Banu Gökarıksel

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Verified

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• PhD
• Professor at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

This essay examines how Donald Trump's 2024 presidential campaign and early 2025 executive orders deploy overlapping forms of embodied exclusion to construct a white heteropatriarchal vision of American nationhood. Building on feminist political geography and refugee studies, I analyse how Trump's rhetoric and policies represent an intensification...

The lockdowns imposed upon cities, regions, and countries as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic are extraordinary state-sanctioned spatial interventions, both in terms of scale and scope. However, rather than a time-delimited event nor an exceptional circumstance of a temporary crisis, the pandemic lockdown was entangled with long-standing and on-...

What does discomfort do? What kinds of spaces, boundaries, and power relations are generated by comfort, and for whom? In this introduction to the themed section, we trace comfort/discomfort across borders and through spaces to see when and how these emotions and affective relations generate life and growth, and when they instead circumscribe possi...

The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have reworked this concept to account for not only what is potentially transformative in encounters but also for how encounters are conditioned by and productive o...

This study takes a critical perspective on the making of sectarian difference and Alevi precarity in contemporary Turkey. Drawing on our research from 2013 to 2016, we present an analysis of stories and conversations that took place amongst Alevi and Sunni focus group participants, primarily in Istanbul. These conversations illustrate how sectarian...

Mosques in Europe have been at the center of (geo)political debates about terrorism, radicalism, and the integration of Muslim communities. Mainstream EU political leaders and pundits often express suspicion of the transnational connections of Muslim populations and Islamic organizations in Europe, portraying mosques as foreign territories and mosq...

What we understand by the ‘Middle East’ has changed over time and across space. While scholars agree that the geographical ‘core’ of the Middle East is the Arabian Peninsula, the boundaries are less clear. How far back in time should we go to define the Middle East? How far south and east should we move on the African continent? And how do we deal...

Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of dependency discourse, this paper discusses affective politics in policy making spaces by examining a Durham (North Carolina, USA) City Council meeting. We focus on a 2017 Housing Needs Hearing where bodily gestures and speech acts were crucial parts of emotional...

In this paper, we critically approach the idea of “saving Muslim women” by examining two prominent judgments by the Supreme Court of India and their attendant debates: Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, popula...

This chapter begins from the question: What does it mean to claim, as French protesters did in 2004, that the headscarf is not a sign? Drawing on our focus group interviews with covered women in Turkey, we examine this proposition theoretically and empirically. Regarding the headscarf as a thing, rather than an object or a sign, opens up an importa...

This Reflection explores the production of the body as a space and the remaking of city spaces through an analysis of Muslim women’s veiling as an embodied spatial practice in contemporary Turkey. This exploration builds on geographic approaches to space as relational, always in the making, and produced by everyday practices and to bodies that emph...

Recent developments in cultural geography have brought forth everyday life and emotions as critical categories for understanding place. Yet, the focus on everyday emotional geographies also presents methodological challenges. This paper argues that auto‐photography is a particularly well‐suited method to explore the intricate relations between ever...

In the midst of the current global turn to the right, striking resonances across oceans emerge: strongmen and their allies point to specific and vivid tales or images signaling demographic shifts as signs of danger. These could be lesbian farmers (supposedly) staging a takeover of the US Midwest, tales of virtuous headscarf-wearing women under atta...

This paper explores the affective making of geopolitics through an analysis of how long-term residents of Turkey narrate their encounters with displaced people from Syria. Situating these narratives in relation to Turkey’s policies and practices concerning the Syrian war and Syrian refugees, our project asks: What are the affective dimensions of en...

In this paper, we approach religion and spirituality through the analytic lens of the everyday and examine how ordinary women make sacred space through their embodied, emotional, and spatially varying practices. Our research is grounded in Czechia where about 80% of inhabitants do not declare any religious affiliation and ‘new’ religions are on the...

Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude of ‘others’: immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, Native Americans, transgender people. The defensively aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national...

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established c...

Keywords: territory;bodies;borders;feminist geopolitics;nation;state This special section builds on recent scholarship on territory and borders to call for attention to the ways that bodies are central in their constitution. Through a wide range of case studies from the delivery room to Tahrir Square, the six contributors find territory and borders...

The term post-Islamism has been broadly applied to suggest that we are witnessing a new phase of Islamist politics in which the goal is not to make the state Islamic but to change the lived experiences of Islam. Whether post-Islamism applies to the Turkish case has been a matter of much debate. We approach post-Islamism in Turkey using a feminist g...

The concept of post-secularism has come to signify a renewed attention to the role of religion within secular, democratic public spheres. Central to the project of post-secularism is the integration of religious ways of being within a public arena shared by others who may practice different faiths, practice the same faith differently, or be non-rel...

Most of the research on Islam and on Muslims, within geographies of religion, focuses on Muslims in diaspora. A trend in geographic research on non-Western places has emerged, however, illuminating the global variance of Muslim communities and identities. Yet in spite of scholarly efforts to draw attention to the development of research in these ‘o...

In psychoanalytically inflected scholarship, the veil is often understood to remove women from the field of the gaze. Our analysis offers a different understanding of the interplay between the veil, the gaze, and the subject by showing that the veil in fact is visible and that this visibility and its governance are part of the formation of pious, d...

The question of the veil and what it conceals has long been a trope within orientalist discourses. In our research with veiled women in Turkey, we find that the veil continues to work as an ambivalent signifier through which women position themselves within both Islamic and secular modernity in Turkey. We find that women who cover in a controversia...

Introducing innovative new research from international scholars working on Islamic fashion and its critics, Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion provides a global perspective on muslim dress practices. The book takes a broad geographic sweep, bringing together the sartorial experiences of Muslims in locations as diverse as Paris, the Canadian Prairie,...

Veiling-fashion, with its array of brands and ever-changing styles, has been on the rise in Turkey in the past decade. Although the producers of these styles present them as the perfect melding of fashion and piety, our analysis of focus groups with consumers in Istanbul and Konya in 2009 shows that veiling-fashion is, in practice, rife with ambiva...

The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situat...

:Since the 1980s, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettür, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styles in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provide...

This special issue of JMEWS examines the intersection of consumer capitalism, women, and the Islamic culture industry. While capitalist forms of economic development have long been part of Muslim societies in various (and often contested) forms (Gran 1979), in the last decade there has been a marked change in both the substance and the scale of the...

Since the 19805, fashionable Islamic dress for women, or tesettur, has become a growing segment of the textile industry in Turkey, yet its meaning and practice remain hotly contested. Through an analysis of the representation of these styes in company catalogs and of the ways in which covered women in Turkey view the styles, this article provides i...

What makes a commodity ‘Islamic’? By focusing on the question of ‘Islamic-ness’ as it traverses both material and symbolic production, this paper aims to contribute to recent research in geography on the lives of commodities. Our study demonstrates the instability of Islamic-ness in the veiling-fashion industry in Turkey and draws out the implicati...

Recent calls for new geographies of religion draw attention to how religion shapes the formation of subjectivity. Focusing on pious Muslim women's new veiling practices in Istanbul, I chart possible geographical analyses not only of religion but also of secularism as the two phenomena intersect and compete with one another in complex and often cont...

The rise of the transnational veiling-fashion industry in Turkey has taken place within the context of neoliberal economic restructuring, the subjection of the veil to new regulations, and the resurgence of Islamic identities worldwide. Even after almost two decades since its first catwalk appearance, the idea of ‘veiling-fashion’ continues to be c...

Abstract In this article we examine recent heated debates about the acceptability of the veil in public institutions in Turkey and France. France's adoption of a law that banned all conspicuous religious and political symbols from public schools was a focal point in these debates. A restraining attitude towards veiling is even more extensive in Tur...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 2003 This dissertation examines the matrix of relationships between modernity, identity and space in Muslim urban settings from a comparative perspective. The sites of this research are Istanbul and Jakarta---two cities that demonstrate important similarities in terms of the relationships between globaliza...