Exercising in Comfort

Abstract

Women’s control of their bodily movements, especially in the Islamicate contexts of the Middle East, constitutes a multilayered process of building privacy, heterosexuality, and intimacy. Physical exercise, however, with the extensive body movements it requires, problematizes women’s ability to control their public sexualities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012 in Istanbul, this article explores the everyday concerns of Istanbulite women who seek rahatlık (comfort) during exercise. The interviewees frequently used the word rahatlık when referring to women-only spaces in the culture of mahremiyet (intimacy, privacy). This article furthers the scholarship on Muslim sexualities by examining the diversity of women’s concerns regarding their public sexualities and the boundary-making dynamics in the culture of mahremiyet. I argue that mahremiyet operates as an institution of intimacy that provides a metacultural intelligibility for heteronormativity based on sexual scripts, normative spaces, and gendered acts.

Fostering intimacy on TikTok: a platform that ‘listens’ and ‘creates a safe space’

“…These studies underline that the term intimacy has diverse connotations and translations in the Turkish language (Liebelt, 2016; Sehlikoglu, 2015, 2016). It can either signify the privacy, the very intimate space of individuals, which creates boundaries, secrecies as well as insiders and outsiders – mahremiyet (Sehlikoglu, 2015, 2016) or the quality of the bond between two peoples who disclose their true, honest, and unpretentious selves to one another to generate a sense of proximity and emotional closeness, a reminiscent of a family atmosphere – samimiyet (Liebelt, 2016). The overlap between intimacy and the myth of family emerges because such domesticity is regarded as the epitome of unmediated and face-to-face interactions in a comfortable and safe environment, privacy, physical, and emotional closeness (Bora, 2013; Liebelt, 2016), and space where individuals can disclose their inner and true selves and emotions, dissimilar from the decent and courteous public selves that we are obliged to display in public spaces (Sennett, 1992).…”

Playing Gender, Religion, and Ethnicity: Girls’ Football and Public Playgrounds in the Schilderswijk, The Hague, the Netherlands

“…On the one hand, intersectionality scholarship only looks at religion and Islam in the context of the racialisation of religion, Islamophobia, and dominant Dutch discourses of Muslims as 'others' (Singh 2015). On the other hand, feminist studies of religion and gender focus largely on pious women in explicitly religious settings and fail to understand religious difference and Islam within spaces and bodies that are not always explicitly religious, such as sports, leisure, and urban public space (Sehlikoglu 2016(Sehlikoglu , 2018Samie 2013). Muslim citizens not only engage with Islamic spaces or practices in public life, but also in spaces and practices that are not explicitly or primarily religious, such as football.…”

“…And, even if they do, many religious young women and men also engage with organisations that are not explicitly religious or find themselves in secular or not explicitly religious spaces, such as fashion, work, It is thus necessary to create a new conceptual space to account for the experiences of Muslim women beyond considering them, on the one hand, as merely enmeshed in oppressive Islamophobic power structures, and, on the other hand, as primarily constituted by piety. It is important to think beyond Islam and piety as primary categories to study Muslim women's lives and as primary sources for Muslim women's agency, and to focus also on other spaces and practices in their daily lives, such as leisure and football (Sehlikoglu 2016(Sehlikoglu , 2018; see also Samie 2013). In the context of this research about girls' football, my next step is to discuss a scholarly field that takes one of these other spheres of life as starting point: studies on sports that engage with issues of gender, religion, and Islam, in specific the flourishing studies on gender and Muslim women in sports.…”

“…Although many of these authors also focus on Western countries and sports institutions and argue that they should 'open up' and accommodate Muslim women's needs, they do this by reducing Muslim women solely to their Islamic religious and cultural identity, as opposed to 'Western' sporting culture. Most sports sociologists reduce Muslim women's embodied practices and experiences in sports solely to the headscarf and to family and/or religious restraints, as also other critics have argued (Samie 2013;Ratna 2011;Sehlikoglu 2016). This stereotypical and essentialist research has 'systematically denied diverse sporting Muslim women an identity or bodily presence outside of the discursive identity of the veil' and is 'animated around a monolithic Orientalist narrative that sensationalises the veil, and asserts the oppression of Islamic thinking on gender equality and female sexuality', Samie (2013, 257) argues.…”

“…Yet, in relation to the Muslim women in her research, she still foregrounds Islamic reasons for gender-segregated swimming, and not reasons related to norms of gender and sexuality in the broader Dutch society. Postcolonial scholar Samie (2013), sports sociologist Ratna (2011), and anthropologist Sehlikoglu (2016) really move beyond a purely Islamic framework to explain Muslim women's experiences of sports and segregated sports spaces. They emphasise the fluidity and hybrid identities of Muslim and ethnic minority women in sports, and convincingly show that the embodied and gendered experiences of Muslim women in sports do not simply fit in the dichotomous idea of 'traditional' Islam versus 'modern' sports.…”