Virilities for rent: navigating masculinity, sexuality, and class in İstanbul

Abstract

This thesis is an endeavour to understand the encountering dynamics of different masculinities of varoş youth and gay men in the context of male prostitution. On the one side, there are the young rent boys of poor, tough, male-dominated varoş culture. Rent boys pretend to be "normal", straight men, desire more money than they have, divide their times and social milieux between gay and non-gay partners. On the other side, there are well-off, refined, heterosocial, urban gay men. Gays develop a self-distaste towards assumed effeminacy of other homosexuals and seek sexual escapades with more masculine varoş boys, as if they were converting straight men into having sex with themselves. The two sides are queering what they seem to have in terms of identity categories through desire and sexual action. Rent boys are queering heteromasculinity by disobeying its unwritten rules by having sex with men. They are subverting the restrictive straight framework when they are with gays, and reconstruct it when they need to pass as straight. By doing this, they uncover the inner, unchangeable, unified status of heterosexuality, and actively construct it as a field of mutual agreement, illusion, and performance. Gays are queering gayness by internalizing global fashions and styles of being gay, sexual rights, and cultural products, and simultaneously rejecting the assumed versatility of homosex, forming desire for straight-acting, and employing local categories of heterosexual imagery. Thus, gay identity becomes an incoherent, destabilized, and insecure possibility of maneuvers. With the help of queer theory, this thesis attempts to unmask (male) gender privilege, dualistic accounts of gender, and compulsory heterosexuality.