Trans Voices in Music Education : a Queer-Transnational Study between Turkey and Germany

Kurzfassung/Abstract

In Germany, the far right has long propagated anti-immigrant (Nann et al., 2024) and anti-Turkish (Bayır, 2025) ideologies, while instrumentalizing queer-feminist agendas to legitimize racist discourses (Boulila et al., 2025; Hajek & Dombrowski, 2022). All of this collectively poses serious threats to fundamental democratic principles and underscores the growing importance of these issues within music education. Even though migration and gender studies within music education discourse exist separately, and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) has been increasingly discussed in Germany (Dunkel et al., 2022; Grow et al., 2022), research on LGBTQ+ individuals with a Turkish-German migration background remains very limited. Therefore, the present study explores how artists who identify under the LGBTQ+ umbrella and move between Turkey and Germany navigate their voice(s) as a site of identity, oppression, and resilience.

The paper focuses on the Berlin-based actress-singer Hayal Kaya, originally from Ankara, Turkey. She is the first trans actress to play a chief inspector on German television (Bakmaz, 2024) and has also appeared in the highly successful Netflix series Woman of the Dead, for which she contributed to the soundtrack as a singer. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and music analysis (using the toolbox by Müller, 2022), and employing content analysis (Mayring, 2022), the study identifies emerging themes such as how her voice becomes a tool for resistance, the challenges she has faced across different axes of oppression—class, gender, body, and race (Winker & Degele, 2009, 2011)—and the strategies she has developed to survive and thrive. Using Kumashiro’s (2000) anti-oppressive education framework, as adapted to music education by Bengonzi (2015), the paper concludes with implications for music education.