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

Join the Department of Anthropology for a virtual book talk by Professor Zeynep Korkman from Gender Studies at UCLA for her newly published Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey (Duke 2023). Gendered Fortunes shows how commercial fortune telling in cafés is a form of affective labor through which its participants (secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals) build intimate feminized publics in which they share and address their hopes and fears in the precarities of twenty-first-century life. In this brilliant work, Korkman uses feeling—which is how her interlocutors describe the divination process—as an analytic to view the shifting landscape of gendered vulnerability and to explore how those who are pushed to the margins feel their way through oppressive landscapes to create new futures. 

The book talk will take place during the department’s Sociocultural Brown Bag on Thursday, November 30, from 12-1:15pm in 250 Blegen Hall or via Zoom. Anthropology graduate student Berkant Caglar and Professor Miranda Joseph from the Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies will present will respond to Korman’s work. 

This event is hosted by the Department of Anthropology and cosponsored by the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies (GWSS) and the Department of Global Studies.