UC Santa Cruz

"Koli Sinemaları: A Trans/ Lubunya Feminist Research-Archive-Curation" is a hybrid PhD dissertation, also known as research-creation, that explores trans audiences' historical experiences in porn movie theatres in Ankara and Istanbul in Turkey, between the 1990s and 2000s. Drawing on oral history interviews with trans femmes, lubunyas, I conceptualize porn movie theaters that welcomed, tolerated, or profited from trans audiences as koli cinemas. I borrow the term koli meaning sex, sexual partner, or client, from Lubunca, a queer vernacular widely used among queer and trans communities in Turkey, particularly among sex workers. By treating trans bodies as archives of lived history through oral history and cinema spaces as archives of sexuality and sociality, I depict how koli cinemas functioned as sites of community formation, sex work, and collective film watching. I make a methodological contribution to artistic research by introducing kürating (mock-curating) as “a trans/lubunya feminist research-archive-curation,” a transnational trans and feminist methodology. With kürating, I propose translation, curation, exhibition, archivization and discussion of media as transfeminist practices that learn from daily life experiences of trans people, treating knowledge as relational and co-constituted through embodied learning and production, exhibition and reception of media. I kürate audio/visual media alongside the written media and invite readers to translate between different reception practices like reading, watching, and listening. I also kürate collective porn-watching and porn-talking events (Koli Sineması Tatavla, Istanbul, 2021 & Koli Cinema Studio C, Santa Cruz, 2026) and audiovisual archive them to demonstrating kürating as a trans/lubunya feminist worldmaking practice.