Overview

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkey's commercial fortunetelling cafes 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 cafes 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.

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9781478016908

Table of Contents

Reviews

"""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"" (12/1/2023 12:00:00 AM) ""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"" (8/6/2023 12:00:00 AM)"

"""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 *"

Author Information

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

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