Border panic over the pandemic: mediated anxieties about migrant sex workers and queers during the AIDS crises in Turkey

Abstract

Looking back to remember the “arrival” of AIDS in Turkey, this article explores how the spread of the new disease fueled border panic in Turkey from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. Drawing on a rich array of material from the archives of national newspapers and magazines, this article analyzes the media discourse on migrant sex workers from the former USSR and the first HIV-positive men. It shows how both groups were seen as intruders bringing the virus from outside Turkey’s borders to its territory. In both cases, I argue, fear of the spread of the virus across borders became entangled with anxieties about the movement of ideas, images, lifeworlds, and meanings relating to sexuality that were discursively constructed as fundamentally alien to Turkish ones. The movement of sexually and racially “other” bodies across borders was seen as a threat to the fragile construed border between “Turkishness” and “foreignness”.