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.

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

Acknowledgments  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