Description
Book SynopsisIn Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey's commercial fortunetelling cafÉs 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 cafÉs 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.
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction. Gendered Fortunes 1
Part I. The Religious, the Superstitious, and the Postsecular
1. Crimes of Divination 37
2. The Gendered Politics of Secularism 59
3. Feeling Postsecular 87
Part II. Femininity, Intimacy, and Publics
4. Feeling Publics of Femininity 111
5. The Joys and Perils of Intimacy 139
Part III. Feeling Labor, Precarity, and Entrepreneurialism
6. Feeling Labors of Divination 161
7. Entrepreneurial Fortunes 193
Coda. Feminist Divinations 221
Notes 225
References 241
Index 263
