A Psychosocial Analysis of Queer* Trauma and Structural Violence in Turkey's LGBTQIA+ Lifeworlds

In this article, I present a psychosocial analysis of queer* trauma within Turkey's LGBTQIA+ communities as I examine how structural violence and minority stress manifest in the everyday experiences of sexual and gender minorities. Drawing on 13 in-depth interviews conducted in Turkish between May 2023 and June 2024, I employ a phenomenologically informed narrative methodology to explore how queer* trauma is produced and experienced within Turkey's complex sociopolitical milieu. Centred around the concept of queer* trauma, I situate individual testimonies within Turkey's specific socio-historical trajectory of LGBTQIA+ presence and aggravating anti-gender politics. Since classical trauma scholarships have long treated personal and collective traumas as separate things, I draw on queer affect theories and critical trauma studies to create a transdisciplinary framework that extends the existing critiques of the traditional individual/collective divide. Queer* trauma, I argue, is the product of ongoing structural violence through the complex interplay of historical silence and social abandonment, manifesting as internalised psychological distress and collective memory. My interlocutors' narratives reveal how external violence becomes etched into psychic structures by creating chronic, 'low-intensity' yet omnipresent conditions of precariousness. In conclusion, I argue that classical trauma paradigms, particularly the biomedical and psychiatric PTSD models, fail to account for the relational complexities and embodied realities of queer* experiences in authoritarian contexts. By foregrounding the psychosocial dimensions of trauma, with this work, I aim to contribute to developing more nuanced understandings of how systemic oppression shapes both individual subjectivities and collective memories within queer lifeworlds.