Refashioning Muslims: Women between the New Conservatism and Neoliberalism in Istanbul
Refashioning Muslims explores the self-presentations and daily performances of young, bourgeois, fashion-conscious Muslim female entrepreneurs who emerged as new social actors in fields of fashion, leisure, charity and the family during the 2010s. It examines how these “Muslim fashionistas” significantly bolster governmental capacity to build public consent by projecting images of successful entrepreneurs, benevolent philanthropists and ideal mothers. However, their performances entail moments of imperfection and moral dilemma as they navigate market demands and everyday aspirations often conflicting with Islamic orthodoxy and traditional gender order.

The book analyses how Muslim fashionistas cooperate with and challenge religious, classed, and gendered ideals, shaping a neoliberal Muslim subjectivity in the new Turkey. Drawing on Ricoeur’s notion of ‘narrative identity’ and Bourdieu’s notion of ‘regulated liberties’, the book argues that women’s subjectivities are guided by the dynamic unity of the narrative configuration of the self, and formed through a complex interplay between autonomy and (self-)regulation.

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Refashioning Muslims: Women between the New Conservatism and Neoliberalism in Istanbul
Refashioning Muslims explores the self-presentations and daily performances of young, bourgeois, fashion-conscious Muslim female entrepreneurs who emerged as new social actors in fields of fashion, leisure, charity and the family during the 2010s. It examines how these “Muslim fashionistas” significantly bolster governmental capacity to build public consent by projecting images of successful entrepreneurs, benevolent philanthropists and ideal mothers. However, their performances entail moments of imperfection and moral dilemma as they navigate market demands and everyday aspirations often conflicting with Islamic orthodoxy and traditional gender order.

The book analyses how Muslim fashionistas cooperate with and challenge religious, classed, and gendered ideals, shaping a neoliberal Muslim subjectivity in the new Turkey. Drawing on Ricoeur’s notion of ‘narrative identity’ and Bourdieu’s notion of ‘regulated liberties’, the book argues that women’s subjectivities are guided by the dynamic unity of the narrative configuration of the self, and formed through a complex interplay between autonomy and (self-)regulation.

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Refashioning Muslims: Women between the New Conservatism and Neoliberalism in Istanbul

Refashioning Muslims: Women between the New Conservatism and Neoliberalism in Istanbul

by Merve Kütük-Kuris
Refashioning Muslims: Women between the New Conservatism and Neoliberalism in Istanbul

Refashioning Muslims: Women between the New Conservatism and Neoliberalism in Istanbul

by Merve Kütük-Kuris

Hardcover

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Overview

Refashioning Muslims explores the self-presentations and daily performances of young, bourgeois, fashion-conscious Muslim female entrepreneurs who emerged as new social actors in fields of fashion, leisure, charity and the family during the 2010s. It examines how these “Muslim fashionistas” significantly bolster governmental capacity to build public consent by projecting images of successful entrepreneurs, benevolent philanthropists and ideal mothers. However, their performances entail moments of imperfection and moral dilemma as they navigate market demands and everyday aspirations often conflicting with Islamic orthodoxy and traditional gender order.

The book analyses how Muslim fashionistas cooperate with and challenge religious, classed, and gendered ideals, shaping a neoliberal Muslim subjectivity in the new Turkey. Drawing on Ricoeur’s notion of ‘narrative identity’ and Bourdieu’s notion of ‘regulated liberties’, the book argues that women’s subjectivities are guided by the dynamic unity of the narrative configuration of the self, and formed through a complex interplay between autonomy and (self-)regulation.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781399526425
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Publication date: 03/31/2025
Series: Critiquing Gender & Islam
Pages: 360
Product dimensions: 6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Merve Kütük-Kuriş is an Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies in the Department of Sociology at Boğaziçi University. She received her M.Phil. in Political Theory from the University of Oxford and her PhD in Politics from SOAS, University of London. Her main research interests revolve around social and political theory, political ethnography, sociology of Islam, social movements, and gender studies with particular reference to the Middle East. Kütük Kuriş has published in edited collections and peer-reviewed journals, including Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Religions.

Table of Contents

List of Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

Introduction: Same Old Debates, New Social Agents

1. Rethinking Muslim Women’s Agency
2. The Politics of Gender in Modern Turkey
3. A Style of One’s Own
4. Diversifying ‘Muslim Chic’
5. The New Islamic Leisure Sites and The Making of Cosmopolitan Muslim Selves
6. Helping the Poor in Splendour
7. Balancing Work and Family: Happy Medium or Dual Strain?

Conclusion: The Women of Many Talents: New Bourgeois Muslim Women Under the AKP

Appendix I: Interlocutors
Appendix II: Cyber-Ethnography and Short Encounters

References
Index

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