Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey

By Zeynep K. Korkman

Book Overview

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey's commercial fortunetelling caf s where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals navigate the precarities of twenty-first-century life. Criminalized by long-standing secularist laws and disdained by contemporary Islamist government, fortunetelling caf s proliferate in part because they offer shelter from the conservative secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and gender pressures of the public sphere. Korkman shows how fortunetelling is a form of affective labor through which its participants build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears. Korkman uses feeling--which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process--as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability in Turkey. In so doing, Korkman foregrounds "feeling" as a feminist lens to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1478019549
• ISBN13: 9781478019541
• Release Date: April 2023
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.96 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.9" x 8.9"