What Do Transgender Women’s Experiences Tell Us about Law? Towards an Understanding of Law as Legal Complex
Based on ethnographic study conducted in Istanbul, this thesis investigates the effects of law and legal operations on transgender women’s sex work and daily lives, and seeks to disentangle the multidimensional ways through which they and their conduct are governmentalized by law in Turkey. The first part of the thesis discusses the legal dynamics surrounding transgender sex work and delineates how transgender women are expulsed from regulated sex work by the interaction of the socially produced desire around their bodies and law. Led to work outside the regulated sex trade, transgender women navigate spaces which are regulated in an ambivalent
