Biography

I am a feminist scholar whose research explores the gendered relationships between affect, labor, religion, and feminist politics, with a regional focus on Turkey and the broader Muslim Middle East. My research agenda revolves around the affective labors and political genres through which women and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and queer (LGBTIQ) individuals navigate globally inflected social formations such as heteropatriarchy, neoliberal capitalism, religiously accented authoritarianism, secularism, and anti-Muslim racism. This research agenda unfolds along two interconnected tracks. The first focuses on the gendered relationships between affect, labor, and religion. The second details the affective contents and discontents of transnational feminist politics.

My book, Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey, is forthcoming in spring 2023 from Duke University Press. Drawing upon an extensive ethnographic fieldwork supported by cultural analysis and archival research, the book explores the proliferating fortunetelling economy of millennial Turkey as an affective window on the gendered contradictions of neoliberalism, secularism, and religiously accented authoritarianism. In a context wherein women and LGBTIQ people of the Muslim Middle East have been the favorite targets of anti-Muslim discourses cloaked in a veneer of (colonial, pseudo-feminist) concern to “save” them, this book shines a light on the complexities and contradictions at the heart of these major political contestations.