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

In Gendered Fortunes, Zeynep K. Korkman examines Turkeys 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 feelingwhich is how her interlocutors describe the divination processas 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. See more