Aesthetic Citizenship in Istanbul: on manufacturing beauty and negotiating belonging through the body in urban Turkey

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article discusses the relationship between affective body politics and gendered norms of urban belonging in Istanbul, Turkey. As I will show, there are specific bodily imaginations and affective desires that tie a classed and racialized appearance to imaginations of modernity, femininity and urban belonging. In Turkey’s largest city, Istanbul, bodily self-fashioning is about expressing and sometimes producing spatial and social difference and distinction. Drawing on Engin Isin’s conceptualization of the everyday ‘acts’ through which subjects constitute themselves as citizens, I propose the notion of ‘aesthetic citizenship’ to highlight the crucial role of beautification and adherence to gender norms for those constructed as female in a competitive urban environment. Gendered, classed and racialized bodies, I argue, are constituted and classified through a ‘visual economy of recognition’ that turns them into tokens of urban belonging or a visceral sense of extraneousness.