Banu Gökarıksel

Beyond the officially sacred: religion, secularism, and the body in the production of subjectivity

Recent calls for new geographies of religion draw attention to how religion shapes the formation of subjectivity. Focusing on pious Muslim womens new veiling practices in Istanbul, I chart possible geographical analyses not only of religion but also of secularism as the two phenomena intersect and compete with one another in complex and often contradictory ways. I approach veiling as a gendered embodied spatial practice that reveals the intertwined production of bodies and subjectivities. Social meanings, the wider political context and spatial regimes that govern everyday life, as well as individual experiences, shape the production of corporeal piety. For the case I analyze, the hegemonic ideology of secularism, the highly politicized issue of veiling, and the informal and formal restrictions on the headscarf all come into play. This analysis offers new insights about the geographies of the body, subjectivity, and the city by highlighting the significant role religion and secularism play in their production.

The intimate politics of secularism and the headscarf: the mall, the neighborhood, and the public square in Istanbul

The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Büşra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.

Between Fashion and Tesettür Marketing and Consuming Women’s Islamic Dress

Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styles in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides insight into how womens fashion and the question of tesettür become negotiable elements of everyday practice. Our analysis shows that while there may be no easy reconciliation between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettür and the spectacle of ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.

“Even I Was Tempted”: The Moral Ambivalence and Ethical Practice of Veiling-Fashion in Turkey

Veiling-fashion, with its array of brands and ever-changing styles, has been on the rise in Turkey in the past decade. Although the producers of these styles present them as the perfect melding of fashion and piety, our analysis of focus groups with consumers in Istanbul and Konya in 2009 shows that veiling-fashion is, in practice, rife with ambivalence. Veiling is undertaken in relation to the moral code of of Islam, but fashion, as consumption, works as part of an ever-shifting economy of taste and distinction. In Baudrillards terms, veiling-fashion is morally ambivalent, caught between its function as modest covering according to Islam and its social signification. In their negotiation of this ambivalence, consumers of these styles turn veiling-fashion into an ethical practice, into part of how they form themselves in relation both to a moral code (Islam) and to the aesthetics, politics, and pleasures of their sociospatial environments. The ethical practice of veiling-fashion thus engages a complex spatial field of bodies, homes, streets, military or state spaces, and public arenas. Veiling-fashion consumers describe their daily practices in terms of a problem of self-governance, or the management of nefis, the bodily or material desires aroused by consumption and its display. In this management of nefis through the technology of veiling-fashion these women form themselves as subjects of ethico-politics in Turkey today.

Introduction: Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry

This special issue of JMEWS examines the intersection of consumer capitalism, women, and the Islamic culture industry. While capitalist forms of economic development have long been part of Muslim societies in various (and often contested) forms (Gran 1979), in the last decade there has been a marked change in both the substance and the scale of the relationship between Islam and capitalism.1 Islamic movements and neoliberal consumer capitalism have arisen simultaneously in many settings, leading to newly articulated and contextually different manifestations of “Islamic capitalism” (Buğra 1998; Hefner 1998; Öniş 2000; Tuğal 2002; 2009; Kuran 2004; Adas 2006). A new market for commodities, media, advertising, businesses, and consumer segments identified as “Islamic” has helped in the creation of a new culture industry.2 While by no means uniform, this Islamic culture industry is increasingly central to the production, packaging, and dissemination of religious products: from traditional print media, cassette sermons, and online fatwas (Bunt 2009; Hirschkind 2009) to the fashionable hijab (Kılıçbay and Binark 2002; Balasescu 2003; 2007; Akou 2007; Lewis 2007; Moors 2007; Sandıkcı and Ger 2007; Schulz 2007; Tarlo 2007; Gökarıksel and Secor 2009). Islamic knowledge, performances, and selves are more and more mediated through increasingly commodified cultural forms and spaces. From memoirs, novels, lifestyle magazines, and newspapers to television channels; from religious education centers and halal markets and restaurants (where food is prepared according to Islamic rules) to holiday resorts and posh gated communities, Muslim identities are constructed

The Veil, Desire, and the Gaze: Turning the Inside Out

In psychoanalytically inflected scholarship, the veil is often understood to remove women from the field of the gaze. Our analysis offers a different understanding of the interplay between the veil, the gaze, and the subject by showing that the veil in fact is visible and that this visibility and its governance are part of the formation of pious, desiring subjects. The question of the gaze is especially pertinent to what we call “veiling fashion” (that is, stylish combinations of the headscarf with a range of clothing items, which variably adhere to an Islamic code of modesty). In 2009 we conducted focus groups with women who wear veiling fashion and with sales assistants who work on the retail side of veiling fashion in Turkey. Rather than being removed from view, we find, women participate in veiling fashion’s scopic regime, which situates them in a particular way as the objects and subjects of looking and desiring. Within the visual field, women enlist veiling fashion in their pursuit of harmony and unity of the self and with God. Yet veiling fashion also incites what women call nefis, corporal and materialistic desires whose subjugation is part of the goal of veiling. By simultaneously orienting women toward an Islamic ideal and provoking desires that take women away from this ideal, veiling fashion and its visual field animate a project of the self that is at once ethical and aesthetic. It is on and through the veiled body that the ongoing struggle for the unity of desire, faith, and image takes place.

Intersectional feminism beyond U.S. flag hijab and pussy hats in Trump’s America

Abstract Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude of ‘others’: immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, Native Americans, transgender people. The defensively aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national territory and protect a threatened white masculinity which is portrayed as both victim and victor. Women and allies have been at the forefront of voicing opposition to Trumpism by organizing one of the largest marches in U.S. history on the day after inauguration and continue to resist through strikes, demonstrations, and other actions. They are raising their voices against the walls, hatred, and deportations embedded in the global turn to the right and attempting to embrace an intersectional feminism that recognizes racial, ethnic, religious, class, and other differences. Yet, in the protest signs and the embodied experience of the 21 January march itself, there were also spiraling redefinitions of what it means to be woman, what it means to be ‘American,’ and whether that is an aspirational goal or the terms of nationalist exclusion, settler colonialism, and imperial feminism. Intersectional feminism does not come easily and its challenges are manifest in some of the iconic symbols of the women’s movement – from the Muslim Woman in the U.S. flag hijab to pink pussy hats. We find spaces of protest fraught but crucial sites of for forging forms of solidarity that are radical in their feminist formulations.

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

Abstract While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.

The post-Islamist problematic: questions of religion and difference in everyday life

Abstract The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether post-Islamism applies to the Turkish case has been a matter of much debate. We approach post-Islamism in Turkey using a feminist geographic analytic that shifts our focus from formal politics to the embodied and the everyday. Drawing upon eight focus groups with men and women in Istanbul in 2013 and 2014, we analyze discussions of education reform, the possibility of religious politics and religious difference to demonstrate how the premises of post-Islamism depend upon the (often unsuccessful) papering over of multiplicity. We argue that everyday, embodied solutions to the questions of post-Islamism often undermine the very categories (state, society, religion and secularism) upon which the post-Islamic problematic is based.

The Body Politics of Trump's "Muslim Ban"

S cholars of Middle East women’s studies have much cause for alarm today. The increasing prevalence of anti-Muslim rhetoric and action, the unabashed reassertion of white male power, and recent attempts to erode the rights of women, queers, immigrants, and people of color have serious consequences for our research, teaching, and engagement with public debates and communities. In the United States, the two executive orders (EO) Donald Trump signed soon after his inauguration in 2017 officially sanctioned and legitimized discourse and policy against Muslims. Thinly disguised as actions thatwould give the government time to review and strengthen already very stringent policies regarding visas of tourists, immigrants, and refugees, the EOs clearly target Muslims, cast them as security threats, and attempt to implement Trump’s campaign promise for a complete “Muslimban.” The anti-Muslim discourse and actions rely on and reproduce deeply gendered stereotypes aboutMuslims and Islam by depicting all Muslimmen as potential terrorists, Muslim women as helpless victims of oppression, and Islam as inherently tyrannical, violent, and patriarchal. The reference to honor killings in the first EO is a prime example of how anti-Muslim thinkingmanipulates gendered (mis)conceptions.TheEOappropriates violence againstMuslimwomenbyMuslim men to justify the targeting of allMuslims (men, women, children, elderly, young) as security threats and condones their collective punishment, echoing once again the historical enlisting of women’s suffering in the service of Western imperial projects and military invasions. This brand of imperial feminism is all too familiar and needs to be as persistently criticized as it is revived and recirculated. Yet it is also crucial to analyze the body politics of Trumpismmore generally and link the attacks