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.

There is a substantial international literature demonstrating that, contrary to the claims of neoclassical economics, household monies are not entirely fungible. Specifically, the monies earned by one partner are not usually interchangeable with those earned by their partner of the other gender. Research on this topic in Egypt has documented complex financial flows between husbands and wives. This previous work is limited, however, by its focus on low-income households alone and its reliance on wives’ accounts to the exclusion of husbands’. In the current study, I use in-depth qualitative interviews with 30 husband-wife dyads across three class groups in Cairo, Egypt, to examine the household budgeting behaviors and discursive practices of dual-earning heterosexual couples I find that symbolic boundaries are constructed to differentiate between women’s and men’s incomes, giving rise to a status hierarchy of monies. While nearly all dual-earner couples in my sample aspired to a male breadwinning ideal in which the household’s needs would be covered by men’s earnings alone, few couples were able to live up to this ideal in Egypt’s high-inflation post-floatation economic landscape. I trace three discursive practices that served to not only distinguish between men’s and women’s earnings, but more importantly, to diminish the value of women’s financial contributions to the household. First, I find that both men and women downplayed women’s monetary contributions to the household and heightened the importance of men’s earnings. Respondents across all three class groups referred to women’s income-generating activities as ‘help’ or ‘supplementary’ to the husband’s breadwinning activities, and their incomes as ‘extra’ or ‘minimal.’ Second, I find that spouses engaged in gendered misrepresentations of their financial arrangements. Men claimed ignorance regarding the exact sum of money earned by their wives. I show that this claim on the part of men is patterned by class, such that working class men are more likely to know what their wives earn because they must be more mindful of the limited means they have. Third, I find that women, but more often men, routinely claimed that God's intervention rather than women's earnings explained their ability to overcome financial crises. Men similarly claimed that God’s intercession alone allowed them to maintain households in which expenditures exceeded incomes. Together, these three practices allowed men and women to neutralize the gender deviance represented by wives’ work, and to offset the threat to husbands’ masculinity represented by women’s contributions to the household budget.

A great deal of scholarship examines why women face barriers to elected office, but very little research examines why a substantial gender gap exists in voting in elections. Women are less likely than men to vote in parliamentary elections by ten percentage points or more in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Using original data from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, this paper tests competing modernization and employment theories drawn from work by Norris and Inglehart and Ross and a novel theory related to the clientelistic context. The findings reveal that the drivers of lack of engagement in local and national elections—for women and men—lie not modernization but lack of personal connections to politicians. The findings have important implications for policymakers seeking to spur women’s political participation and reduce under-representation of women in politics.