Zeynep K. Korkman’s Gendered Fortunes is an outstanding book that rethinks the over-signified categories of secularism and Islam in Turkey through the less utilized lenses of affect, labor, and gendered intimacy. Using ethnographic and cultural analysis, Korkman shows how (largely) secular and “downwardly mobile” Muslim women and LGBTIQ people engage in feminized, devalued, and increasingly commercialized practices of divination “to navigate their secular anxieties, gendered vulnerabilities, and economic precarities” in Turkey (p. 15). Characterized by “an inherently contradictory dialectic of faith and skepticism” (p. 222), and creatively combining traditional Islamicate practices, New Age spirituality, therapeutic idioms, and self-entrepreneurship, divination thrives as a feminized “postsecular” enterprise in millennial Turkey despite its historical stigmatization by secular state elites and condemnation by the normative Islam endorsed by today’s neoconservative government.
The book employs a robust methodology, drawing on the author’s expansive research conducted over a span of twenty years. It incorporates ethnographic fieldwork and interviews in various settings of divination (most notably, fortune-telling cafés in Istanbul), archival research of primary and secondary historical sources, and cultural inquiry of a diverse array of material circulating in print, social media, and audiovisual platforms. This approach to research allows for a historically grounded and culturally textured examination of divinatory practices in Turkey, which constitute an otherwise challenging site for participant observation. In skillfully navigating this challenge, Korkman deepens her embodied perspective on the phenomenon through autoethnography and scales up the analysis to address issues beyond the ethnographic present.
The narrative structure of Gendered Fortunes reflects its multifaceted argumentation, focusing over three parts on the historical transformations, sociospatial and affective expressions, and political economy of coffee divination. After providing a genealogical overview of the shifting relations between the state, official religion, and popular divinatory practices in Turkey since the Ottoman Empire until the present, Korkman adopts an intersectional feminist lens to add a much-needed nuance to this trajectory by demonstrating the gendered, sexualized, classed, and racialized axes along which the secular and Islamic institutions’ shared disdain for divination operates: The Ottoman stratification favoring educated Muslim male forms of divination (e.g. astrology, geomancy, or Qurʾanic dream interpretation) over ethnically and racially otherized female forms (e.g. Arab/black, non-Muslim, or Roma practices of fortune-telling) transitioned under modern Turkey to a paternalistic secular state seeking to rescue naive religious women from the sexual and economic exploitation of demonized Muslim hodjas (religious teachers or clerics), while excusing housewives’ domestic coffee cup reading practices as irrational yet inconsequential. The novel and intimate spaces Korkman’s interlocutors foster in fortune-telling cafés reproduce certain elements of the gendered heteronormative logic shared by Turkish secularism and Islam-inflected conservatism. However, existing vocabularies and frames of analysis appear inadequate to account for the new actors, media, idioms, and conditions of divination in millennial Turkey, rendering Korkman’s analysis both unprecedented and timely.
To conceptualize the new constellations of affect, labor, and public intimacy in coffee divination, Korkman deploys “postsecular” as a “suggestive term” (p. 21), an analytic with multiple meanings and functions in the book. Firstly, postsecular denotes a temporal marker that qualifies the historical conditions under which contemporary workers and consumers of coffee divination interact. Korkman argues that while secularism as “the foundational state ideology” persists in millennial Turkey, it is no longer hegemonic and “increasingly on the defense” (p. 22) against “Islamism’s…authoritative dominance” (p. 5). Secondly, postsecular serves as an etic ethnographic category, or an orientation, specific to the practice of divination itself: it describes how non-pious (and even secularist) citizens turn to spirituality to address their anxieties and vulnerabilities stemming from Islam-oriented political authoritarianism and economic neoliberalism. Lastly, postsecular represents an intellectual stance problematizing the secular-religious dichotomy to reveal gendered, sexual, racialized, and classed hierarchies obscured by this dichotomy, hierarchies that underpin the divination economies (and the minority lifeworlds) in Turkey and the Middle East.
While this multivalent analytic postsecular offers a refreshing perspective, it also raises new questions regarding the term’s foundational concepts, the secular and secularism. Critical scholars with whom Korkman is in conversation have argued for some time that the secular is not just the opposite or absence of religion but a discursive operation of power producing its own sensibilities, affects, and dispositions. Likewise, secularism (as an exercise of the nation-state’s sovereign power) does not just reorganize a priori distinct spheres of public, private, religion, and politics, but rather generates, defines, delineates, and naturalizes these spheres. As Korkman’s historical analysis of divination very well shows, this process is highly gendered at the structural, legal, and affective levels.
If the prefix “post” does not imply a radical break from the secular as such, or ascribes an absolute unchanging essence to its “once-hegemonic” presence in Turkey, how exactly does the secular persist in the postsecular? What are its recursive elements in the Islamically accented neoconservative and neoliberal modes of governance in millennial Turkey that constitute the political context of Korkman’s analyses? And how should we account for the social and affective qualities of divination which have long preceded and exceeded secularity and may be just as influential as the neoliberal anxieties in drawing Korkman’s interlocutors to the “postsecular” publics? The book gives little space to the critiques posed to the idea of the postsecular by the very scholarship of secularism to which Korkman posits her analysis as “complementary” (p. 22). However, the ethnographic chapters effectively tackle these questions and offer further provocations as they show the multitemporal orientations of divination that tie historical continuities to anxious presents and speculative futures.
For instance, Korkman masterfully details the actual workings of coffee cup reading with particular attention to its affective, intimate, and sociospatial parameters. Traditionally associated with housewives’ domestic and homosocial intimacies, coffee divination embodies normative and devalued femininity while providing an alternative outlet for those marginalized by the heteronormative social order to share their private feelings, troubles, and secrets. Korkman’s fine-grained ethnography deepens our understanding of how the extension of this intersubjectively personal genre to modern urban publics reconfigures the gendered spatial arrangements of intimacy. Especially for women and sexual minorities, commercialized coffee divination settings not only reduce the risk of exposure and patriarchal disciplining, but also foster new intimate bonds with strangers, potentially forming “juxtapolitical publics” (p. 155) that transcends the secular domains of the feminist and LGBTIQ movements in Turkey.
While contemplating the politically generative and imaginative dimensions of coffee divination, Gendered Fortunes does not merely tell a story of minority emancipation from the bounds of heteropatriarchal structures. Instead, Korkman points to the paradoxes inherent in the neoliberal conditions under which the practice has reached new urban, digital, and transnational publics. The book approaches these paradoxes through the lens of gendered and affective labor relations, focusing more squarely on the stories of individual coffee cup readers. Working under increasingly precarious and competitive labor conditions in cafés, home offices, and online platforms, readers share some of the same anxieties with their secular working- and middle-class clients: they, too, are “unsettled” (p. 187) by the failed promises of democratization, Islamic conservatism, gender equality, and economic growth in millennial Turkey.
In addition, Korkman cogently shows how the divergent responses of divination laborers to such precarity are also contingent on their positions within the uneven coordinates of race, sex, class, and gender. While many secular middle-class Turkish fortune-tellers tend to embrace the therapeutic and entrepreneurial ethos of neoliberalism, working-class, racialized, and queer coffee cup readers recognize that this ethos never delivers its promises through their repeated experiences of marginalization. On the contrary, this ethos compounds the vulnerabilities produced by the gendered articulations of neoliberalism and neoconservative authoritarianism.
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.
