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“Are you able to protect animals? No… We cannot protect our minds either…” by Asli Alpar Bodies That Freely Roam: Politics of Containment in TurkeyNazli Yagmur Erdogmus, Iscte - University Institute of Lisbon Peri was a stray cat, one of millions in Istanbul, and I had decided to take her with me to Europe, where I currently study and live. “This cat is older than six months,” the staff at the agriculture branch announced flatly. “You’ll need to pay a fine. 3,000 liras.” I explained we had just found her on the street, that we hadn’t avoided chipping her—but my words met only indifference. Frustrated, I broke down in the corridor, muttering, “This state is a thief.” As I cried, a polished, modern-looking woman manager walked by almost whispering, “So easy to insult our government these days.” Her calm mockery marked a rupture. Her appearance—unveiled, made-up—threw me off. I had placed her to be oppositional, maybe even an ally? As a feminist queer woman from a secular background, I believed I had unlearned nationalist binaries that equate veiling with oppression and unveiling with liberation. Yet in that moment, I realized how deeply such reflexes remain. Later, my mother and I took a taxi to the municipal shelter to seek help. The driver echoed our frustration against the government, only to say, “They’ve put women in cockroach uniforms,” and then added, “But also women shouldn’t show too much of their meat.” Was he aware that he was driving two bags of meat? Though personal, these encounters reflected broader histories of regulating bodies and public life. In the early 1900s, thousands of stray dogs were abandoned on Hay?rs?z Island—left to die in the name of modern urban hygiene (Abdullazade et al., 2020). This urge to “clean” public space still guides governance. From the early Republican veil ban to the 2004 Animal Protection Law— which criminalized harm but offered no care infrastructure—Turkey’s urban policy has oscillated between symbolic inclusion and material abandonment. The 2023 “animal massacre law,” which justifies mass euthanasia by sending strays to overcrowded shelters, reflects a familiar state logic: invoking public safety while shifting responsibility from public to individual. Strays, like refugees, have been granted symbolic protections—through the 2004 Animal Protection Law or “guest” status—but these rarely result in material solutions. Instead, both are governed through shifting narratives that frame them as either tolerable or threatening, depending on political needs. This dynamic of moral regulation and selective inclusion extends to how the state manages gendered visibility. Once banned under secular modernization as a marker of backwardness, the veil was later reclaimed by women as a form of resistance. Yet this moment of reclamation was also aligned with a broader political project to advance a conservative agenda rather than gendered liberation. As such, the veil has functioned less as a stable cultural symbol and more as a shifting political tool shaped by state ideologies (Kandiyoti, 2016; Zeytinoglu & Bonnabeauis, 2015). Like the narratives around strays and refugees, women’s appearances have been used to signal a gendered moral order, marking certain bodies as proper citizens and others as threats to be governed or erased. This is the violence of modernist imaginaries: demanding legibility, erasing difference, and narrowing how we’re allowed to see one another, our cities, and ourselves (Yegenoglu, 2017).
A recent study on X (formerly Twitter) showed how opposition to the new animal law is pathologized. The term ittapar (“dog-worshipper”) brands critics as mentally ill or anti-human (Press, 2024; Yanki Raporu, 2024) lumping them with feminists, LGBTQ+ people, and supposed western-backed conspirators, reflecting wider societal prejudices. Pathologizing the Other is a longstanding strategy of control (Fanon, 2008). The term “free-roaming,” used for both stray animals and women who defy gender norms, reinforces the idea that public space belongs to the disciplined, neoliberal Turkish-Islamic citizen. Those who deviate from this ideal—whether queer, migrant, or non-human—are recast not as subjects with needs or rights, but as disruptions to be managed. When difference is framed as disorder, and systemic care is replaced with moral panic, reclaiming public space becomes more than a demand for visibility. It becomes a refusal of sanitized order and a call for a shared space that does not depend on control or conformity. In my case, the unveiled official’s loyalty to the state and the taxi driver’s misogyny—despite his anti-government stance—ruptured my expectations. These contradictions revealed that governance does not merely assign identities from above, but moves through people in unpredictable ways. The inability to neatly categorize people as “friend” or “enemy,” “ally” or “oppressor” disrupts the clarity on which neoliberal governance depends (Han, 2017). Not knowing opens up a different kind of engagement—one that resists flattening dissent into manageable forms. A mundane daily experience turned into a reflection of larger systems of exclusion—from Hay?rs?z Island to veiling politics, from animal laws to refugee scapegoating. Inhabiting opacity in these moments is not about offering unconditional acceptance but resisting the demand to reduce people to legible categories. Embracing difference and uncertainty, opacity here becomes our right to exist without explanation, to resist being fully known on someone else’s terms. Perhaps, it is through embracing the right the opacity that we can ‘freely roam’ through our daily ruptures, relate across each other’s differences – not to fix each contradiction, but to remain present with them while seeking collective remedies.
BibliographyAbdullazade, S., Gasimova, M., Mammadl?, S., Mukhtarov, Z., Baghirov, J., & Ghasemlou, K. (2020). The Great Dog Massacre in late Ottoman ?stanbul: The history of “Hay?rs?z Ada.” http://hdl.handle.net/11693/76241 Kandiyoti, D. (2016). Locating the politics of gender: Patriarchy, neo-liberal governance and violence in Turkey. Research and Policy on Turkey, 1(2), 103–118. https://doi.org/10.1080/23760818.2016.1201242 Press, A. (2024, July 30). Turkey approves ‘massacre law’ to remove millions of stray dogs. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/30/turkey-approves- massacre-law-remove-millions-street-dogs Yanki Raporu. (2024). Aposto | Sokak hayvanlar?, sosyal medyada nas?l tart???ld?? Aposto. https://aposto.com/s/sokak-hayvanlari-sosyal-medyada-nasil-tartisildi |
