Secular self-fashioning against "Islamization": aesthetic body modification and female subjectivites among the secular middle class in Istanbul
Liebelt, Claudia – 2019
In his essay on the secular body, Hirschkind wonders why the statement "He lives a very religious life" gives us some impression of the shape of a life, while "He lives a very secular life" tells us almost nothing (except, negatively, that the person does not engage in worshipful practices)" (2011: 641). For the inhabitants of contemporary Istanbul, the latter statement may not sound as nonsensical as it might elsewhere and for others. More than that, in an atmosphere of political tension and the general rhetoric of a growing secular and Islamic divide in society following the consolidation of power and increasingly authoritarian rule of the conservative, pro-Islamic Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), the 'secular body' took on a concrete form and role for many of my research participants in Istanbul. In this chapter, I focus on a particular group of middle-aged to older women, commonly referred to in public discourse as "(self-)conscious menopausal women" (bilinç sahibi menopozlu kadınlar) (Erol 2011), and who were confronted with the first signs of ageing during the early boom of the urban beauty sector in the 1990s, a time when menopause became public knowledge in Turkey. In the following, we will show how self-identified secular women of this generation understood their secular self-fashioning through bodily practices and public appearances as an act of immediate concern.