Book Talk - Working Out Desire (Sertaç Sehlikoğlu) / Cultural Studies & SU Gender Speaker Series

Описание: Cultural Studies and SU Gender Speaker Series: Book Talk, titled "Working Out Desire: Women, Sport & Self-Making in Istanbul" by Sertaç Sehlikoğlu (University College London). 8 December 2021.

Working Out Desire examines spor merakı as an object of desire shared by a broad and diverse group of Istanbulite women. Sehlikoglu follows the lat­est anthropological scholarship that defines desire beyond the moment it is felt, experienced, or even yearned for, and as something that is formed through a series of social and historical makings. She traces Istanbulite women’s ever-increasing interest in exercise not merely to an interest in sport, but also to an interest in establishing a new self—one that attempts to escape from conventional feminine duties—and an investment in forming a more agentive, desiring, self.

Sertaç Sehlikoglu is a social anthropologist specialized in gender and subjectivity in the Middle East and in Islamicate contexts. Her work often focuses on intangible aspects of human subjectivity that enable humans to change and transform social life. She has studied at Istanbul's Bogazici University, Concordia University in Montreal, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge before completing a research fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge. She is currently the Primary Investigator of an ERC Starting Grant on imagination and politics as Senior Research Associate in the Institute of Global Prosperity at the University College London.