ABSTRACT (İngilizce Özetler)

Performative politics: On the “Defending the Will of the People” rallies
EMEL UZUN AVCI
This study examines the “Defending the Will of the People” rallies initiated by the Republican People’s Party following Ekrem İmamoğlu’s arrest on 19 March 2025, within the framework of performative politics and ritual. Drawing on Jeffrey C. Alexander’s cultural pragmatic approach, the rallies are analysed not merely as gatherings for conveying political messages, but as performative mechanisms that generate meaning and affect through repetitive staging practices. The study argues that, through their frequent and regular repetition, these rallies have evolved into a ritualistic form of political communication for both the masses and political actors. This ritual structure is interpreted through a strategy of re-enactment built around the narrative of the War of Independence and reinforced through repetition. Spatial sites such as Samsun and Izmir, call-and-response practices, music, lighting, and digital circulation are analysed as key components of this performative structure.
Keywords: Performative politics, political rallies, ritual, re-enactment.

Generative AI, performative regimes and ethics in the neoliberal university
HAKAN ERGÜL, NICOLE BROWN
The rapid integration of generative AI (GenAI) into higher education has intensified concerns about its entanglement with longstanding inequalities and questions of academic integrity in the neoliberal university. While promoted through techno‑solutionist discourses that promise acceleration, efficiency, and competitiveness, these technologies are embedded in an academic culture increasingly governed by performance metrics, productivity, competition, and ranking —each framed as markers of excellence. Within this context, GenAI tools appear to enhance speed, expand review processes, and boost output, yet they simultaneously raise profound concerns about integrity and risk eroding practices of slow, critical reading (Beer, 2019), reflexivity, and sustained engagement with knowledge production. This article first situates GenAI within current debates on higher education, beforeturning to the lived experiences of academics and students. Drawing on initial data from a workshop held in May 2025 in the UK, we examine how questions of integrity, ethics, and performance are negotiated in everyday academic practice. We then explore the methodological possibilities of social fiction as a reflexive, practice‑as‑research approach, showing how it enables critical engagement with the cultural, ethical, and epistemic challenges posed by AI in academic life.
Keywords: Academic performance, GenAI, neoliberal university, social fiction, academic integrity.

The performative burden of naming, the symbolization crisis, and the humor
ÖZLEM ATİK
In this article, I discuss how the names “Dersim” and “Tunceli” turn into a performative burden in everyday encounters, and how this burden is related to the failure to symbolize historical violence. I argue that responses to the question “Where are you from?” go beyond a simple declaration of identity and produce a linguistic trajectory that calls the subject to bear witness and to repeatedly perform narratives of the past. Drawing on the conceptual framework developed by Judith Butler in Excitable Speech, the article examines the injurious effects of language and,
through engagement with the literature on trauma, symbolization, and testimony, explores why this recurring call generates exhaustion and burden. I contend that in contexts where mourning is not publicly and institutionally recognized, narratives of the past fail to settle into a collective framework and are instead placed upon the shoulders of individual subjects. Finally, through an analysis of Akın Aslan’s humorous narratives about Dersim, I seek to show how humor functions not as a solution that entirely eliminates this injurious trajectory, but rather as a linguistic practice that can suspend the concentration of performative burden on singular subjects, rework language in alternative contexts, and open up a certain distance in the relationship established with the past.
Keywords: Performativity, Dersim, symbolization crisis, injurious speech, humor.

The third wave of stand-up comedy in Turkey: Performance, identity, and offensive humor
OZAN DOĞUŞ ALPSAR
This study examines the new stand-up comedy movement that has become increasingly visible in Turkey since the mid-2010s within the conceptual framework of a “third wave.” After briefly outlining the historical development of stand-up in Turkey through the first and second waves, the article analyzes the conditions that paved the way for the third wave, focusing on the emergence of comedy clubs, the open-mic ecology, the circulation opportunities provided by social media, and the deepening economic-political crisis in the post-pandemic period. The study argues that the third wave represents not merely a quantitative increase, but a qualitative transformation in modes of production, circulation, and reception. Focusing on the public function of third-wave stand-up, the article discusses how issues such as Kurdish identity, gender, class impoverishment, and political repression circulate on stage. In this context, offensive humor and dark comedy are evaluated in terms of both their potential to reproduce hegemonic discourses and the possibilities they offer as tools of counter-public critique. Finally, the study aims to demonstrate how third-wave stand-up contributes to the formation of fragmented, identity-centered, and conflictual comedic publics in the face of a shrinking public sphere in Turkey.
Keywords: Stand-up comedy, Turkey, third wave, dark comedy, offensive humor, counterpublics.

From performance/pleasure to the influencer: The dissolution of neoliberal rationality
MERT KARBAY
This article argues that neoliberal rationality, understood as a mode of living, feeling, and thinking organized around a regime of performance and pleasure, is increasingly being superseded by the social media dispositif. In this process, the entrepreneurial subject –conceived as a company-self– is giving way to an influencer subject that emerges within the algorithmic flows of the dispositif. The article first interrogates the limits of approaches that conceptualize neoliberalism primarily as a regime of accumulation, and analyzes neoliberal governmentality, which operates through the logic of generalized competition mediated by the market. It subsequently contends that the neoliberal performance/pleasure regime –aimed at maximizing pleasure and performance while externalizing costs and risks– is losing its status as the dominant form of subjectivity. Finally, the article analyzes how the social media dispositif, by articulating the online and the offline, through practices of writing, interaction, and regimes of attention, disarticulates and reconfigures the neoliberal subject. The article suggests that to grasp contemporary processes of subjectivation, one must attend not only to the performance/pleasure game but to social media flows and the game of influence that encompass, yet cannot be reduced to, that game; the figure now emerging is the subject of the flow, constituted within an increasingly algorithmized form of governmentality.
Keywords: Social media dispositif, influencer, neoliberalism, performance, governmentality, subjectification.

Sexuality in the performance society: OnlyFans
AYŞE HÜMEYRA ÇAMURCU
This article aims to analyze how the performance society, which emerged with the transformation of privacy, dominates sexuality. A feminist theoretical framework is used in this analysis, explicitly avoiding positioning women as perpetrators. Since the pressure of the performance society affects women much more intensely, misogynistic attitudes often portray them as the guilty party. Consequently, women are forced to conform to male-defined standards in many aspects of daily life, from domestic labor to sexuality. Within this cycle, they are systematically exploited both physically and psychologically. OnlyFans, a platform for adult content, serves as a powerful tool for this exploitation. This study examines the extent to which OnlyFans and similar platforms commodify and consume women’s bodies and sexuality.
Keywords: Digital sex work, OnlyFans, performance society, privacy, sexuality.

Art of theatre in the selfie age
BELİZ GÜÇBİLMEZ
To understand what kind of experiential space theatre can generate in a social order where performance and self-display have become default norms, it is necessary to trace the oppositional structures that theatre has created since Ancient Greece around the spatial organization of the stage (sk-en-e): the visible and the invisible, the present and the absent, representation and performance. When the co-presence of these oppositions –which ontologically stratify theatre and give rise to an “ontological crack”– is treated not as a productive distance to be sustained but as a problem to be resolved, as a malfunction, the very idea of theatrical presentation is pushed into crisis. This article argues that the operation of the fourth wall as an “ideological absolute” in nineteenth-century realist theatre constitutes an attempt to rid theatre of its performative layer. As a kind of derivative of this impulse, performance art –pursuing pure presence by eliminating the representational layer is discussed through its claim to authenticity, its “anti-theatrical” discourse crystallized around ideals of raw and unmediated presentation, and its indistinguishability from the selfie age that forms its cultural backdrop, through which it ultimately loses its critical distance. Without abandoning theatre’s tense hybridization of representation and performance, the article defends the idea of a “performative stage” that keeps this ontological crack open, arguing for its contemporary aesthetic and political potential.
Keywords: Theatre, performance, representation, ontological crack, fourth wall, selfie age, performative stage.