- Bogazici University, Sociology, AlumnusConcordia University (Canada), Anthropology, Alumnus, and 3 moreadd
- Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist and a Principal Research Fellow at the UCL’s Institute of Global Pro... moreDr Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist and a Principal Research Fellow at the UCL’s Institute of Global Prosperity. Her work often focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. Currently, she is the Principal Investigator on a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2020-2025), with her project entitled “Imaginative Landscapes of Islamist Politics across Balkan-to-Bengal Complex” [TAKHAYYUL]. Sehlikoglu is the author of “Working Our Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul” (Syracuse UP, 2021), has edited several journal issues and a book volume (“The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality”, Lexington, 2020). She is also the editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies’ Book Reviews Section. Sehlikoglu is currently accepting PhD applications on topics related to ethical imagination in the Middle East and the Balkans. Sehlikoglu is the recipient of several awards and grants, including a BRISMES (British Institute of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies) PhD Award, a Wadad Kadi Fellowship, a BIAA (British Institute at Ankara) Study Grant, a Gibbs Travelling Fellowship, and an ERC Starting Grant. She formerly ran the ‘Desiring the Middle East’ seminar series and ‘Is Critique Islamic?’ reading group at the University of Cambridge and taught the following courses/papers/lectures:-anthropology of the Middle East, -subjectivity and desire, -gender and sexuality, -Medieval Arab theories as part of the ‘decolonising the curriculum.’edit
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This special issue is one of the most exciting products of 8-year-long conversations with critical-minded friends and colleagues. The conversations have begun with the reading group that Dr. Sehlikoglu has hosted at Pembroke College, the... more
This special issue is one of the most exciting products of 8-year-long conversations with critical-minded friends and colleagues. The conversations have begun with the reading group that Dr. Sehlikoglu has hosted at Pembroke College, the University of Cambridge. In 'Is Critique Islamic?' reading group (2017-2020), we visited the classical Muslim scholars and polymaths from theology, philosophy and sciences to understand how concepts related to power, authority, critique and resistance were understood by some of the most acclaimed scholars ranging from Al-Ghazali to Ibn Khaldun, Al-Kindi, Maimonides and Ibn Taymiyya. Professor Humeira Iqtidar's intellectual contributions to those meetings have been quite influential in conceptualizing the formation of the Islamic canon across time and space. These conversations played a crucial role in the 2-day conference Sehlikoglu co-convened with Mahv
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The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in... more
The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking. It is built on the premise that the decolonizing movement is set to go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies and it can do so by: (1) revising the ‘dismissed’ genealogies that has contributed to the formation of the contemporary classical theory, and (2) thinking creatively in implementing the critical thinking tools to the dismissed scholarship, in an equal manner to the Eurocentric scholarship. To illustrate, it uses the case of Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar of social sciences and historical analysis from 14th Century who is often referred to as the first sociologist. On the one hand, his influence in classical Western thinking is largely dismissed. On the other hand, as a counter-response to this dismissal, the new Islamic revivalist intelligentsia in the Muslim right engage with him in a selective manner that not only rejects that central critical thinking but, even worse, sanctions the local regimes of power, including that local canon. By locating his scholarship to multiple tropes in anthropological theory and reading his evolutionist thinking vis-à-vis the post-colonial literature in anthropology and sociology, I question the limits and possibilities of critical thinking within and beyond the decolonizing movement.
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Drawing on ethnographic research with the devout members of Gülen movement displaced in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016, this paper studies the existential crisis these formerly “proper Turkish citizens” have been experiencing... more
Drawing on ethnographic research with the devout members of Gülen movement displaced in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016, this paper studies the existential crisis these formerly “proper Turkish citizens” have been experiencing after being targeted by the Turkish State. This existential crisis, as argued in this paper, is significantly informative in understanding how privilege-based ethical self-making emanates fragility. The paper, thus, both parallels Sunni-Turkish-ness with whiteness and provides a reading of ethical self-making processes the Gülenists developed vis-à-vis the notions of critique and comfort. It first looks closer at the two Islamic revivalist movements, Milli Görüş as the predecessors of Turkey’s ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) and the Gülen Movement, their rivalry over claiming the canon and the ways in which they differ in their notions of politics, political Islam, and critique. Although critique and self-critique are integral components of ethical self-formation processes, Gülen movement takes a somewhat inconsistent approach in implementing them to the heteronomous layers of self. Meaning, that while self-critique is an essential part of ethical self-making, critiquing the movement itself, the state, nation, and ancestors (as they were imagined) are not seen as ethical acts. It concludes with an analysis of how this discrepancy results in a sporadic distribution of ethical self-formation, leading to an existential crisis.
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The newly emerging literature on the far right, so far, seems to have failed to capture the interconnected imaginative forces in the formation of Islamist politics for three reasons: (i) the global interconnectivity in populist political... more
The newly emerging literature on the far right, so far, seems to have failed to capture the interconnected imaginative forces in the formation of Islamist politics for three reasons: (i) the global interconnectivity in populist political aspirations is missed due to Western‐oriented tendencies in calibrating the scholarly foci; (ii) the region does not fit into the foci employed by area studies; and (iii) rationality‐oriented Eurocentric theories are limited in their ability to grasp and analyse the imaginative forces that are at stake.
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This article locates imaginative aspects of human subjectivity as a feminist issue by reviewing the concept of agency in the genealogy of Muslim and Middle Eastern women in anthropological and ethnographic literature. It suggests that, if... more
This article locates imaginative aspects of human subjectivity as a feminist issue by reviewing the concept of agency in the genealogy of Muslim and Middle Eastern women in anthropological and ethnographic literature. It suggests that, if feminist scholarship of the Middle East would continue approaching to Muslim women's agency-as it has been doing for decades-, it should do so as an epistemo-logical question and thus expand the limits of ethnographic and analytical focus beyond the broader systems, such as family, nation, religion, and state. As an example to this proposition, the article then discusses the recent work on aspects of selfhood that escape from the structures, rules, systems, and discursive limits of life but captures imagina-tions, aspirations, desires, yearnings, and longings.
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A B S T R A C T Women's control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with... more
A B S T R A C T Women's control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive body movements it requires, problematizes women's ability to control their public sexualities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Istanbul, this article explores the everyday concerns of Istanbulite women who seek rahatlık (comfort) during exercise. The interviewees frequently used the word rahatlık when referring to women-only spaces in the culture of mahremiyet (intimacy, privacy). This article furthers the scholarship on Muslim sexualities by examining the diversity of women's concerns regarding their public sexualities and the boundary-making dynamics in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that mahremiyet operates as an institution of intimacy that provides a metacultural intelligibility for heteronormativity based on sexual scripts, normative spaces, and gendered acts.
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The last decade has witnessed an almost ballistic turn in the studies of sexuality in the Middle East and in the Islamicate contexts. Yet, few works have attempted to reflect upon the ways in which the norms on sexuality are established... more
The last decade has witnessed an almost ballistic turn in the studies of sexuality in the Middle East and in the Islamicate contexts. Yet, few works have attempted to reflect upon the ways in which the norms on sexuality are established in those contexts. This paper looks at the heterosexual culture in Turkey as a system that creates its own institutions of intimacy and privacy, which regulate their sexualities and bodies in public through creating borders, normalcies, and privileges. In order to address this question, I focus on the culture of mahremiyet (the Islamic notion of privacy and intimacy) as an “institution of intimacy” (Berlant 1998), and gazing and hiding are the two fundamental components of this culture. I also share two vignettes that trouble the culture of mahremiyet in seemingly unrelated, but in fact deeply connected ways: the first one is the headscarf-wearing cover girls of Âlâ magazine and the second one is the kissing protest in Ankara, both of which threaten the power dynamics of gazing and hiding in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that the culture of mahremiyet, that is central in the ways in which both public and private sexuality is imagined, regulated, and screened in everyday life, is changing in today’s Turkey, which in return troubles the social dynamics at multiple layers.
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In the last decade the question of intimacy in the Middle East has received renewed scholarly attention in its relation to love, sentimentality, sexuality, gender, and erotics (Mahdavi 2009; Najmabadi 2005; Ozyegin 2015; Peirce 2010;... more
In the last decade the question of intimacy in the Middle East has received renewed scholarly attention in its relation to love, sentimentality, sexuality, gender, and erotics (Mahdavi 2009; Najmabadi 2005; Ozyegin 2015; Peirce 2010; Pursley 2012). This research has greatly contributed to understanding the role of distinctive historical and social processes and transformations in constructing the realms of intimacy. We suggest that the question of intimacy and its relation to the everyday domains of life requires further attention. How people, bodies, and objects meet and touch — and the zones of contact that they create (Pratt and Rosner 2006, 17) in the everyday life of publics, institutions, and families—are critical issues to further examine.
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Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with dynamics of sensual and affective attachments and forms of desire. In that sense, it is integral to the formation of what is called “the... more
Intimacy is tightly bound up with notions of privacy, sexuality, proximity and secrecy, and with dynamics of sensual and affective attachments and forms of desire. In that sense, it is integral to the formation of what is called “the human,” selves, subjectivities, as well as communities, publics, collectives and socialities. The papers collected in this special section commit to an anthropological inquiry on intimacy, seeking a conceptual formulation to capture its operations. They ethnographically contribute to the continuing anthropological discussions on intimacy, and explore how multiple domains and forms of intimacies are defined, shaped, constructed and transformed across cultures and social worlds.
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At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports... more
At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty
different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed
pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically
on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which
originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to
North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was
considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular
mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed’s (2000) discussion of ‘strange
encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim
sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically,
discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant
‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and
contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes
competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place.
By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary
western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what
Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of
post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.
different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed
pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically
on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which
originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to
North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was
considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular
mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed’s (2000) discussion of ‘strange
encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim
sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically,
discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant
‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and
contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes
competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place.
By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary
western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what
Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of
post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.
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Women's sports have been considered as more than an individual act not only in Turkey, but also in the broader Middle East. This entry historicizes women's involvement in professional and non-professional sports in Turkey. The entry... more
Women's sports have been considered as more than an individual act not only in Turkey, but also in the broader Middle East. This entry historicizes women's involvement in professional and non-professional sports in Turkey. The entry starts with locating state investments in women's sports during early republican Turkey within broader questions about women's bodies and nation building. It then opens up multiple layers through which women's sporting bodies have been subjectified in different ways by contrasting and opposing patriarchal ideologies and the ways in which sport has been perceived as a political tool for discursive and cultural formation of " the nation. "
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This article offers an ethnographic account of the culture of mahremiyet [intimacy and privacy] in Turkey, not only as an institution regulating everyday sexual relationships between individuals in public, but also as a system enabling... more
This article offers an ethnographic account of the culture of mahremiyet [intimacy and privacy] in Turkey, not only as an institution regulating everyday sexual relationships between individuals in public, but also as a system enabling the operation and re-operation of social normalcies through the creation of boundaries and privileges. By probing the concepts of mahremiyet and fıtrat [creation of natural disposition], the article investigates how intimacy operates in religious, mundane, and political registers, and delves into the intricate relationship between the intimate and the shared. It suggests that the culture of mahremiyet is deeply rooted in the ways individuals construct their sense of selves in relation to others, and imagine mahrem boundaries as natural, meaning God-given, fıtrî laws in their entanglement with gender. The use of the language of mahremiyet in contemporary politics not only enables what can seem to be a metacultural intelligibility that guarantees popular support, but also distances any critique as strange or foreign.
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Kutuplaşan kamusal alan tartışmalarının her bir katmanından ari kalma adına, görüntülerini en ince detayına kadar modernleştirmiş, sekülerleştirmiş, dindar olduklarını öğrenip şaşırdığınızda bu şaşkınlığınızı övgü kabul eden, yüzlerinde... more
Kutuplaşan kamusal alan tartışmalarının her bir katmanından ari kalma adına, görüntülerini en ince detayına kadar modernleştirmiş, sekülerleştirmiş, dindar olduklarını öğrenip şaşırdığınızda bu şaşkınlığınızı övgü kabul eden, yüzlerinde belli belirsiz gurur beliren erkekler. Onlar, biz (bir yandan sekülerler, bir yandan dindarlar, toplum olarak bizler) başörtülü kadınların görünürlüğü ile fazlaca meşgulken, sorgulanmamanın, kontrol edilmemenin, tenkit edilmemenin konforu ile İslamî camiaların yeni ve görünmeyen “yüzü” olmuş erkekler. Kimdir bu, muhtelif mekânlarda karşılaştığımız, dindarlıkları yahut İslamîlikleri ile “görünmez” olan yeni mütedeyyin erkekler? Ve bugüne dek tekrar tekrar İslamî ve seküler görünürlükten, kamusal mekândan ve bunlara bağlı onca politik meselelerden bahsederken nelerden bahsetmedik, neleri göz ardı ettik?
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(...) As my field in Istanbul, Turkey reveals, sport can be used as a powerful tool for social change. It has been used as a mechanism in Turkey to progress towards the ideal of achieving a modern nation, as the republican ideology... more
(...) As my field in Istanbul, Turkey reveals, sport can be used as a powerful tool for social change. It has been used as a mechanism in Turkey to progress towards the ideal of achieving a modern nation, as the republican ideology invested in sports and physical education for the corporeal transformation of its citizens. Unfit Eastern bodies of Turks had to be moulded into a better shape for the formation of a new civilization. (...)
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This paper uses ethnographic methods to inquire how new forms of consumption arise as a result of bridging Islamic spirituality with leisure in the newly growing tesettür hotels in Turkey, which have become a magnet of popular and... more
This paper uses ethnographic methods to inquire how new forms of consumption arise as a result of bridging Islamic spirituality with leisure in the newly growing tesettür hotels in Turkey, which have become a magnet of popular and academic attention. We aim to offer a multi-layered analysis of the leisure and consumption practices of Muslim women in the context of the new Islamic hospitality industry by looking at the interactions between spiritual Islam and modern capitalism. We focus on the consumption process of the female customers of these hotels as part of defining and redefining their newly developing identity that is Islamic and spiritual; as well as modern and luxurious. The study responds to the call of Gökarıksel and Secor to analyse new Islamic patterns of consumption and leisure by building on their perspectives bridging neoliberal capitalism and resurgence of Islamic identities. We call for a critical and contextual perspective to understand the dynamic emergence of new forms of Islamic lifestyles and capitalism; emphasising a future agenda of further research that is sensitive to the complexities of desires and leisure activities of veiled Muslim women in diverse countries.
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Any work on Muslim sportswomen inevitably needs to examine the (growing) debates in the Muslim world and in the social sciences concerning Muslim women’s public visibility and public sexuality. One of the central questions I will address... more
Any work on Muslim sportswomen inevitably needs to examine the (growing) debates in the Muslim world and in the social sciences concerning Muslim women’s public visibility and public sexuality. One of the central questions I will address is related to the earlier debates and cultural/religious contradictions regarding women’s physicality, their bodies, appearance and public visibility. Olympics and international games however, raise another debate on the ways in which a woman’s body is exposed to international audiences which is linked to complex feelings on national pride (and how this sense of pride and nation is perceived), women’s public sexuality and Islamic pride (which also takes gendered forms). This piece analyses the debates on public visibility and sexuality of Muslim sports women among Islamic circles, including fatwas and the media. In particular, the paper builds on the responses received from sporty Muslim women themselves during semi-structured in-depth interviews in Istanbul. During my interviews, I showed photos of various Muslim sportswomen, which were taken during international games. Female members of women-only gyms were interviewed on their involvement in sports and how their involvement is shaped or constrained by people closest to them at home or at work. The interview data indicate that a large group of women redefine modernity by using a religious framework, and reinvent what it means to be a modern Muslim woman. This act of redefinition has produced both an acceptance of and resistance to certain conservative values regarding gender. In some contexts, women have energetically participated in the propagation of political Islam while simultaneously making their voices heard and claiming agency for redefining modesty, bodily movements and public sexuality as well as security in response to outfit regulations of international games.
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"Aside from the political positions expressed, the genre used in public, employing vulgar and even abusive jargon is as problematic as the ideas themselves. Male politicians seemed oblivious about the traditional Islamic notion of privacy... more
"Aside from the political positions expressed, the genre used in public, employing vulgar and even abusive jargon is as problematic as the ideas themselves. Male politicians seemed oblivious about the traditional Islamic notion of privacy (mahremiyet) that requires sensitivity and circumspection when it comes to intimate personal and/or familial issues. Yet, on this occasion, male lawmakers were putting women’s sexuality out in the public domain and thus turning it into a mundane and trivial issue. They were, thus, sacrificing the values of privacy for the sake of population policy."
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The debates triggered by a 14-fold increase in violent crimes against women in Turkey in the last seven years have pitted Islamic male scholars and journalists against Islamic women writers.
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Kanada, Müslüman memnuniyetinin en yüksek olduğu Batı ülkesi. Fakat bu görece olumlu resim, Kanada’nın yumuşak karnı Quebec bölgesinde, hem de bir futbol turnuvasıyla çatlamaya başlamış görünüyor.
Research Interests: International Relations, Multiculturalism, Football (soccer), International Law, Human Rights, and 19 moreInternational organizations, Conflict, Security, Nationalism, Diplomacy, Postcolonial Theory, Québec Studies, Ethnicity, Minority Rights, Peace, Sports, Canada, Freedom, Gender and Sexualities, Transnational Feminisms, Gender and Citizenship, Feminist Methodologies, Veiling and Embodiment, and Women and Political Islam
At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced... more
At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed's (2000) discussion of ‘strange encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically, discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant ‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place. By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.
Research Interests:
Working Out Desire examines spor merakı 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,... more
Working Out Desire examines spor merakı 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 agen-tive, desiring self. Sehlikoglu develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Pushing back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects, Sehlikoglu places women's desiring subjectivity at the book's center. 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 ability to shift and transform their conditions and to exercise agency in defining their cultural role.
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Using a cross-cultural perspective, The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality examines the conceptual formulation of heteronormativity and highlights the mundane operations of its... more
Using a cross-cultural perspective, The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality examines the conceptual formulation of heteronormativity and highlights the mundane operations of its construction in diverse contexts. Heterosexual culture simultaneously institutionalizes its narrations and normalcies, operating in a way that preserves its own coherency. Heteronormativity gains its privileges and coherency through public operations and the mutuality of the public and private spheres. The contributors to this edited collection examine this coherency and privilege and explore in ethnographic detail the operations and making of heteronormative devices: material, affective, narrative, spatial, and bodily. This book is recommended for students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies.
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"Bir çiçekçinin önünden geçerken çok güzel bir saksı çiçeği gördünüz ve içeriye girdiniz. Evimin salonunda ne de güzel durur diye İçinizden geçirdiniz. Satıcıdan önce çiçeğin cinsi ve fiyatı ile ilgili bilgileri aldınız. Sonra aklınıza... more
"Bir çiçekçinin önünden geçerken çok güzel bir saksı çiçeği gördünüz ve içeriye girdiniz. Evimin salonunda ne de güzel durur diye İçinizden geçirdiniz. Satıcıdan önce çiçeğin cinsi ve fiyatı ile ilgili bilgileri aldınız. Sonra aklınıza geldi ki, acaba bu çiçek yerini sever mi? Hemen sormaya başladınız: ´Bu çiçek ne kadar su ister? Güneşi doğrudan mı görsün yoksa gölgeyi mi sever? Arada gübre vermek gerekir mi acaba?´ Ve böyle devam eden sorular... Hepsi çiçeğin olabilecek en sağlıklı, en güzel ve en uzun hayatı geçirebilmesi için... İşte elinizdeki bu eserle her biri birer çiçek olan en değerli varlıklarımız çocuklarımızı daha iyi tanıyabilecek, onları bilinçle yetiştirebileceksiniz. Kitabın ana teması olan Jung Kişilik Teorisi zor anlaşılır bir bilgi olsa da, yazarın akıcı üslubu ile bir çiçekçinin verdiği bilgileri kolaylıkla uygulayabileceksiniz. Eğer çocuğunuzun yetişmesine en az bir saksı çiçeğine gösterdiğiniz kadar Önem veriyorsanız, elinizdeki bu kitabı dikkatle okuyun ve tüm çiçek sahiplerine tavsiye edin."
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Various forms of ever-evolving cultural practices, rituals and entertainments which are now communicated throughout the Middle and Near East, and around the world have acquired new power not only as sites of resistance between the people... more
Various forms of ever-evolving cultural practices, rituals and entertainments which are now communicated throughout the Middle and Near East, and around the world have acquired new power not only as sites of resistance between the people and the state, but also as sites of competing inter-class and inter-generational discourses. The processes of globalization and the development of new information technologies have reformulated notions of nationalism, conceptions of identity, and gender roles.
The central concern of this seminar series is to look at contemporary Middle and Near East through unaccustomed angles, as an attempt to unfix the Eurocentric categories, and narrow the epistemological gap by informing ourselves about seemingly less political aspects of the everyday life in the region.
By starting a conversation about the region, this seminar series aim to use desire as a central theme. Desire enables a gripping discussion at multiple levels: gendered, political, social, and religious.
The central concern of this seminar series is to look at contemporary Middle and Near East through unaccustomed angles, as an attempt to unfix the Eurocentric categories, and narrow the epistemological gap by informing ourselves about seemingly less political aspects of the everyday life in the region.
By starting a conversation about the region, this seminar series aim to use desire as a central theme. Desire enables a gripping discussion at multiple levels: gendered, political, social, and religious.
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Cfp for 'Cultures of Difference: Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity' Workshop.
June 10-11, 2017 - University of Cambridge
June 10-11, 2017 - University of Cambridge
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The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in... more
The aim of this paper is to locate critique at the intersections of the genealogy of knowledge in anthropological thinking and the decolonizing movement. The paper approaches the decolonizing movement as one of the most crucial points in anthropological thinking. It is built on the premise that the decolonizing movement is set to go beyond filling the gaps in genealogies and it can do so by: (1) revising the ‘dismissed’ genealogies that has contributed to the formation of the contemporary classical theory, and (2) thinking creatively in implementing the critical thinking tools to the dismissed scholarship, in an equal manner to the Eurocentric scholarship. To illustrate, it uses the case of Ibn Khaldun, an Arab scholar of social sciences and historical analysis from 14th Century who is often referred to as the first sociologist. On the one hand, his influence in classical Western thinking is largely dismissed. On the other hand, as a counter-response to this dismissal, the new Islamic revivalist intelligentsia in the Muslim right engage with him in a selective manner that not only rejects that central critical thinking but, even worse, sanctions the local regimes of power, including that local canon. By locating his scholarship to multiple tropes in anthropological theory and reading his evolutionist thinking vis-à-vis the post-colonial literature in anthropology and sociology, I question the limits and possibilities of critical thinking within and beyond the decolonizing movement.
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Research Interests:
Working Out Desire examines spor merakı 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,... more
Working Out Desire examines spor merakı 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 agen-tive, desiring self. Sehlikoglu develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Pushing back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects, Sehlikoglu places women's desiring subjectivity at the book's center. 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 ability to shift and transform their conditions and to exercise agency in defining their cultural role.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Women’s control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive... more
Women’s control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive body movements it requires, problematizes women’s ability to control their public sexualities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Istanbul, this article explores the everyday concerns of Istanbulite women who seek rahatlık (comfort) during exercise. The interviewees frequently used the word rahatlık when referring to women-only spaces in the culture of mahremiyet (intimacy, privacy). This article furthers the scholarship on Muslim sexualities by examining the diversity of women’s concerns regarding their public sexualities and the boundary-making dynamics in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that mahremiyet operates as an institution of intimacy that provides a metacultural intelligibility for heteronormativity based on sexual scripts, normative spaces, and gendered acts.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
This research is about the contemporary relationship Muslim women build with global trends, including those related to their body image and health, and the ways in which such a relationship is related to their subjectivation, agency and... more
This research is about the contemporary relationship Muslim women build with global trends, including those related to their body image and health, and the ways in which such a relationship is related to their subjectivation, agency and desire. In order to understand this relationship, my project focuses on women’s rising demand for women-only sport centres, the number of which had increased twenty-fold between 2005 and 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.
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questions about how Arab women’s lives are represented at home and abroad, and their work should inspire future research in the following areas: the erasure of women from Arab news versus their concentration in women’s magazines; theories... more
questions about how Arab women’s lives are represented at home and abroad, and their work should inspire future research in the following areas: the erasure of women from Arab news versus their concentration in women’s magazines; theories and empirical tests of so-called Eastern and Western readership; changes in home-grown Arab news reporting following the post-September 11 media boom; and classor identitydriven differences in Arab women’s political awareness and activism.
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Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Drawing on ethnographic research with the devout members of Gülen movement displaced in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016, this paper studies the existential crisis these formerly “proper Turkish citizens” have been experiencing... more
Drawing on ethnographic research with the devout members of Gülen movement displaced in the aftermath of the coup attempt in 2016, this paper studies the existential crisis these formerly “proper Turkish citizens” have been experiencing after being targeted by the Turkish State. This existential crisis, as argued in this paper, is significantly informative in understanding how privilege-based ethical self-making emanates fragility. The paper, thus, both parallels Sunni-Turkish-ness with whiteness and provides a reading of ethical self-making processes the Gülenists developed vis-à-vis the notions of critique and comfort. It first looks closer at the two Islamic revivalist movements, Milli Görüş as the predecessors of Turkey’s ruling AKP (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi/Justice and Development Party) and the Gülen Movement, their rivalry over claiming the canon and the ways in which they differ in their notions of politics, political Islam, and critique. Although critique and self-critiqu...
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Research Interests:
Using a cross-cultural perspective, The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality examines the conceptual formulation of heteronormativity and highlights the mundane operations of its... more
Using a cross-cultural perspective, The Everyday Makings of Heteronormativity: Cross-Cultural Explorations of Sex, Gender, and Sexuality examines the conceptual formulation of heteronormativity and highlights the mundane operations of its construction in diverse contexts. Heterosexual culture simultaneously institutionalizes its narrations and normalcies, operating in a way that preserves its own coherency. Heteronormativity gains its privileges and coherency through public operations and the mutuality of the public and private spheres. The contributors to this edited collection examine this coherency and privilege and explore in ethnographic detail the operations and making of heteronormative devices: material, affective, narrative, spatial, and bodily. This book is recommended for students and scholars of anthropology, sociology, and gender and sexuality studies.
Research Interests:
Working Out Desire examines spor merakı 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,... more
Working Out Desire examines spor merakı 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 agen-tive, desiring self. Sehlikoglu develops a multilayered analysis of how women use spor merakı to take themselves out of the domestic zone physically, emotionally, and also imaginatively. Pushing back against the conventional boundaries of scholarly interest in Muslim women as pious subjects, Sehlikoglu places women's desiring subjectivity at the book's center. 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 ability to shift and transform their conditions and to exercise agency in defining their cultural role.
Research Interests:
As social transformations and new forms of sexualities are studied with close interest by social scientists, the question regarding the content and the formation of heterosexual culture that makes and remakes itself on a daily basis... more
As social transformations and new forms of sexualities are studied with close interest by social scientists, the question regarding the content and the formation of heterosexual culture that makes and remakes itself on a daily basis through forming boundaries and normalities remains theoretically less explored. Yet such a concern calls for further elaboration of the very boundaries in sexuality that differentiate public from private, intimate from distant. Indeed, in their pioneering article, Berlant and Warner discuss sex and sexuality as something "mediated by public" and argue that heterosexual culture creates privacy in order to identify and operate itself and preserve its own coherency. Albeit private, intimacy "also involves an aspiration for a narrative about something to be shared (1998: 281).
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Research Interests:
1990s deem it wise to support the popularization of talk about their very own population being depressed? To conclude, Prozak Diaries is both a fascinating read and a major contribution to our understanding of postrevolutionary Iran and... more
1990s deem it wise to support the popularization of talk about their very own population being depressed? To conclude, Prozak Diaries is both a fascinating read and a major contribution to our understanding of postrevolutionary Iran and of intersecting fields including trauma studies, generation studies, and medical anthropology. It will be a very valuable addition to both undergraduate and graduate courses on these topics.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Women’s control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive... more
Women’s control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive body movements it requires, problematizes women’s ability to control their public sexualities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Istanbul, this article explores the everyday concerns of Istanbulite women who seek rahatlik (comfort) during exercise. The interviewees frequently used the word rahatlik when referring to women-only spaces in the culture of mahremiyet (intimacy, privacy). This article furthers the scholarship on Muslim sexualities by examining the diversity of women’s concerns regarding their public sexualities and the boundary-making dynamics in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that mahremiyet operates as an institution of intimacy that provides a metacultural intelligibility for heteronormativity based on sexual scripts, normative spaces, and gendered acts.
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
Research Interests:
"Aside from the political positions expressed, the genre used in public, employing vulgar and even abusive jargon is as problematic as the ideas themselves. Male politicians seemed oblivious about the traditional Islamic notion of... more
"Aside from the political positions expressed, the genre used in public, employing vulgar and even abusive jargon is as problematic as the ideas themselves. Male politicians seemed oblivious about the traditional Islamic notion of privacy (mahremiyet) that requires sensitivity and circumspection when it comes to intimate personal and/or familial issues. Yet, on this occasion, male lawmakers were putting women’s sexuality out in the public domain and thus turning it into a mundane and trivial issue. They were, thus, sacrificing the values of privacy for the sake of population policy."
Research Interests:
Any work on Muslim sportswomen inevitably needs to examine the (growing) debates in the Muslim world and in the social sciences concerning Muslim women’s public visibility and public sexuality. One of the central questions I will address... more
Any work on Muslim sportswomen inevitably needs to examine the (growing) debates in the Muslim world and in the social sciences concerning Muslim women’s public visibility and public sexuality. One of the central questions I will address is related to the earlier debates and cultural/religious contradictions regarding women’s physicality, their bodies, appearance and public visibility. Olympics and international games however, raise another debate on the ways in which a woman’s body is exposed to international audiences which is linked to complex feelings on national pride (and how this sense of pride and nation is perceived), women’s public sexuality and Islamic pride (which also takes gendered forms). This piece analyses the debates on public visibility and sexuality of Muslim sports women among Islamic circles, including fatwas and the media. In particular, the paper builds on the responses received from sporty Muslim women themselves during semi-structured in-depth interviews in Istanbul. During my interviews, I showed photos of various Muslim sportswomen, which were taken during international games. Female members of women-only gyms were interviewed on their involvement in sports and how their involvement is shaped or constrained by people closest to them at home or at work. The interview data indicate that a large group of women redefine modernity by using a religious framework, and reinvent what it means to be a modern Muslim woman. This act of redefinition has produced both an acceptance of and resistance to certain conservative values regarding gender. In some contexts, women have energetically participated in the propagation of political Islam while simultaneously making their voices heard and claiming agency for redefining modesty, bodily movements and public sexuality as well as security in response to outfit regulations of international games.
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(...) As my field in Istanbul, Turkey reveals, sport can be used as a powerful tool for social change. It has been used as a mechanism in Turkey to progress towards the ideal of achieving a modern nation, as the republican ideology... more
(...) As my field in Istanbul, Turkey reveals, sport can be used as a powerful tool for social change. It has been used as a mechanism in Turkey to progress towards the ideal of achieving a modern nation, as the republican ideology invested in sports and physical education for the corporeal transformation of its citizens. Unfit Eastern bodies of Turks had to be moulded into a better shape for the formation of a new civilization. (...)
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This paper uses ethnographic methods to inquire how new forms of consumption arise as a result of bridging Islamic spirituality with leisure in the newly growing tesettür hotels in Turkey, which have become a magnet of popular and... more
This paper uses ethnographic methods to inquire how new forms of consumption arise as a result of bridging Islamic spirituality with leisure in the newly growing tesettür hotels in Turkey, which have become a magnet of popular and academic attention. We aim to offer a multi-layered analysis of the leisure and consumption practices of Muslim women in the context of the new Islamic hospitality industry by looking at the interactions between spiritual Islam and modern capitalism. We focus on the consumption process of the female customers of these hotels as part of defining and redefining their newly developing identity that is Islamic and spiritual; as well as modern and luxurious. The study responds to the call of Gökarıksel and Secor to analyse new Islamic patterns of consumption and leisure by building on their perspectives bridging neoliberal capitalism and resurgence of Islamic identities. We call for a critical and contextual perspective to understand the dynamic emergence of new forms of Islamic lifestyles and capitalism; emphasising a future agenda of further research that is sensitive to the complexities of desires and leisure activities of veiled Muslim women in diverse countries.
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At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced... more
At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed's (2000) discussion of ‘strange encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically, discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant ‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place. By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.
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Research Interests:
Women’s Sport as Politics in Muslim Contexts provides an urgently needed analysis of the bravery and creativity exhibited by women in the realm of sports, which has emerged as a major realm of contestation between proponents of women’s... more
Women’s Sport as Politics in Muslim Contexts provides an urgently needed analysis of the bravery and creativity exhibited by women in the realm of sports, which has emerged as a major realm of contestation between proponents of women’s rights and political Islamist forces in Muslim contexts. Through focused case studies, this volume tracks the many sophisticated, context-specific, and constantly evolving strategies of women’s resistance to their exclusion in sport. Integral in their struggles for full inclusion in competitive sports, as both players and spectators, is women’s claim to their full and equal citizenship. The edited volume divulges the various ways women negotiate political and ideological boundaries, as they politicize and subvert spaces normally considered outside the realm of state politics in order to bring about gender-equitable opportunities while at the same time redefining women’s roles in society.
Hoodfar and other contributors have provided a ground-breaking analysis of the landscape of gender and sports in diverse Muslim contexts, covering Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Europe, North America, and Senegal. This book offers a glimpse of the variety of ways that women debunk exclusionary masculinist logics in sports that are justified by nationalism, religion, and modernism. In the process, they also expose, unpack, and critique, the policies and tactics imposed by both international mega-sport organizations and Islamist regimes that objectify and sexualize women’s bodies in their opposing perspectives.
The various chapters of the book document women’s insistence in participating in and politicising sports, which challenges and redefines gender norms that prevail in their specific context. This fascinating case studies that document the variety of ways that women in Muslim contexts have initiated strategies to contest their exclusion from the public sphere, is part of the WLUML’s research and publication series on Dress Codes and Modes: Politics of Women’s Clothing in Muslim Contexts.The book is written in an accessible manner and is a timely resource for proponents of sports for women. It also serves teachers and scholars interested in women’s sports and resistance, as well as cultural and post-colonial studies. This book is an important and inspiring resource for feminists, activists, and scholars who are committed to ending the exclusion of women from sports, which is an important aspect of the public sphere.
Hoodfar and other contributors have provided a ground-breaking analysis of the landscape of gender and sports in diverse Muslim contexts, covering Iran, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Europe, North America, and Senegal. This book offers a glimpse of the variety of ways that women debunk exclusionary masculinist logics in sports that are justified by nationalism, religion, and modernism. In the process, they also expose, unpack, and critique, the policies and tactics imposed by both international mega-sport organizations and Islamist regimes that objectify and sexualize women’s bodies in their opposing perspectives.
The various chapters of the book document women’s insistence in participating in and politicising sports, which challenges and redefines gender norms that prevail in their specific context. This fascinating case studies that document the variety of ways that women in Muslim contexts have initiated strategies to contest their exclusion from the public sphere, is part of the WLUML’s research and publication series on Dress Codes and Modes: Politics of Women’s Clothing in Muslim Contexts.The book is written in an accessible manner and is a timely resource for proponents of sports for women. It also serves teachers and scholars interested in women’s sports and resistance, as well as cultural and post-colonial studies. This book is an important and inspiring resource for feminists, activists, and scholars who are committed to ending the exclusion of women from sports, which is an important aspect of the public sphere.
Research Interests:
In 2018, Sertaç Sehlikoglu analysed a departure from the study of piety and ethical self-making in the anthropological literature on gender and gendered agency in the Middle East towards a focus on ‘joy, desire, and fun’. Whereas in the... more
In 2018, Sertaç Sehlikoglu analysed a departure from the study of piety and ethical self-making in the anthropological literature on gender and gendered agency in the Middle East towards a focus on ‘joy, desire, and fun’. Whereas in the 1990s and early 2000s scholars grappled with the apparent ‘paradox’ of women’s participation in the Islamic Revival, researchers more recently had begun to study Muslim women’s engagement with fashion, youth cultures, the arts or sports across the region. With Working Out Desire, Sehlikoglu now presents her own monograph along these lines, namely a study on women’s engagement in sport in the Turkish metropolis of Istanbul.
Research Interests: Middle East Studies, Subjectivities, Sexuality, Gender, Turkey, and 3 moreSports, Subjectivity, and Istanbul
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Sertaç Sehlikoglu's Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul is an ethnographically rich and multilayered contribution to contemporary anthropological debates on subject formation. The book generates insights into the... more
Sertaç Sehlikoglu's Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul is an ethnographically rich and multilayered contribution to contemporary anthropological debates on subject formation. The book generates insights into the gendered (re)production of normative orders and the cultivation of agency at the intersection of piety and everyday politics. Sehlikoglu's exploration of women's engagements extends these debates through its attention to the ordinary and yet often overlooked modalities of subjectivity formation. Drawing on extensive fieldwork, conducted in 2008 and 2011–2012 across multiple sites in contemporary Istanbul, Working Out Desire focusses explicitly on the ways in which women engage with sport not solely as a process of reshaping their bodies but also as a way of constituting themselves as capable and willful subjects in a changing socio-economic landscape. The ethnography skilfully moves between experiences of wider political magnitudes (such as the rise of political Islam and the consolidation of neoliberal logic where cost-benefit calculation reigns supreme and subjects are posited first and foremost as consumers) and an examination of how nascent social forces are renegotiated and acted upon by individuals and smaller groups. The reader is presented with an account of ‘women's self imaginations, with what women imagine themselves doing, and with how those aspirations are formed and collectively articulated toward triggering the creation of a new market’ (p. 9).
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Turkey has long been perceived as an intriguing country for social scientists to study, mostly due to its Muslim secularist constituency, lately resulting in a vast literature on the unprecedented upsurge of political Islam. Kayhan... more
Turkey has long been perceived as an intriguing country for social scientists to study, mostly due to its Muslim secularist constituency, lately resulting in a vast literature on the unprecedented upsurge of political Islam. Kayhan Delibas contributes to this litera- ture in his latest book. His book is based on a combination of quantitative and qualitative research in suburban districts of Ankara (Keçiören and Mamak), conducted with the activist members of Islamist political parties.
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Özlem Akkaya’s PhD dissertation entitled “The Construction of Gendered Subjectivities of Female Broadcast Professionals within TRT” offers an interesting insight into female broadcast professionals of national state-owned TV channel of... more
Özlem Akkaya’s PhD dissertation entitled “The Construction of Gendered Subjectivities of Female Broadcast Professionals within TRT” offers an interesting insight into female broadcast professionals of national state-owned TV channel of Turkey from its establishment (1964) until the time private TV channels start operating in Turkey (1989). The central focus of research is the gendered subjectivities of those professionals and the work is benefited from rich data conducted from the professionals themselves, through in-depth interviews. The research also uses autobiographies, memoirs, and journals of former female professionals of TRT, in addition to interviews and archives of TRT.