Zeynep K. Korkman - Böcker

This special issue advances transnational feminist approaches to the globally proliferating phenomenon of anti-Muslim racism. The contributors trace the global circuits and formations of power through which anti-Muslim racism travels, operates, and shapes local contexts. The essays center attention on and explore the gendered, sexualized, and racialized forms of anti-Muslim oppression and resistance in modern social theory, law, protest cultures, social media, art, and everyday life in the United States and transnationally. The contributors illuminate the complex nature of global anti-Muslim racism through various topics including Islamophobia in the context of race, gender, and religion; hate crimes; the sexualization of Islam in social media; queer Muslim futurism; the connection between secularism and feminism in Pakistan; the racialization of Muslims in the early Cold War period; and anti-Muslim racism in Russia. Together the essays provide a complex picture of the multifaceted nature of the worldwide spread of anti-Muslim racism.Contributors. Evelyn Alsultany, Natasha Bakht, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Taneem Husain, Amina Jamal, Amina Jarmakani, Zeynep K. Korkman, Minoo Moellem, Nadine Naber, Tatiana Rabinovich, Sherene H. Razack, Tom Joseph Abi Samra, Elora Shehabuddin, Saiba Varma

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.