Notes on Alla Turca camp: Bülent Ersoy and her ‘diva’ style

Abstract

Bülent Ersoy (1952–present) is known as the first transgender star of Turkish music. Since the 1970s, she has been a famous singer with the help of her extraordinary powerful voice and impressive performances, as well as drawing public attention to her queer identity. Occasionally, she clashed with Turkish authorities mostly due to her insisting on performing on stage wearing women’s clothing before her gender affirmation surgery that took place in 1981. She left Turkey in 1981 when Turkish authorities banned transgender performers on the stage. However, even after the surgery, she could not get an official female identity card in Turkey for seven years and was banned from performing on stage. When she returned to Turkey and started singing again in 1988, she described those years and her struggle to be known as a ‘woman’ in her hit songs through metaphorical ways. In addition to music, she also reached a large television audience through her costumes and performances as a jury member in various reality shows broadcasted on Turkish television, especially in the 2000s. In this article, we will discuss the usage of ‘camp’ as a strategy for reading Bülent Ersoy’s artistic performances, which are informed, at least partially, by the exaggeration of social roles, sometimes reaching to a point of absurdity. We use Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’ as a lens through which to explore how Bülent Ersoy negotiates the limiting camp binaries of artifice/authenticity, hypersexuality/monogamy and monstrous/virtuous in order to contribute to underexplored areas in camp scholarship.