TRANSGRESSING THE CULTURAL-WAR REGIME: TRANSCULTURES AND YOUTH REVOLUTIONARY SUBJECTIVATION IN TURKEY
Études balkaniques (Sofia) 2026, N 3, pp. 563-595
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62761/645.EB.LXII3.03
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: cem.ozatalay@gmail.com
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: ipekboldag@gmail.com
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: cerenntunay@gmail.com
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: ozan.bal@yahoo.com
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: elif_bilginn@hotmail.com
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: gizemkosova@gmail.com
Galatasaray University, Turkey
E-mail: micayit@gmail.com
Abstract: This article examines how young people raised in religiously conservative, government-aligned families in Turkey come to inhabit oppositional political subjectivities without severing familial ties. Drawing on 20 sociological biographies conducted in the wake of the March 2025 student mobilization, six of which had queer-identified participants, we conceptualize these boundary-crossing agents as transcultures: subjects whose trajectories from one culture to another emerge through gendered refusals, queer refusals of heteronormative legibility, institutional contradictions, tactical concealment, and the public reconfiguration of collective belonging. Building on Bourdieu’s habitus clive, Lahire’s plural dispositions, and Jaquet’s transclass, we argue that transcultural trajectories make visible the nonreproduction internal to the cultural-war regime. They unsettle both the regime’s claim that conservative families produce conservative subjects and the state fantasy that revolutionary politics must come from outside Sunni Muslim Turkishness, reopening the problem of vivre-ensemble as practical, conflictual labor.
Keywords: transcultures, cultural-war regime, vivre-ensemble, anti-gender politics, Turkey
