Working Out Desire: Women, Sport, and Self-Making in Istanbul by Sertaç Sehlikoğlu (review)

Abstract

Working Out Desire is an engaging and theoretically informed ethnographic account of Istanbulite women’s interest in sport and exercise (spor merakı), which has transformed these women’s lives in myriad ways. In this fascinating ethnography, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu illustrates how Istanbulite women’s ever-growing passion for physical exercise is not a “banal” fad but an “object of desire” that reveals women’s agentive aspirations to reconfigure their subjectivity beyond the confines of the domestic sphere. By participating in physical exercise, these women do not simply work out their bodies but also recalibrate their relationship to their body image, gender roles, sexuality, faith, and familial duties— “physically, emotionally, and imaginatively” (6). WorkingOutDesire is based on the ethnographic fieldwork Sehlikoğlu undertook in 2008 and 2011–12. Thanks to the interviews she conducted with nearly a hundred female gymgoers, Sehlikoğlu introduces the reader to the recreational world of women from all class positions and different walks of life: university students, career women, housewives, middle-aged “aunties,” pious women, and those who identify as “secular” or “secularist.” Sehlikoğlu also conducted participant observation in venues includingmunicipally owned public gyms catering to aworking-class clientele,women-only private gymsmostly attended by the Islamic bourgeoise, a women-only private gym modeled after the American franchise Curves and owned by a US-educated “secular” feminist, and public parks where themunicipality has installed clunky exercise equipment to encourage Istanbulites to adopt a more active life style. In chapter 1 Sehlikoğlu traces the history of Turkish women’s involvement in sports. The Kemalist early Republican (1923–50) elite presented sports as a tool to civilize the masses and cultivate a healthy nation. Women’s involvement in sports was significant for the early Republican elite’s efforts to brand Turkey as a Western nation vis-à-vis the