Tranny Tease
Performative lecture by Slavs and Tatars
Lenin believed that the revolution of the east begins with the Latinization (or Romanization) of the alphabets of all Muslims of the USSR. The march of alphabets has always accompanied that of empires–Arabic with the rise of Islam, Latin with that of Roman Catholicism, and Cyrillic with the Orthodox Church and subsequently Bolshevism.
Through the lens of phonetic, semantic, and theological slippage, The Tranny Tease explores the potential for transliteration–the conversion of scripts–as a strategy equally of resistance and research into notions such as identity politics, colonialism, and faith. With a focus on the Turkic languages, of the former Soviet Union, as well as the eastern and western frontiers of the Turkic sphere, namely Anatolia and Xinjiang/UighuristanThe Tranny Tease attempts not to emancipate peoples or nations but rather the sounds rolling off our tongues.
