MES Book Award, Aslı Zengin
The Middle East Section is pleased to present Aslı Zengin with the 2025 MES Book Award for Violent Intimacies: The Trans Everyday and the Making of an Urban World (Duke University Press, 2024). Based on sustained fieldwork with trans women in Istanbul, Zengin traces how the Turkish state reaches into the textures of daily life—through touch, surveillance, and regulation—to produce what she calls “violent intimacies.” Zengin situates transness in the global south as a site of theoretical production rather than a test case for Euro-American trans and queer theorization. Violent proximities, at once physical and affective, shape not only trans lives but the very grammar of governance and belonging in urban Turkey. Zengin approaches transness not as a stable identity but as a condensed site within a wider relational economy of violence. By navigating surveillance and securitization, trans women compel the police to devise new techniques of control, thereby reshaping the very state that polices them.
Violent Intimacies is a work of uncommon depth—empirically grounded, conceptually original, and attuned to the entanglements of power and endurance that define urban life. Intervening in anthropological and feminist and queer scholarship on intimacy, Zengin shows not only how violence attaches itself to everyday life beyond heteropatriarchal relations, but also what intimacy becomes through violence—how it circulates in streets, clinics, courtrooms, and funerals as much as within homes. Her account of kinship likewise resists simple oppositions between “straight” and “queer” families, revealing that no families—cis or trans—are internally coherent or uniform. Zengin, thus, offers new perspectives on state power, securitization, and urban geography that radiate from trans life. The state’s policing of trans women and sex workers, Zengin shows, simultaneously transforms the spatial and moral order of Turkish cities, for all citizens and residents. Techniques of control developed in relation to one marginalized group circulate across others—Kurds, Roma, refugees, and non-Muslim workers as well as trans women—revealing a shared political economy of violence. This ethnography offers an elegant, grounded vocabulary for understanding how power takes sensorial and spatial form, and how, in turn, those most subject to it find ways to act upon and transform it.
MES Book Award (Honorable Mention), Emrah Yıldız
The Middle East Section recognizes Emrah Yıldız with an Honorable Mention for the 2025 MES Book Award for Zainab’s Traffic: Moving Saints, Selves, and Others across Borders (University of California Press, 2024). Through a richly textured ethnography of Shi‘i pilgrimage routes connecting Iran, Turkey, and Syria, Yıldız rethinks ritual as “traffic”—a mode of regulated improvisation that entwines devotion, commerce, and contraband. Moving through buses, bazaars, and border checkpoints, the book traces how saints, states, pilgrims, and smugglers co-produce sovereignty and value in the same circuits of movement. Zainab’s Traffic makes a theoretical intervention in the anthropology of Islam by situating the “ethical turn” within its political economy: piety and self-cultivation emerge not in isolation from capitalism, sanctions, and sovereignty, but through them. Yıldız’s account expands the anthropology of religion and borders alike, revealing mobility as a deeply moral and material practice that remakes both subjects and states.
MES Student Paper