Su, Janine; (2025) ON BOYS AND BORDERS: Unintelligible mobility and uncertain manhood in Istanbul’s Old City. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis examines the point of intersection between mobility and masculinities in Istanbul, Turkey. My interlocutors are single young men from around the country, who were self-motivated to leave their home towns and villages seeking adventure in the wider world, and who converge in the touristic Old City district of Sultanahmet. I investigate my interlocutors’ claims to feel different from ‘typical’ migrants, and to be more interested in freedom of movement than settlement abroad per se, much less ‘migration as rite of passage’ eventuating in reincorporation into the home community. I label this conceit and its related dynamics ‘unintelligible mobility’, as the slippage between the normative frameworks surrounding socio-spatial movement and these young men’s aspirations has the potential to disrupt their ‘masculine trajectories’ (Ghannam 2013). I suggest that their mobile subjectivities are not aberrant or random, and instead conform to an alternative framework with a long regional history that remains influential in the form of ‘cultural geographies’ under the ‘national cartographies (Zırh 2017) that have shifted the modern lexicon of mobility. I employ instead the indigenous concepts of sıla, gurbet, and garip to elaborate the affective relationship between people and place, and argue that my interlocutors’ unintelligibility is attributable to their non-normative orientation toward these categories. I go on to detail the efforts of so-called ‘Sultanahmet boys’ to actualize their subjectivities, as their feeling of being misunderstood by their countrymen fuels a desire to interact with foreigners, who lack the baggage of ‘cultural intimacy’ (Herzfeld 2005). The combination of unintelligible people and ‘non-place’ (Augé 1995) creates opportunities to manoeuvre beyond domestic socio-spatial regimes. The pursuit of relationships with tourists, then, becomes a means of cultivating alternative networks of mobility, and in turn achieving manhood on their own terms. The ethnography explores the precarious terrain associated with these efforts.

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