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Becoming fit in "Men-Free" Spaces: Islamic Segregation and Self-Making
Abstract
This research focuses on young to middle-aged Muslim women’s leisure and recreational activities and whether and how they play a role in their self-formation, with a specific focus on their agency and desires. I will explore women’s rising interest in fitness and sports in women-only sports facilities in Istanbul, Turkey, where, the number of women-only gyms and fitness centers has increased twenty-fold in the last seven years. Women, who prefer to exercise in such segregated spaces are also those who have concerns (Islamic, traditional, or else) related to their body movements in mixed spaces, which led them either to exercise in a homosocial space, or to limit those movements if they exercise in a public one. Moreover, unlike the other homosocial spaces in Islamic contexts (i.e. public baths or tea parties), the need for such spaces are not based on social networking or daily hygiene needs, but are related to global trends that trigger new forms of desires and self-making. The customers of women-only gymnasia are also those in demand of a fit, healthy and skinny look triggered by factors related to contemporary fashions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper proposes that Muslim women’s temporary patronage of women-only gyms form an experience that is “intersubjective and embodied; not individual and fixed, but redeemably social and processual” (Moore 1994:3). Both women’s fascination with fitness, exercise, re-fashioning their bodies (Buckley 1986) and Muslim women’s changing relationship with their bodies have been perceived and presented as false consciousness in the literature. This view purports that women let their bodies become objects of masculinist aesthetics from which they are not fully aware of. Instead of criticizing women’s popular interest in exercise as an object of masculinist aesthetics, I suggest looking at their interest itself as a popular means of enthusiasm, entertainment and enjoyment. I suggest that, women’s popular (or even banal) entertainment or leisure activities are worth looking at; mainly because such an emphasis will enable us to question the system that made women’s popular entertainment banal. Indeed, for women’s leisure, I believe that “its very banality calls us to understand the technologies that produce its ordinariness” (Berlant & Warner 1998:549).
Discipline
Anthropology
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
None