Notes on Allaturca Camp: Bülent Ersoy and Her Diva Style

Abstract

Bulent Ersoy, renowned as the first transsexual star of Turkey, identifies herself as someone“who is at the sharpest point of a climax”. Since the 1970s, she has been a famoussinger with the help of her extraordinary powerful voice and impressive performances, asmuch as she drew public attention with her queer identity. Occasionally, she clashed withTurkish authorities mostly due to her insisting on performing on stage with women’s clothingbefore her gender affirmation surgery that took place in 1981. Moreover, even after thesurgery, she could not get an official female identity card in Turkey for seven years andhas been banned from staging. When she returned to Turkey and started singing again in1988, she described those years and her struggle to be known as a “woman” in her hit songsmetaphorically. Esther Newton in her book “Mother Camp” (1979) links camp to dragculture, focusing on female impersonation and diva worship (Newton 1979). With “Diva”which is a nickname given to her by her audience, Bulent Ersoy intentionally plays withthe lyrics of her songs to highlight her queer background. Furthermore, with her campycostumes, she becomes someone – “It’s too much,” “It’s fantastic,” “It’s not to be believed” asSusan Sontag describes in Camp (Sontag 1964).Bulent Ersoy receives high viewer ratings from her TV appearances too. She reached asignificant audience with her costumes and performances as a jury member in various realityshows broadcasted on Turkish television, especially in the 2000s. Since these ratings comenot only from queer viewers, but from heterosexual audiences all around the country, whoare well informed about Ersoy’s past and present, each queer display on screen might bethought as significant as her singing performances. Therefore, a viewer not only hears herstruggle against those hegemonic straight discourses, but also encounters transsexualismpublicly through her body, which is a sacrificial site to her desirable existence. In this presentation,we will discuss the usage of Camp as a strategy of reading these artistic performanceswhich are informed, at least partially, by the exaggeration of social roles, sometimes reachingto a point of absurdity. Our aim is to analyze Bülent Ersoy ‘s Camp TV performances and herextravagant costumes in the midst of these social negotiations between the queers and theirmanagement in the social realm – both on and off stage – in contemporary Turkey.