She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey, and reported the following:
The Page 99 Test promises to foretell a book’s quality by simply opening and reading this fateful page. What an exciting way to engage with a book on divination! Page 99 of Gendered Fortunes: Divination, Precarity, and Affect in Postsecular Turkey, as it turns out, offers an intriguing yet incomplete taste of the book.Follow Zeynep K. Korkman on Twitter.
Page 99 is from “Chapter 3: Feeling Postsecular,” which features women and young and gay men who read fortunes as a way to broker their precarious positioning as Muslim, non-pious, and secular subjects in the context of declining secularism and rising Islamist authoritarianism in 21st century Turkey. Page 99 features the subtitle “Don’t Believe in Fortune-Telling, but Don’t Do without it Either,” a popular saying that I have repeatedly heard from fortunetellers and their clients who were part of a burgeoning divination economy in millennial Turkey. The saying succinctly summarizes the prescribed secular Muslim way of engaging with fortune-telling, and more broadly, with religion; it recommends faith and practice with a dose of skeptical distance. Fortunetellers and their clients offer this saying to rhetorically and pedagogically claim a secular(ist) subject position and to distinguish themselves from the people who they deem believe too much and from those who they deem to take advantage of naïve believers. They strive to distinguish themselves from “those hodjas” (religiously-accented, often male fortunetellers) who they insist abuse their naive (female) clients economically, psychologically, and sexually. They also speak against “those Islamists” who they insist mobilize religion to manipulate their gullible fellow citizens. Reading fortunes to lift their spirits in the face of their perilous social and personal futures as secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals, people featured in my book do not naively believe but still invest in their hopes in divination.
While page 99 provides a good preview of the book’s analysis of religion and secularism, not captured here is the broader substantive argument of the book that secular Muslim women and LGBTIQ individuals of a postsecular neoliberal era navigate not only their secular anxieties but also their gendered vulnerabilities and economic precarities through divination. Fortunetelling is a feminized idiom that brings together women and young and gay men to feel out their intimate desires and fears at some distance from the reignited gender conservatism of the government pushing against feminist and queer movements in the mainstream public sphere. This happens, however, only at the expense of the devalued, precarious, stigmatized, and even criminalized labors of fortunetelling women and LGBTIQ folk, who assist their more economically privileged counterparts in exploring their aspirations and worries.
Also missing from page 99 is the book’s methodological and theoretical argument that “feeling” as an analytic renders visible how ordinary people register and traverse at the affective level otherwise distanced and occulted social processes such as neoliberalism, secularism, Islamism, and gender conservatism, feeling their way into, through, and away from them. The book thus forwards attention to the disregarded realms of the minoritized and to the deployment of feeling as a lens into these realms as a feminist analytical and methodological strategy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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