Emotional and corporeal formations of secularism: a case study of military bases in Turkey, 1980s-2000s

Abstract

ABSTRACT From the 1980s to the end of 2000s, the Turkish military was actively involved in the construction of Islam as a threat to national security, and in doing so it securitized religious identities in the political arena and in its own ranks. In the process, Turkish military bases became infused with public tensions around religion and secularity and became sites that produced social divisions along these lines on a daily basis. This article explores the uniquely emotional and corporeal the intertwinement of secularism and security as was experienced within the mundane social interactions in the daily life of military bases through ethnographic research conducted in 2011. It focuses on the narratives of the daughters and wives of military officers whose bodies were mapped on to the opposite ends of a security paradigm based on a secular/religious dichotomy. Caught in between designations of security and risk, women’s bodily and emotional experiences reveal the spatial constructions of secularism and the inherently vague and ambiguous distinctions secularism cultivates as a function of modern power. Looking at the gendered and spatially mediated meanings of secular, religious, security and risk, this article contributes to scholarship in cultural and social geographies of secularism through an analysis of corporeal and emotional experiences.