Through my thesis, I will be analysing ‘clean city’ discourses which have been deployed to imply social conflicts in contemporary Turkey and specifically in Istanbul. As much as the term is related to hygienisation technologies of urban space, it also addresses to the homogenisation practices which target dissolution of non-hegemonic social identities and positions. Looking at from an intersectional perspective, I will be examining how social minority positions (including ethical, sexual, religious, bodily and class identities) are imagined as the reason of dirt, filth and contamination, and how they come to signify binary opposite of ‘clean’, ‘pure’, ‘white’ identities of the urban space, in contemporary Istanbul.
- assigned by the advisor