A Field of Silence

Feminist Studies 46, no. 2. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 345 Aslı Zengin A Field of Silence: Secrecy, Intimacy, and Sex Work in Turkey Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint to a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence — Adrienne Rich, “Cartographies of Silence” The silences I speak of here are unnatural; the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot. In the old, the obvious parallels: when the seed strikes stone; the soil will not sustain; the spring is false; the time is drought or blight or infestations ; the frost comes premature. —Tillie Olsen, Silences Every ethnographer has a unique story of fieldwork. The intimate and turbulent relationship between the researcher and the field shapes the very content of our projects and the directions we take. Almost always, our initially proposed research questions fail, and we find ourselves pushed toward novel formulations and trajectories. A new set of questions and problems emerge as part of the exposure to surprises, challenges, and adjustments. For this reason, ethnography as a method 346 Aslı Zengin is both a curse and a gift. One could even argue that the ethnographic experience, rather than being an immersion of the researcher in the field, is an absorption of the researcher by the field. This piece is about turbulent ethnographic stories. It is a retrospective look at the specific challenges that I, as a twenty-three-year-old female master’s student, faced while conducting feminist ethnographic research on sex work in Istanbul in 2005. The particularity of my research topic—the domain of sexual transgression and excess—presented unique impediments, quandaries, and confrontations. In reflecting back on my research experience after more than a decade, I want to further explore and analyze the resonances of a central challenge I faced: silence. This challenge was related to the understandable problem of reaching and establishing rapport with sex workers. My gender, non-sex worker status, and educational background automatically placed me within the category of “respectable” womanhood, constraining my entrance into brothels and certain night clubs and bars, in addition to shaping my interactions with institutional actors as well as with sex workers . When I succeeded in entering a few sites, I faced a sharp silence from female sex workers, and most of my efforts to establish rapport failed. Consequently, my field experience, just like “my field,” was a fragmented , diffused, shattered, and unsteady story full of silences. I can neither describe a well-defined field, nor can I portray a strictly demarcated community of which I became a part. The field for me was not one place that I visited regularly; rather, it was an assembly of places that were continuously disrupted, suspended, variously lost and found. I had to draw new paths, change strategies, and manage specific figures. The legal status of sex workers explained, in part, my difficulty. In Turkey, sex work can be practiced legally according to the framework outlined in special codes, which originally date back to 1930, but were modified in 1961 and 1973.1 Yet, the wider world of sex work expands beyond this legal framework and is highly diverse in terms of gender (cis women, cis men, trans women, and gender nonconforming people), legal status (registered and unregistered), and nationality (Turkish and non-Turkish). The existing conventions cover only cis women and trans 1. The legal document at https://www.mevzuat.gov.tr/MevzuatMetin/2.4.5984. pdf. covers all the information regarding alterations made to the existing Prostitution Code from 1930 through 1973. Aslı Zengin 347 women sex workers, so male and gender-nonconforming sex workers fall outside the legal framework.2 At the time of this research, I had limited my scope to registered and unregistered Turkish cis women sex workers. Among my research sites were a hospital that served sex workers, offices responsible for the regulation and control of sex work, brothel streets, various low-rated night clubs and bars, houses of unregistered sex workers , NGOs working on HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases, and some publishing houses and journal offices that had published writing on

Aesthetics · Art · Blueprint · Ethnography · Field (mathematics) · Parallels · Political science · Secrecy · Silence · Sociology · Visual arts · Work (physics) · Anthropology · Engineering · Gender Studies · Law · Mathematics · Mechanical Engineering · Sex work and related issues · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies · Turkey's Politics and Society

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