In Istanbul, it is a common practice to read the dregs of Turkish coffee to predict the coffee drinker’s fortune. Fortune telling and other occult practices have been illegal in Turkey since 1925, yet, despite this, there has been an increase in fortune-telling cafés throughout Istanbul over the past two decades. These fortune-telling cafés have been understudied, but they provide an important empirical window into the gender politics of Turkey, specifically the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). The few scholars who have written on fortune-telling cafés emphasize their role as feminized spaces that challenge the hegemonic heteronormative agenda. In contrast, I approach these cafés as sites whose practices align with and reinforce forms of patriarchal governance. This paper examines what societal mechanisms allow for fortune-telling cafés to remain open despite their dubious legal status. Specifically, I argue that these cafés are allowed to remain open because they continue to uphold the ruling AKP’s gender norms and support its biopolitical agenda. This paper first exams the literature on the role of gender in Turkish nationalism and more broadly on the discourse of the “politics of the intimate” as it relates to the AKP’s promulgation of patriarchal gender roles through neoconservative familialism. The theory and literature on the AKP’s biopolitics are supported through news sources and official speech transcripts that highlight President Erdogan and the AKP’s gendered agenda. Within this context, fortune-telling cafés reinforce the AKP’s gendered policies that work to create the “ideal” Turkish woman who is a “wife, mother, and homemaker,” limiting women to the domestic sphere. The AKP utilizes a historic narrative of masculine nationalism in conjunction with neoconservative familialism to constrain women’s economic opportunities, further relegating them to the home. Ethnographic interviews with Turkish community members on the practice of fortune-telling and its spaces, in addition to interviews with experts on gender in Turkey, demonstrate how the AKP’s gendered policies are reinforced through the labeling of fortune-telling cafés as femininized spaces that bolsters the notion of “female irrationality”. In contrast with the hyper-masculine nationalist narrative Erdogan capitalizes on in his rhetoric, the phenomenon of fortune-telling cafés, despite their questionable legality, emphasizes Erdogan’s dismissal of women’s issues while reinforcing the AKP’s biopolitical agenda to restrain women to the domestic sphere through economic and cultural mechanisms.