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Gendered Fortunes

Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey
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Language: English
Published/Copyright: 2023

About this book

In 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.

Author / Editor information

Zeynep K. Korkman is Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Reviews

"Gendered Fortunes contributes to multiple disciplines like gender studies, Middle Eastern studies, critical theory, and social sciences. Beyond all the theoretical novelty, conceptual clarity, and historical complexity, anthropologists and ethnographers will particularly enjoy meeting the many eccentric but familiar characters coming alive through Korkman’s masterfully crafted ethnography. Gendered Fortunes is poised to become the go-to fun and interesting text in undergraduate anthropology syllabi to teach gender, religion, and secularism in postsecular Turkey."
 

-- Deniz Duruiz American Anthropologist

"This book is innovative, thought-provoking, and well-written. It offers novel insights for scholars interested in feminist scholarship on gendered labour and its affective modalities in the age of neoliberalism. Moreover, it is a necessary read for those who aim to grasp the shifting terms of the affective atmosphere in the political sphere and public culture of millennial Turkey and how divination publics constitute novel public arrangements at the intersection of gender precarities, emotions, affect, neoliberalism and postsecularism."

-- Didem Unal Feminist Encounters

“In her pivotal scholarly work, Gendered Fortunes Zeynep K. Korkman embarks on a penetrating exploration of fortune-telling cafés of Istanbul. . . . [T]he book offers an enriched and nuanced perspective, shedding light on the intricate interplay between Turkey’s gender politics, the shifts wrought by neoliberal transformations since the 1980s, and the layered historical debates sur­rounding Turkish secularism.”
 

-- Koray Öcal Gender, Place & Culture

"The book’s strength lies in its theoretical sophistication, substantiated by an extensive and rich ethnography, and in its unique focus on, at first glance, a niche topic of feminized publics, intimacies, and gendered labors. Yet Korkman’s rigorous analysis illustrates how these themes serve as an important entryway into the discussion of (post)secularism, the textures of neoliberal precarity, and cultural politics in urban Turkey."
-- Tatiana Rabinovich American Ethnologist

"This book will interest students of gender and sexuality, those studying Turkey under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), and anyone interested in learning about minority communities resisting growing rightwing extremism threatening their rights."
-- Laïla Véissid Middle East Journal

"A fascinating book on fortunetelling in twenty-first-century Istanbul. . . . Korkman’s feminist perspective is highly informative, shedding light on how various actors in this fortune-telling economy—including secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals—experience 'the anxieties of the postsecular condition'. . . ."
-- Volkan Aytra Contemporary Sociology

"Gendered Fortunes is a significant book that urges scholars of Turkey and the Middle East to acknowledge the central role of marginalized feminine spaces and affects in the mutual constitution (and transformations) of secularism, religion, and the capitalist economy. It will greatly interest students and scholars of gender studies, religious studies, and qualitative social sciences, as well as Turkish and Middle East studies."
-- Seçil Dagtas Journal of Middle East Studies

"Korkman’s engaging style, her lively use of ethnographic detail, and her sophisticated theoretical approach would make the book an interesting addition to any graduate and undergraduate syllabi in Anthropology, Cultural Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or Middle Eastern history."
-- Canan Tanir Journal of International Women's Studies

"This book will prove to be especially interesting not only to those intrigued by the conversations surrounding fortune-telling in Turkey but to any reader interested in the applications and critiques of feminist theory in relation to a specific, spatially situated spiritual practice."
-- Erin Templeton Religious Studies Review

"Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep Korkman’s nuanced and captivating ethnography, takes us to an unexpected site in postsecular Turkey: Its fortune-telling cafés, where customers drink cups of thick Turkish coffee and have their futures divined in the grounds left behind. . . . Although the book speaks most directly to an audience familiar with contemporary Turkey, the book should also interest geographers engaging questions of affect, labor, and gender."
-- Timur Hammond Cultural Geographies

"Gendered Fortunes is a great contribution to scholars of intimacy, affective labor, secularism, non-medical therapeutics, neoliberal precarity, alternative economic transactions, and the broader Middle Eastern gender and sexuality studies. It brings immensely inspiring qualitative data to the pages of the book and is surely interesting for undergrad and graduate students thanks to its engaging ethnographic stories and complex theoretical openings."
-- Berkant Caglar Gender & Society

"Gendered Fortunes offers a compelling narrative on how a cultural practice, which revolves around the coffee cup, reflects worries that have come to define Turkey. The book is as an important read for those who examine how individuals deal with anxieties pertaining to neoliberalism, religion, or gender politics."
-- Oguz Alyanak Religion and Gender

"Zeynep Korkman’s book . . . provides a deeper understanding of the entangled labour, precarity, and affective relations experienced by both fortune tellers and their clients in the intimate publics of the divination economy in postsecular Turkey."
-- Wesam Hassan Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford

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Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
October 30, 2024
eBook ISBN:
9781478093558
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
View content
https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478093558
eBook ISBN: 9781478093558
Keywords for this book
2024 Association of Middle East Women’s Studies Book Award
Audience(s) for this book
For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research
Creative Commons
BY-NC 4.0
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