publications
Forthcoming:
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, (in press) “You can’t know how they are inside”: The Ambivalence of Veiling and Discourses of the Other in Turkey,” in Peter Hopkins, Lily Kong, and Elizabeth Olson eds. Religion and Place: Identity, Community, Territory. 2012. Springer Press.
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, (forthcoming) “The veil, desire, and the gaze: Turning the inside out," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
"Islam on the catwalk" in Stan Brunn ed. Changing World Religion Map. Springer Press.
Banu Gökarıksel, 2012, “The Intimate Politics of Secularism and the Headscarf: The Mall, the Neighborhood, and the Public Square in Istanbul” Gender, Place, and Culture 19, 1, 1-20.
ABSTRACT: The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Büşra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, 2011, “‘Even I Was Tempted:’ The Moral Ambivalence and Ethical Practice of Veiling-Fashion in Turkey,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, August 2011 (online), DOI:10.1080/00045608.2011.601221
ABSTRACT: Veiling-fashion, with its array of brands and ever-changing styles, has been on the rise in Turkey in the past decade. Although the producers of these styles present them as the perfect melding of fashion and piety, our analysis of focus groups with consumers in Istanbul and Konya in 2009 shows that veiling-fashion is, in practice, rife with ambivalence. Veiling is undertaken in relation to the moral code of of Islam, but fashion, as consumption, works as part of an ever-shifting economy of taste and distinction. In Baudrillard's terms, veiling-fashion is morally ambivalent, caught between its function as modest covering according to Islam and its social signification. In their negotiation of this ambivalence, consumers of these styles turn veiling-fashion into an ethical practice, into part of how they form themselves in relation both to a moral code (Islam) and to the aesthetics, politics, and pleasures of their sociospatial environments. The ethical practice of veiling-fashion thus engages a complex spatial field of bodies, homes, streets, military or state spaces, and public arenas. Veiling-fashion consumers describe their daily practices in terms of a problem of self-governance, or the management of nefis, the bodily or material desires aroused by consumption and its display. In this management of nefis through the technology of veiling-fashion these women form themselves as subjects of ethico-politics in Turkey today.
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, 2010, “Between Fashion and Tesettür: Marketing and Consuming Women’s Islamic Dress” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, 6, 3.
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 a) the representation of these styles in company catalogs, and b) 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 fashions, women accept this disjuncture and knowingly engage in a constant mediation between the two.
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, 2010, “Islamic-ness in the Life of a Commodity: Veiling-Fashion in Turkey” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 35, 313-333.
ABSTRACT: What makes a commodity ‘Islamic’? By focusing on the question of Islamic-ness as it traverses both material and symbolic production, this paper aims to contribute to recent research in geography on the lives of commodities. Our study demonstrates the instability of ‘Islamic-ness’ in the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey and draws out the implications of this finding for our understanding of the socio-spatial work of the commodity. The veiling-fashion (or tesettür) sector has become a conspicuous part of the Turkish apparel industry in the past thirty years. Firms producing veiling-fashion engage in the design, production, marketing and sale of distinctive commodities stylized to signify Islamic-ness. We begin by situating veiling-fashion within the broader contours of the Turkish apparel industry, economic restructuring, and the rise of an Islamic habitus in Turkey. Based on our 2008 survey of 174 veiling-fashion firms in Turkey and our case studies of three such firms, we seek to understand how and to what extent the commodity is inscribed as an Islamic commodity in the course of its life, from financing to marketing. We use survey data to explore the role of Islamic banking practices, Islamic trading practices, and Islamic workplace ethics in the itinerary of veiling-fashion. Drawing on our case studies of three veiling-fashion firms (Tekbir, Boutique Dayı, and Armine), we show how these companies represent their ambivalent relationships to Islamic-ness, both as a set of values and as a particular milieu in Turkey. Through this analysis, we find that the Islamic-ness of the commodity cannot in fact be located or fixed; it is instead best understood as a mode of insertion into socio-spatial networks. Veiling-fashion as a commodity thus enters into and becomes constitutive of the wider material and symbolic networks that enact Islamic-ness in Turkey today.
Banu Gökarıksel and Anna Secor, 2009, “New Transnational Geographies of Islamism, Capitalism and Subjectivity: The Veiling-Fashion Industry in Turkey,” Area, 41, 1, 6-18.
ABSTRACT: The rise of the transnational veiling-fashion industry in Turkey has taken place within the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, the subjection of the veil to new regulations, and the resurgence of Islamic identities worldwide. Even after almost two decades since its first catwalk appearance, the idea of “veiling-fashion” continues to be controversial, drawing criticism from secular and devout Muslim segments of society alike. Analyzing veiling-fashion as it plays out across economic, political and cultural fields is to enter into a new understanding of the role of Islam in the global arena today. Veiling-fashion crystallizes a series of issues about Islamic identity, the transnational linkages of both producers and consumers, and the shifting boundaries between Islamic ethics and the imperatives of neoliberal capitalism. In this paper, our overarching argument is that controversies and practices surrounding veiling-fashion show how Islamic actors are adapting and transforming neoliberal capitalism at the same time as they navigate a complex geopolitical terrain in which Islam – and the iconic Muslim, headscarf-wearing woman – has been cast as a threatening “Other.” Thus the rise of veiling-fashion as a transnational phenomenon positions women and women’s bodies at the center of political debates and struggles surrounding what it means to be “modern” and Muslim today. Based on interviews with producers, consumers and salesclerks, and our analysis of newspaper articles, catalogs and web sites, this article traces out how the transnational production, sale, and consumption of veiling-fashion works to order spaces of geopolitics, geo-economics and subject formation.