Banal nationalism and queers online: Enforcing and resisting cultural meanings of .tr

Abstract

Focusing on daily (re)productions of national identities online, in this article, I investigate a particular country-code Top-Level Domain, .tr for Turkey. I follow Billig’s concept of ‘banal nationalism’ to argue that .tr (re)produces online Turkish national imaginations. Furthermore, I inspect the hegemonic Turkish norms of sexuality to examine what kind of Turkishness .tr (re)produces. The analyses of the policies governing the allocation process of .tr and the email interviews with the authors of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans* websites in Turkey show that .tr works to (re)produce, in a banal way, queer-free notion of Turkishness online. My analysis also demonstrates that some authors of the analysed websites do not dismiss .tr as banal but refuse to use it in resistance against the Turkish national requirements embedded in the domain. More broadly, I argue for the acknowledgement of cultural structures in internet governance studies.