Moving lubunya in the age of rights: activist negotiations of lexical queerness and human rights

This article centres lubunya – a queer identity, lexicon and political lifeworld in Turkey – as an analytic for understanding the language politics of organising. Grounded in grassroots political culture, lubunya illuminates the affective, relational, and irreverent dimensions of queer activism. We situate our analysis within Turkey’s shifting political landscape and neoliberal rights economy, where foreign donors and Euro-American human rights norms press upon local activist agendas and reshape the grammar of dissent. Within this terrain, organisers find themselves caught between grassroots imperatives and the unhuman institutional logics of professionalised rights work. Drawing on nine interviews with activists, historical analysis, and autoethnographic reflections, we theorise multidirectional rights work: a tactical, paradoxical practice of code-switching between donor-oriented scripts and situated local vernaculars. Treating language as the matrix of such negotiations, this framework moves beyond co-optation/resistance binaries in capturing the ambivalent ways queer activists try to balance competing priorities and engage the language of rights under conditions of authoritarianism and marketised civil society.