Biographical Notes
Before joining Rutgers, Zengin was the Louise Lamphere Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Pembroke Center at Brown University and held postdoctoral fellowships in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at Harvard Divinity School and the Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program at Brandeis University.
Her first book, Intimacy of Power: Women Prostitutes, Sex Work and Violence in İstanbul, was published in Turkish in 2011. In this book, she examines the regulation of licensed and unlicensed sex work at the intersection of state power, law, medicine and violence. Currently Zengin is completing her second book manuscript Violent Intimacies: Transgender Lives, Family and the State in Contemporary Turkey, which examines how everyday troubles with sex/gender nonconformity in social and institutional life shape the organization of state power, the social production of family and kinship, the religious order, and the transgender lives, deaths, and activism in Turkey.
Selected Publications
Forthcoming Gender Minorities, In the Handbook on Women in the Middle East, eds. Suad Joseph and Zeina Zataari, London: Routledge.
2020 A Field of Silence: Secrecy, Intimacy and Sex Work in Turkey, Feminist Studies, 46(2): 1- 26.
2020 Turkish Cemeteries for the “Unknown”_#Afterlives, Allegra Lab
2019 The Afterlife of Gender: Sovereignty, Intimacy and Muslim Funerals of Transgender People in Turkey, Cultural Anthropology, 34(1): 78-102.
2016 Violent Intimacies: Tactile State Power, Sex/Gender Transgression and the Politics of Touch in Contemporary Turkey, the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 12 (2): 225-245.