Several films have addressed queer Turkishness in recent years, albeit
in very different ways. Regardless of whether being produced and located
in Turkey or across Europe, a common concern is the problematization of
home and belonging. Prof. Poole will look at two contrasting examples
and discuss the ambiguities of home arising from queer – and
specifically gay male – sexuality. Zenne Dancer (2011), a Turkish
production, and Beyto (2020), a Swiss production, in strikingly
different ways feature a trio of mixed-cultured protagonists who are
forced to arrange their lives not according to their wishes. While Zenne
Dancer ends with killing the gay and thus with a bleak outlook on the
state of queerness in Turkey, Beyto envisions a utopic future for its
queer protagonist far away from Turkish influences. What unites the
films, however, is the notion that finding a home for queers requires
involuntary mobility.  Both films in the lecture are considered as part
of a new queer pan-European cinema that foregrounds homesteading as
(perhaps necessarily) linked to migration. The act of coming out all too
often results in having to move out, although the wish for a steady home
remains unbroken. Both films address the risks of homelessness and offer
dreams of homefulness, a major topic of the new Heimatfilm at large. In
what ways these films refresh, expand, and transgress a genre that
grounds on a seemingly unchallenged claim to heteronormativity, will be
asked by positioning them alongside theories of queer narration, queer
futurity, and queer migration. Are such theories that stem from
Euro-American social, political, and cultural contexts even adequate and
valid when dealing with non-European contexts? Both films at stake take
a different stance as to how Westernized their queer protagonists are
meant to be perceived and in what ways their homes – as precarious as
they turn out to be – are linked to the past, the present, and the
future.

Ralph J. Poole is an American-German researcher who teaches as Professor
of American Studies at the University of Salzburg, Austria. He taught at
the University of Munich, Germany, at Fatih University in Istanbul,
Turkey, and was a research scholar at CUNY’s Center for Advanced Studies
in Theater Arts in Manhattan. His publications include a study on the
Avant-Garde tradition in American theatre, a book on satirical and
autoethnographical “cannibal” texts, a collection of essays on
“dangerous masculinities”, and another collection on “queer Turkey”.
Having wrapped up a project funded by the Austrian Science Fund on
“Gender and Comedy in the Age of the American Revolution”, he is
currently researching the Austrian Heimatfilm from a pan-European and
and genderqueer perspective. His research interests include gender and
queer studies, popular culture, and transnational American studies.

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