Gendering the Public Sphere in the Muslim Middle East

• In Event: 247 - Regular Session. Redefining the Public Sphere in the Middle East

Abstract

For the first time in the long history of publics conjured from sociabilities around coffee, which travelled from Ottoman coffeehouses to European cafés to inspire Habermas’s canonical work on the modern public sphere, a feminized public emerges around the coffee in the Muslim Middle East. This novel public consists of divination businesses called fortunetelling cafés in contemporary Turkey, where gender and sexual minorities and youth gather around coffee cups to give and receive coffee divinations. I contrast these divination publics to gender segregated male coffeehouses and mixed gender cafés. I argue that divination fosters a public space for those subordinated by heteropatriarchal hierarchies of gender, age, and sexual orientation to express their gendered hopes and disappointments. The significance of these publics lie in the opportunities they provide for the articulation of otherwise marginalized feelings and desires of women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals against the backdrop of a religiously accented neoconservative familialism that renders the political public sphere an increasingly intimate and disciplinary domain. My analysis draws upon an extended ethnographic fieldwork in divination cafés in 2000s Turkey as a window into the gendering of the public sphere in the contemporary Muslim Middle East. Analyzing divination publics in dialogue with Habermesian conceptualizations of the public sphere and their feminist, queer, and postcolonial critiques, I articulate a Middle Eastern feminist intervention that genders, pluralizes, and provincializes conventional understandings of the public sphere.

Author

• Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman, University of California Santa Barbara