"An engaging and theoretically informed ethnographic account of Istanbulite women’s interest in sport and exercise (spor merakı), which has transformed these women’s lives in myriad ways."—Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
"Even more important than its significance as a historical resource are Working Out Desire’s methodological and theoretical insights, which are of relevance not only for anthropologists working on Turkey and the Middle East but also for those interested in the anthropology of urban space, temporality, gender, sexuality, and leisure."—American Ethnologist
"Working Out Desire brings together the often disparate fields of sport, desire, sexuality, and politics, combining it with rich ethnography and the skillful deployment of theory."—Pardis Mahdavi, Arizona State University
"A rich and nuanced ethnography illustrating how Turkish women actively engage with nationalist, secularist, and Islamist discourses that limit their physicality – by creatively reshaping meanings and categories."—Tamir Sorek, University of Florida
"This fascinating ethnography casts a refreshing light on gendered bodies in contemporary Turkey in all their diversity."—Niko Besnier, co-author of The Anthropology of Sport: Bodies, Borders, Biopolitic
"This ethnography of community-generated empowerment will challenge the persistent popular imaginary of ordinary Muslim women as caught in a frozen web of traditions and moral values."—Homa Hoodfar, Concordia University, Montreal
"An interesting perspective on women's ongoing struggle to assert their rights in the context of a patriarchal society. Recommended."—Choice
Description
Working Out Desire examines spor meraki as an object of desire shared by a broad and diverse group of Istanbulite women. Sehlikoglu follows the latest anthropological scholarship that defines desire beyond the moment it is felt, experienced, or even yearned for, and as something that is formed through a series of social and historical makings. She traces Istanbulite women’s ever-increasing interest in exercise not merely to an interest in sport, but also to an interest in establishing a new self—one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties—and an investment in forming a more agentive, desiring, self.
Working Out Desire develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor meraki to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively.
Sehlikoglu pushes back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects. Instead, it places women’s desiring subjectivity at its center and traces women’s agentive aspirations in the way they bend the norms which are embedded in the multiple patriarchal ideologies (i.e. nationalism, religion, aesthetics) which operate on their selves.
Working out Desire presents the ways in which women’s changing habits, leisure, and self-formation in the Muslim world and the Middle East are connected to their agentive capacities to shift and transform their conditions and socio-cultural capabilities.
Table of Contents
Introduction: A Eulogy to Sporty Aunties
Self
1. Forming an Object of Desire
2. Desiring Istanbulite Women
3. Mediating Desires
Space
4. Leisurely Istanbul
5. Men-Free Exercise
6. Homosociality and the Female Gaze
Time
7. Embodied Rhythms and Self-Time
8. Gendered Temporalities
9. Emanet Corporalities
Coda: Tracing Desire
Glossary
About the Author
Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a Senior Research Associate and Primary Investigator at the Institute for Global Prosperity, University College London.
Series: Gender, Culture, and Politics in the Middle East
6 x 9, 336 pages, 7 black and white illustrations, 1 maps
January 2021