In Queer in Translation, Evren Savci analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savci shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savci traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savci turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West-thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

In Queer in Translation, Evren Savci analyzes the travel and translation of Western LGBT political terminology to Turkey in order to illuminate how sexual politics have unfolded under Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP government. Under the AKP's neoliberal Islamic regime, Savci shows, there has been a stark shift from a politics of multicultural inclusion to one of securitized authoritarianism. Drawing from ethnographic work with queer activist groups to understand how discourses of sexuality travel and are taken up in political discourse, Savci traces the intersection of queerness, Islam, and neoliberal governance within new and complex regimes of morality. Savci turns to translation as a queer methodology to think Islam and neoliberalism together and to evade the limiting binaries of traditional/modern, authentic/colonial, global/local, and East/West-thereby opening up ways of understanding the social movements and political discourse that coalesce around sexual liberation in ways that do justice to the complexities both of what circulates under the signifier Islam and of sexual political movements in Muslim-majority countries.

In this special issue, we address what we refer to as 'perversity of the political' or 'perverse politics': namely, the assumptions political theory and movements, and in our specific case feminism, often make on behalf of their subjects, and how their subjects, in return, perform individual and collective contrariness, unruliness and resistance to what is expected or desired from their 'subjectivity'. Specifically focusing on the themes of 'false consciousness', multiplicity, and uneasy alliances, the papers collected here seek to empirically lay out a number of such 'perverse' moments, and offer anti-imperialist feminist alternatives to second wave feminism's often reductive understandings of freedom; emancipation; oppression; empowerment and democracy.