The International Society for the Critical Study of Divination (ISCSD) is pleased to invite you to our next Book Talk, featuring Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey by Zeynep K. Korkman (University of California, Los Angeles). The event will take place on Friday, May 16, 2025, at 18:00 CET.
In this pathbreaking ethnography, Korkman investigates Turkey’s commercial fortunetelling cafés, where secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals seek solace and solidarity amidst the entangled pressures of secularist, Islamist, neoliberal, and patriarchal forces. Despite being marginalized by law and cultural norms, these cafés have emerged as affective and feminized publics in which participants grapple with precarity and envision alternative futures.
Korkman’s analysis foregrounds “feeling” both as a mode of divinatory engagement and as a feminist analytic, offering profound insights into how those on the social margins experience and respond to structural vulnerabilities. Her work challenges dominant secular suspicions of magic and provides a critical lens through which to explore postsecular subjectivities, gendered labor, and affective publics in contemporary Turkey.
Book Talk Details:
Featured Book: Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey
Author: Zeynep Korkman (UCLA)
Discussant: Canan Tanir (University of Texas–Rio Grande Valley)
Date: Friday, May 16, 2025
Time: 18:00 CET
Zoom link: https://fau.zoom-x.de/j/67467253755
We warmly welcome you to join us for this timely and thought-provoking discussion.
The event poster can also be downloaded here.
