21/10/2020 | Writer: Yiğit E Korkmaz
Yildiz Tar of Kaos GL was a guest at the Enstitü Fabrika's event and explained the discrimination in language through the oral history book Trails and media monitoring reports.
Enstitü Fabrika Gender Equality Initiative organized the "Trails: Language, Discrimination and the Search for Equality" discussion. Mustafa Aşık moderated the online discussion on October 15, where Kaos GL's Yıldız Tar spoke.
Yildiz Tar traced the word "homosexual" through Kaos GL's oral history book Trails in the discussion attended by about fifty people. Tar explained the banishment from the language, linguistic isolation, the call to return and the hierarchical nature of this process:
“The absence of words to describe your own life, your own experience, corresponds to the banishment from the language. The concepts produced while you are being recalled to the language which you were banished from are always tainted with other meanings. Feelings like shame are labeled on the notions, and where you're recalled to is a tucked-down, chastened place. You are being recalled to the same place that you were banished from in the first place, but this time your experiences are immobilized and adorned with feelings like shame.”
Click here for the book Trails.
What's the extent of discrimination in the media language?
Then Yıldız Tar quoted Kaos GL's Media Monitoring reports and inferences from this report:
“2019 was a year in which LGBTI+ identity and existence were shown as "crime" in the printed press. The discriminatory language was used very often. Half of the texts were discriminatory. In 2018, the rate of discriminatory language was 34 percent; In 2019, the rate increased dramatically to 50 percent. In 2019, the freedom of expression and organization of LGBTI+'s was violated in too many texts, as dissimilar from 2018. In 2018, this violation took place in only 341 of the texts; while there were 1077 texts in 2019.”
Click here for the Media Monitoring Report 2019 in Turkish.
Tags: arts and culture, life
