Abjectly melodramatic: The monstrous body and the queer politics of Tamam mıyız? (Are We OK?)

This article seeks the queer politics of melodrama in the very abjectness of the form with a reading of Çağan Irmak’s 2013 popular motion picture Tamam mıyız? (Are We OK?). Telling the story of an unlikely friendship between two men, the film thematizes abjection as a social phenomenon with its abject bodies: Temmuz, a bohemian gay sculptor, and İhsan, a suicidal young man with tetra-amelia syndrome. Are We OK? capitalizes on melodrama’s affective potency to render its characters sympathetic through a narrative of victimhood shared by both men. This article demonstrates that the film nonetheless struggles to register these abject bodies in a socially intelligible relationship within the confines of the norm. In a performative act evocative of abjection, the film pushes Temmuz and İhsan to the end of melodrama, where their bodily unison forms an embodied queer subjectivity. The improbability of this body situated in an anti-oedipal temporal impasse between a post-melodramatic future and a pre-abject past exposes the ineptness of the categories of relationality that govern the domain of the social.