Homonationalism and Western progressive narrative: locating ‘conservative heartlands’ with Zenne Dancer (2012) and its Western reviews

Abstract

In this paper, we analyze the Turkish film Zenne Dancer (2012), which is largely based on what has been called a first gay honor killing in Turkey. We employ a framing analysis to both the film’s content and its Western reviews to compare how different media texts frame the murder. The results indicate that while both the film and the reviews recognize tradition, understood here as native and archaic values as well as Islamic religion, as a key factor behind the murder, they locate this tradition quite differently: the film relegates it to the eastern Turkey, and thus implicitly to Kurds, while the reviews tend to extend it to the entire country or even the whole Middle East. We relate these results to the Western progressive narrative that positions the West as a civic and moral ideal that could be achieved by others over time. In particular, we employ Puar’s concept of homonationalism to show how different media texts challenge or exploit the Western imperative to ‘come out’ and what effects it has for the East–West juxtapositions.