Banu Gökarıksel is Professor of Geography and Distinguished Royster Professor for Graduate Education at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She was the co-editor of the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies (2014-2018). Her work engages cultural and political geographies, feminist geopolitics, and geographies of religion with a focus on gender, bodies, and spaces of everyday life. She has conducted ethnographic and multi-method fieldwork research (including focus groups and surveys) in Turkey since 1996. She is also interested in questions about religious, racial, and gender/sexual diversity, shared spaces, and social justice in the US and feminist analyses of the global rise of the right wing political movements.
What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? D... more What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? Drawing on our focus group interviews with covered women in Turkey, we examine this proposition theoretically and empirically. Regarding the headscarf as a thing, rather than an object or a sign, opens up an important critique of how the headscarf has been cast within public discourse. The headscarf, we argue, is one element of an assemblage oriented towards the ethical problematic of Islamic modesty. By engaging the claim that the headscarf is not a sign, we move beyond the logic of the sign and towards an understanding of the veil that is attuned to the protests of those who wear it.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Nov 1, 2017
S cholars of Middle East women’s studies have much cause for alarm today. The increasing prevalen... more S cholars of Middle East women’s studies have much cause for alarm today. The increasing prevalence of anti-Muslim rhetoric and action, the unabashed reassertion of white male power, and recent attempts to erode the rights of women, queers, immigrants, and people of color have serious consequences for our research, teaching, and engagement with public debates and communities. In the United States, the two executive orders (EO) Donald Trump signed soon after his inauguration in 2017 officially sanctioned and legitimized discourse and policy against Muslims. Thinly disguised as actions thatwould give the government time to review and strengthen already very stringent policies regarding visas of tourists, immigrants, and refugees, the EOs clearly target Muslims, cast them as security threats, and attempt to implement Trump’s campaign promise for a complete “Muslimban.” The anti-Muslim discourse and actions rely on and reproduce deeply gendered stereotypes aboutMuslims and Islam by depicting all Muslimmen as potential terrorists, Muslim women as helpless victims of oppression, and Islam as inherently tyrannical, violent, and patriarchal. The reference to honor killings in the first EO is a prime example of how anti-Muslim thinkingmanipulates gendered (mis)conceptions.TheEOappropriates violence againstMuslimwomenbyMuslim men to justify the targeting of allMuslims (men, women, children, elderly, young) as security threats and condones their collective punishment, echoing once again the historical enlisting of women’s suffering in the service of Western imperial projects and military invasions. This brand of imperial feminism is all too familiar and needs to be as persistently criticized as it is revived and recirculated. Yet it is also crucial to analyze the body politics of Trumpismmore generally and link the attacks
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Feb 20, 2017
O n July 15, 2016, an otherwise ordinary Friday night for citizens of Turkey was disrupted by ima... more O n July 15, 2016, an otherwise ordinary Friday night for citizens of Turkey was disrupted by images, sounds, and situations that have, unfortunately, become less extraordinary in recent decades: a coup d’état. Modern Turkey’s history has been marred by a series of coups, from the bloody to the “postmodern,” in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. Military tanks rolled into the cities, fighter jets and helicopters fired ammunition. Soldiers blocked key nodes in transportation networks and attacked central state, intelligence, and police locations and media outlets. The leaders of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) immediately named those behind the coup, Fethullah Gülen and his followers, and called on ordinary people to come out in defense of democracy. In response, thousands ignored the curfew declared by the coup leaders and poured out to the streets, confronting armed soldiers and tanks, working with the police to catch and sometimes extrajudicially execute suspected culprits. By the followingmorning itwas clear that the coup attempthad failed.Crowds came out to occupy public squares in celebration of new heroes and democracy. The government encouraged these “democracy vigils” and ensured access to them by suspending all fees for public transportation. Heroic moments of that night played over and over again on screens set up at the squares where people gathered. The aftermath of the coup is still uncertain. Over three hundred people were killed and more than two thousand were injured during the coup. Hundreds have been detained or arrested; thousands have been fired from their jobs or forced to resign; over one hundred media outlets have been closed down in the days that followed. The government declared a state of emergency soon after the coup attempt.
ABSTRACT :Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growin... more ABSTRACT :Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styles in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides insight into how women's fashion and the question of tesettür become negotiable elements of everyday practice. Our analysis shows that while there may be no easy reconciliation between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettür and the spectacle of ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.
Abstract Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of ... more Abstract Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of dependency discourse, this paper discusses affective politics in policy making spaces by examining a Durham (North Carolina, USA) City Council meeting. We focus on a 2017 Housing Needs Hearing where bodily gestures and speech acts were crucial parts of emotional interactions that defined, maintained, and challenged subject positions and power structures. We argue that embedded within legacies of racial and gender inequality, neoliberal sensibilities work through embodied emotional performances that impact policy conversations. Our analysis reveals how, despite progressive aspirations and accomplishments in Durham, the meeting's extractive set up perpetuates inequities by positioning those seeking assistance to prove their worth through a contradictory performance of desperation and self-actualization while enabling supporters of housing affordability, including city officials, to adopt the role of caring advocates. We find that a performance of pain and the rhetorical proof of self-responsibility opens up potential access to affordable housing and in doing so reveals both the limits and impact of a broken housing system. We thus extend analysis of the neoliberal condition of US housing inequality by deepening understanding of how neoliberal deservingness is embodied and shapes racialized, classed, and gendered subject positions.
This Reflection explores the production of the body as a space and the remaking of city spaces th... more This Reflection explores the production of the body as a space and the remaking of city spaces through an analysis of Muslim women’s veiling as an embodied spatial practice in contemporary Turkey. This exploration builds on geographic approaches to space as relational, always in the making, and produced by everyday practices and to bodies that emphasize their porosity, fluidity, and multiscalar dimensions. In a period of Turkish history when the headscarf continues to be restricted and stigmatized, the Reflection examines the effects of veiling on women’s bodies by focusing on how this practice redefines a woman’s relation to her body when she starts wearing a headscarf as an adult. Veiling initiates a struggle to discipline and shape her body according to her Islamically oriented ideals, thus remaking her body emotionally and materially. This practice also shifts her experiences of different city spaces across Istanbul. The Reflection traces the place of veiling and veiled bodies f...
What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? D... more What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? Drawing on our focus group interviews with covered women in Turkey, we examine this proposition theoretically and empirically. Regarding the headscarf as a thing, rather than an object or a sign, opens up an important critique of how the headscarf has been cast within public discourse. The headscarf, we argue, is one element of an assemblage oriented towards the ethical problematic of Islamic modesty. By engaging the claim that the headscarf is not a sign, we move beyond the logic of the sign and towards an understanding of the veil that is attuned to the protests of those who wear it.
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Nov 1, 2017
S cholars of Middle East women’s studies have much cause for alarm today. The increasing prevalen... more S cholars of Middle East women’s studies have much cause for alarm today. The increasing prevalence of anti-Muslim rhetoric and action, the unabashed reassertion of white male power, and recent attempts to erode the rights of women, queers, immigrants, and people of color have serious consequences for our research, teaching, and engagement with public debates and communities. In the United States, the two executive orders (EO) Donald Trump signed soon after his inauguration in 2017 officially sanctioned and legitimized discourse and policy against Muslims. Thinly disguised as actions thatwould give the government time to review and strengthen already very stringent policies regarding visas of tourists, immigrants, and refugees, the EOs clearly target Muslims, cast them as security threats, and attempt to implement Trump’s campaign promise for a complete “Muslimban.” The anti-Muslim discourse and actions rely on and reproduce deeply gendered stereotypes aboutMuslims and Islam by depicting all Muslimmen as potential terrorists, Muslim women as helpless victims of oppression, and Islam as inherently tyrannical, violent, and patriarchal. The reference to honor killings in the first EO is a prime example of how anti-Muslim thinkingmanipulates gendered (mis)conceptions.TheEOappropriates violence againstMuslimwomenbyMuslim men to justify the targeting of allMuslims (men, women, children, elderly, young) as security threats and condones their collective punishment, echoing once again the historical enlisting of women’s suffering in the service of Western imperial projects and military invasions. This brand of imperial feminism is all too familiar and needs to be as persistently criticized as it is revived and recirculated. Yet it is also crucial to analyze the body politics of Trumpismmore generally and link the attacks
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies, Feb 20, 2017
O n July 15, 2016, an otherwise ordinary Friday night for citizens of Turkey was disrupted by ima... more O n July 15, 2016, an otherwise ordinary Friday night for citizens of Turkey was disrupted by images, sounds, and situations that have, unfortunately, become less extraordinary in recent decades: a coup d’état. Modern Turkey’s history has been marred by a series of coups, from the bloody to the “postmodern,” in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. Military tanks rolled into the cities, fighter jets and helicopters fired ammunition. Soldiers blocked key nodes in transportation networks and attacked central state, intelligence, and police locations and media outlets. The leaders of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) immediately named those behind the coup, Fethullah Gülen and his followers, and called on ordinary people to come out in defense of democracy. In response, thousands ignored the curfew declared by the coup leaders and poured out to the streets, confronting armed soldiers and tanks, working with the police to catch and sometimes extrajudicially execute suspected culprits. By the followingmorning itwas clear that the coup attempthad failed.Crowds came out to occupy public squares in celebration of new heroes and democracy. The government encouraged these “democracy vigils” and ensured access to them by suspending all fees for public transportation. Heroic moments of that night played over and over again on screens set up at the squares where people gathered. The aftermath of the coup is still uncertain. Over three hundred people were killed and more than two thousand were injured during the coup. Hundreds have been detained or arrested; thousands have been fired from their jobs or forced to resign; over one hundred media outlets have been closed down in the days that followed. The government declared a state of emergency soon after the coup attempt.
ABSTRACT :Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growin... more ABSTRACT :Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styles in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides insight into how women's fashion and the question of tesettür become negotiable elements of everyday practice. Our analysis shows that while there may be no easy reconciliation between the demands for modesty that underlie tesettür and the spectacle of ever changing fashion, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.
Abstract Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of ... more Abstract Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of dependency discourse, this paper discusses affective politics in policy making spaces by examining a Durham (North Carolina, USA) City Council meeting. We focus on a 2017 Housing Needs Hearing where bodily gestures and speech acts were crucial parts of emotional interactions that defined, maintained, and challenged subject positions and power structures. We argue that embedded within legacies of racial and gender inequality, neoliberal sensibilities work through embodied emotional performances that impact policy conversations. Our analysis reveals how, despite progressive aspirations and accomplishments in Durham, the meeting's extractive set up perpetuates inequities by positioning those seeking assistance to prove their worth through a contradictory performance of desperation and self-actualization while enabling supporters of housing affordability, including city officials, to adopt the role of caring advocates. We find that a performance of pain and the rhetorical proof of self-responsibility opens up potential access to affordable housing and in doing so reveals both the limits and impact of a broken housing system. We thus extend analysis of the neoliberal condition of US housing inequality by deepening understanding of how neoliberal deservingness is embodied and shapes racialized, classed, and gendered subject positions.
This Reflection explores the production of the body as a space and the remaking of city spaces th... more This Reflection explores the production of the body as a space and the remaking of city spaces through an analysis of Muslim women’s veiling as an embodied spatial practice in contemporary Turkey. This exploration builds on geographic approaches to space as relational, always in the making, and produced by everyday practices and to bodies that emphasize their porosity, fluidity, and multiscalar dimensions. In a period of Turkish history when the headscarf continues to be restricted and stigmatized, the Reflection examines the effects of veiling on women’s bodies by focusing on how this practice redefines a woman’s relation to her body when she starts wearing a headscarf as an adult. Veiling initiates a struggle to discipline and shape her body according to her Islamically oriented ideals, thus remaking her body emotionally and materially. This practice also shifts her experiences of different city spaces across Istanbul. The Reflection traces the place of veiling and veiled bodies f...
Following recent calls for critical and feminist human geographers to take demographic change ser... more Following recent calls for critical and feminist human geographers to take demographic change seriously (Robbins & Smith 2016), we are inviting submissions about the origins of demographic fever dreams and fantasies. We're interested in the work that they do, the danger that they pose to building solidarity across difference, but also the potential for play and subversion that is embedded in their vivid specificity. Traditionally, critical human geography has overlooked or ignored demographic change, and yet global demographic shifts are animating and inspiring political movements worldwide. Often, these shifts are mobilized in political discourses through specific demographic fantasies to instill anxiety and fear of perceived threats to the success of nations. These fantasies rely on normative ideas of gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious difference, but also invent compelling narrative justifications for those ideas and a means for them to mutate and multiply. In the 2016 US election cycle, for example, we have recently been privy to a deluge of dreams and fantasies: a migration-engendered epidemic of " taco trucks on every corner, " an Obama-sponsored invasion of lesbian farmers to undermine red state agricultural strongholds, and a " basket of deplorables " containing half of all Trump voters. We describe these as fever dreams and fantasies because of their strikingly specific and dream-state features that leap from numerical measures and policy into a surreal and multivalent landscape of threat…or delight. As we consider the political purpose of these demographic fantasies, the fears underlying them, and how the vivid imagery ties into fears of white masculine decline and panic, we wonder how we can unravel these oddly specific imaginaries. Beyond the US election, we also read an underlying element of demographic fantasy in worries about the presence of burkinis on French beaches, attempts to ban " sharia law " across the southern US and Europe, the rhetoric surrounding the Brexit, and numerous other global cases. In each of these instances, a vivid and fantastic fiction is used by figures with political power to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality to consolidate political power or to dismiss or undermine class tensions and create fictions communities of homogeneity. While it is easy to be smugly dismissive of fears about an unlikely takeover by " others, " here we hope to more carefully consider the content, deployment, and mechanisms of these vivid demographic imaginaries of threat. In so doing, we hope to build on, but also disrupt and complicate theoretical explorations in feminist political geography, which evoke the embodied life of territory and borders and the political life of demography.
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