Sex Under Intimate Siege: Transgender Lives, Law and State Violence in Contemporary Turkey

My doctoral research is about the production of marginalized sexualities through both the exercise of power and resistance to it. Focusing on legal codes and regulations surrounding sex reassignment surgeries (SRSs), sex work, hate crimes targeting trans people, and state officials' (juridical actors, police, doctors, forensic medicine people) legal and extralegal relations with trans people in Beyoglu, Istanbul, I scrutinize the transformation of trans lives into the microphysical domain of state power for the symbolic and material production of sexual and gender difference in Turkey. I also analyze how trans people respond to this process in their everyday lives. Starting with the queer history of Beyoglu, and trans people's everyday experiences of spatial discrimination, marginalization and displacement by the police, capital owners, landlords, and neighbors since the 1960s, I investigate how myriad forms of everyday violence shape trans people's political and intimate subjectivities. The construction and deployment of "transsexuality" as a medico-legal category is also part of this violent process. I elaborate on the work of this category to discuss how medico-legal actors of the state evaluate transsexuality, and hence, one's "true" sex, and open trans people's bodies to violent proximities and intimacies. Overall I argue that the categories of sex and gender are integral to the formation and intimate workings of Turkish state power as the state seeks to govern and regulate not only bodies and sexuality, but also subjects' intimate conducts and desires. The second part of my dissertation focuses on trans people's responses to these relations of violence, including the making of transgender community - a form of family and trans activism. In many cases, practices that are understood culturally as essential family duties (i.e. providing emotional and financial protection, caring for the body at death) are re-claimed by the trans community, replacing the assumed role of the family and announcing the community as "the real family." I discuss family as one of the most contested intimate sites in transgender people's lives, a site that is intimately intertwined with an ethics of care in the face of everyday violence. Arguably another expression of this ethics of care is trans activism in Istanbul. By looking at how trans people organize and mobilize around hate crimes, police violence and state control over SRSs, I scrutinize trans people's definitions of and struggle for queer justice in institutional spaces, as well as the street.Ph.D.2016-11-30 00:00:0

CROSS-LAYER ADAPTATION OF SERVICE-BASED SYSTEMS

One of the key features of service-based systems (SBS) is the capability to adapt in order to react to various changes in the business requirements and the application context. Given the complex layered structure, and the heterogeneous and dynamic execution context of such systems, adaptation is not at all a trivial task. The importance of the problem of adaptation has been widely recognized in the community of software services and systems. There exist several adaptation approaches which aim at identifying and solving problems that occur in one of the SBS layers. A fundamental problem with most of these works is their fragmentation and isolation. While these solutions are quite effective when the specific problem they try to solve is considered, they may be incompatible or even harmful when the whole system is taken into account. Enacting an adaptation in the system might result in triggering new problems. When building adaptive SBSs precautions must be taken to consider the impacts of the adaptations on the entire system. This can be achieved by properly coordinating adaptation actions provided by the different analysis and decision mechanisms through holistic and multi-layer adaptation strategies. In this dissertation, we address this problem. We present a novel framework for Crosslayer Adaptation Management (CLAM) that enables a comprehensive impact analysis by coordinating the adaptation and analysis tools available in the SBS. We define a new system modeling methodology for adaptation coordination. The SBS model and the accompanying adaptation model that we propose in this thesis overcome the limitations of the existing cross-layer adaptation approaches: (i) genericness for accommodating diverse SBS domains with different system elements and layers (ii) flexibility for allowing new system artifacts and adaptation tools (iii) capability for dealing with the complexity of the SBS considering the possibility of a huge number of problems and adaptations that might take place in the system. Based on this model we present a tree-based coordination algorithm. On the one hand it exploits the local adaptation and analysis facilities provided by the system, and on the other hand it harmonizes the different layers and system elements by properly coordinating the local solutions. The outcome of the algorithm is a set of alternative cross-layer adaptation strategies which are consistent with the overall system. Moreover, we propose novel selection criteria to rank the alternative strategies and select the best one. Differently from the traditional approaches, we consider as selection criteria not only the overall quality of the SBS, but also the total efforts required to enact an adaptation strategy. Based on these criteria we present two possible ranking methods, one relying on simple additive weighting - multiple criteria decision making, the other relying on fuzzy logic. The framework is implemented and integrated in a toolkit that allows for constructing and selecting the cross-layer adaptation strategies, and is evaluated on a set of case studies

Clam: Cross-layer management of adaptation decisions for service-based applications

Adaptation of service-based applications (SBA) is not trivial in their heterogeneous and dynamic execution context. While different approaches exist, most of them focus on a specific part of the SBA ignoring the overall impact of the adaptation on the whole application. In this paper we propose a cross-layer adaptation manager (CLAM) that tackles this problem

SCOPOLAMINE-INDUCED CONVULSIONS IN FASTED RATS AFTER FOOD INTAKE: THE EFFECT OF DURATION OF FOOD DEPRIVATION

Objective: Mice and rats fasted for 2 days and then treated with antimuscarinic drugs, scopolamine or atropine, develop convulsions soon after food intake. It has been demonstrated that deprivation of food for less than 48 h also causes convulsions in mice. Since there are differences in characteristics of the seizures between mice and rats, the present study evaluated whether rats also develop convulsions after being deprived of food for 3-24 h

Scopolamine-induced convulsions in fasted mice after food intake: the effect of duration of food deprivation

It has been shown that mice and rats treated with antimuscarinic drugs, scopolamine or atropine, after fasting for 48 h develop convulsions soon after refeeding. The present study was performed to evaluate whether mice also develop convulsions after being deprived of food for 1-24 h. The effect of day-night fasting on the development of convulsions was also determined in 12-h deprived animals. Mice were deprived of food for periods of 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24, and 48 h. Animals fasted for 12 h during the day or night were deprived of food at 08:00 or 20:00 h, respectively. At the time of testing, animals were treated with intraperitoneal (i.p.) saline or 3 mg/kg scopolamine. Twenty minutes later, they were given food and allowed to eat ad lib. All animals were observed for 30 min for the incidence and onset of convulsions. Fasted animals treated with scopolamine developed clonic convulsions after food intake. Incidence of convulsions was significant in 2-, 3-, 12-, 18-, 24-, and 48-h deprived animals. Convulsions observed after deprivation of food for 12 h during the day or at night were almost similar in both regimens. Our results indicate that food deprivation itself, rather than its duration, seems to be the principal factor in the development of these convulsions

Effects of scopolamine treatment and consequent convulsion development in c–fos expression in fed, fasted, and refed mice

Fasting, anticholinergics, and seizures affect c-fos activation in the brain. Additionally, antimuscarinic treated fasted animals develop convulsion soon after re-feeding. Therefore, we assessed whether c-fos expression changes in fed, fasting, and refed animals and how scopolamine treatment affects these changes. We further assessed whether there is a change in c-fos expression after convulsions. For this purpose, BALB/c mice fasted for 1, 3, 6, 12, 24 and 48 h periods were used. The animals were treated with saline or scopolamine. Half of the animals treated with saline or scopolamine were given food 20 min after injection. All animals were observed for development of convulsions for 30 min. At the end of this period, the brains of all animals were removed, and the percentage of c-fos active cells in the hypothalamus was determined immunohistochemically. Convulsions occurred within 1-48 h of fasting, after scopolamine treatment and re-feeding. Compared to fed animals, c-fos expression was not significantly changed in those undergoing different fasting periods, but significantly decreased after 12 h fasting. After animals were allowed to eat, c-fos activation significantly increased in the 1, 3, 6 and 12 refed-saline groups and decreased in the 48 refed-saline group. Scopolamine treatment in 1-24 h fasted animals increased c-fos expression, but decreased in 48 h fasted animals. Whereas convulsion development in scopolamine-treated 3, 6, 12 and 24 h refed animals suppressed c-fos expression. These results demonstrate that re-feeding and scopolamine treatment induces neuronal activity in the hypothalamus, while scopolamine induced convulsions after food intake suppressed the c-fos activity

Scopolamine-induced convulsions in fasted animals after food intake: Sensitivity of C57BL/6J mice and Sprague-Dawley rats

Food intake triggers convulsions in fasted BALB/c mice and Wistar, albino rats treated with antimuscarinic drugs, scopolamine or atropine. Inbred strain studies have yielded considerable information regarding genetic influences on seizure susceptibility and factors contribute to epileptogenesis in rodents. This study, therefore, investigated sensitivity to antirnuscarinic-induced seizures in C57BL/6J mice and Sprague-Dawley rats. Food deprivation for 48 h in mice and 52 h in rats did not produce strain differences in body weight loss. Fasted animals treated i.p. with 3 mg/kg scopolamine developed convulsions after food intake. The incidence of convulsions was indifferent in comparison to BALB/c mice and Wistar albino rats. Number of animals developing stage 5 was more and onset of convulsions was longer in C57BL/6J mice than in BALB/c mice. Strain-related differences in sensitivity to seizures in C57BL/6J mice may need further evaluation for investigating genetic influences on scopolamine-induced seizures. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved