and held postdoctoral fellowships in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis University. 

Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul, was published in Turkish in 2011. In this book, she examines the regulation of licensed and unlicensed sex work at the intersection of state power, law, medicine, and violence.Currently Zengin is completing her second book manuscript, Violent Intimacies: Transgender Lives, Family and the State in Contemporary Turkey, which examines how everyday troubles with sex/gender nonconformity in social and institutional life shape the organization of state power, the social production of family and kinship, the religious order, and the transgender lives, deaths, and activism in Turkey.

Turkey
Gender

Queering the Middle East and its Diasporas Lecture Series
Supported by the Herbert H. Goldberger Lectureships Fund
Cosponsored by the LGBTQIA+ Thinking Initiative, Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women