Feeling Labor-Korkman

FEELING LABOR: Commercial Divination and Commodified Intimacy in Turkey
Author(s): ZEYNEP KURTULUS KORKMAN

Source: Gender and Society, Vol. 29, No. 2 (April 2015), pp. 195-218
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FEELING LABOR:
Commercial Divination and Commodif

Intimacy in Turkey
ZEYNEP KURTULUS KORKMAN

University of Arizona , USA
This article approaches commercial divination as a lens to examine the gendered c

tents and discontents of labor and intimacy in the neoliberal era. While coffee div
tions have long been a feminized medium of socializing and caring in Turkey, they w
recently transformed into a commodifled service that recruits women, youth
LGBTQ individuals as workers and consumers. In dialogue with scholarship on e
tional and affective labors, I conceptualize divination as 'feeling labor" that produ
an affective intersubjective space for the incitement, experience, and articulation
emotions . The feeling labors of divination create commodifled intimacies thro
which women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals explore their feelings. However, t
intimacies are produced at the expense of devalued labors of those who are femin
along the heteropatriarchal hierarchies of gender, age, and sexual orientatio
Attending to the gendered production and consumption of feeling labors and the i
macies they create are central to understanding the relationships between gender
labor in postindustrial capitalism.
Keywords: affective labor; commodifled intimacy; divination; emotional labor; Turk
AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to Salih Can Aciksoz, Patricia MacCorquodale, H

Ozsoy, and Ruken Sengul for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. I since
thank Gul Ozyegin and Kathleen Jenkins for providing an opportunity to share and of
ing valuable feedback on an earlier version of this work at the College of William
Mary in 2013. I am also thankful to Umut Yildirim for the invitation to present this w
at the Sociocultural Anthropology Meeting, 2014, and to Kathleen Weston for her c
mentary. Special thanks to the editor, Joya Misra, and the anonymous reviewers for
helpful suggestions. Correspondence concerning this article should be addresse
Zeynep K. Korkman, University of Arizona, 925 N. Tyndall Avenue, Room 109D, Tu
AZ 85721, USA ; e-mail: korkman@email.arizona.edu.
GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 29 No. 2, April 2015 1 95-2 1 8

DOI: 10.1177/0891243214566269
© 2015 by The Author(s)
196 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2015
A middle-aged manicured
manicured hands,anxiously
hands, stares woman, atstares withceramic
the tiny anxiously blond-highlighted
coffee cup she at the tiny ceramic brown hair coffee and cup well- she
has just emptied and inverted onto the saucer. She is sitting alone at a café,
impatiently tapping her fingers on the wooden table. She touches the top
of the closed cup now and then to see if it has cooled off and the coffee
grounds, leftovers from a ground-rich cup of Turkish coffee, might be
safely assumed to have dried, making them ready for a reading. Soon, a
woman walks over to her table, sits across from her, and introduces her-
self. The two women look quite alike except that the newcomer looks
slightly older, less styled, and more tired. The reader reaches over the
table towards the cup and opens it to reveal its contents. Studiously exam-
ining the coffee grounds, she declares, "You are over-stressed," throwing
a quick look of concern toward the woman sitting across from her. "You
care about others a lot and tend to lose yourself in others' worries." The
client's eyes enlarge with attention, fixed on the reader to catch every
word she utters, listening intently and nodding occasionally. After 15 min-
utes of predictions and comments about the client's mood, character,
spouse, children, health, and finances, the reader decides that she has
exhausted the meanings to be deciphered from the coffee grounds and sets
the cup aside. She seems tired, yet she is still trying to remain responsive
to her client, who is now relaxed and chatty, eager to discuss the private
details of her life with the cup reader who just minutes ago was a complete
stranger but is now an intimate confidant (field notes, Istanbul, Turkey,
2007).
Every day, thousands of these scenes take place in the divination busi-
nesses that have proliferated in the last decade in Turkey, where women,
youth, and LGBTQ individuals gather around coffee cups for fortunetell-
ing sessions. What makes these social interactions novel and significant is
that people gathering around coffee cups do not simply provide and con-
sume an ordinary commodified service or share a mundane moment of
intimacy; they partake in the provision of an emergent type of labor that
renders them intimate strangers. As such, these scenes provide a precious
window into our changing social universe in which the personal and the
emotional are increasingly commodified (Hochschild 2012) and work and
intimacy are redefined (Bernstein 2007), often through the recruitment of
women as devalued laborers (Boris and Parrenas 2010; Ehrenreich and
Hochschild 2002). This article approaches commercial divination as a
lens to examine the gendered contents and discontents of feeling labors
and commodified intimacies that increasingly characterize feminized
work under neoliberal capitalism.
Korkman / FEELING LABOR 197
My work refines our understanding of labor and intimacy with its f

on a previously ignored feminized niche of service work, namely di
tion, in the understudied context of contemporary urban Turkey. W
expanding the scope of feminist knowledge into new occupationa
geographical realms through original ethnographic data, I engage wi
and contribute to the growing literatures on emotional and affective l
(Hardt 1999; Hochschild 1983; Negri 1999) and commodified intim
(Bernstein 2007; Boris and Parrenas 2010; Constable 2009; Hochsc
2003, 2012; Zelizer 2005). I conceptualize divination as feeling labor t
produces an affective intersubjective space for the incitement, experi
and articulation of emotions. I argue that feeling labors of commerc
divination produce commodified intimacies through which women, yo
and LGBTQ individuals explore their feelings. I conclude that these g
dered intimacies are produced through the recruitment of the deval
labors of those who are disempowered along heteropatriarchal hierarc
of gender, age, and sexual orientation. More broadly, I demonstrate
the commodification of feminized and unrecognized forms of fe
labor forges novel gendered and sexualized intimacies under late cap
ism. I also show that attending to the gendered production and consu
tion of feeling labors reveals their contradictory implications for
empowerment of gender and sexual minorities.
THEORIZING EMOTIONAL/AFFECTIVE LABOR

AND INTIMACY
Feeling Labor
Recognizing and theorizing divination as work is challenging, as
common sense and social scientific understandings of work preven
from acknowledging the labor involved in divination. The take
granted demeaning of fortunetellers as charlatans and their cli
dupes reflects an underlying assumption that divination labor doe
produce value. Our theoretical tools for studying labor, traditionall
eled on male and artisanal or industrial forms of work, also rende
effort involved in divination invisible. However, the increasing fem
tion of the labor force and the growing centrality of services, comm
tions, and information sectors are challenging our understand
work, inspiring concepts like emotional and affective labors to accou
the emergent forms of work that characterize the postindustrial
economy.
While divination requires effort at various levels, including physical,

intellectual, communicational, aesthetic, and artistic, the dominant mode
of labor is affective/emotional. Here, the emotional dimension refers to
the socially constructed processes of identifying, managing, and display-
ing emotions, while the affective dimension refers to the unstructured,
precognitive, and embodied intensities underlying emotional experience
itself (Massumi 2002). While the former dimension is examined by a now
well-established emotional labor literature and the latter is only recently
and cursorily addressed by an emergent literature on affective labor,
understanding divination requires a holistic approach that neither focuses
on one dimension at the expense of the other nor collapses these analyti-
cally distinct levels together, but takes into account both emotional and
affective dimensions in their specificity and in relation to each other. To
this purpose, I coin the term "feeling labor" to refer to labor that produces
an affectively intense intersubjective space in which the recipient is
incited to engage with various emotions. This conceptualization allows
me to account for both the incitement, identification, and expression of
cognitively articulated, culturally meaningful emotions as well as the
underlying affective intensities in all their amorphousness, fluidity, and
contagiousness. Grounded in my research on divination but relevant to
other contexts of production and consumption in service, information, and
communications sectors and to various forms of (commodified or non-
market) emotional/affective labor, the concept of feeling labor synthesizes
the insights of emotional and affective labor scholarships.1
I inherit Hochschild's (1983) foundational concern about the gendering
of emotional labor and the gendered inequalities characterizing capitalist
commodification of emotional capacities and experiences. This article
contributes to the burgeoning field of qualitative studies that explore the
contours and consequences of emotional labor (reviewed by Lively 2006;
Steinberg and Figart 1999; Wharton 2009) in different occupations,
including flight attendants (Hochschild 1983), waitresses (Hall 1993;
Paules 1991), paralegals (Lively 2000; Pierce 1999), sex workers (Chapkis
1996), fast food cashiers, and bill collectors (Leidner 1999). I join these
studies in their conclusion that gender is an essential category of analysis
in studying emotional labor and in their commitment to demonstrating
how emotional labor processes are gendered (Bellas 1999; Hall 1993;
Hochschild 1983; Kang 2003; Lively 2000; Paules 1991; Pierce 1999).
Nevertheless, I find limits to the definition of emotional labor as manag-
ing the mood of the customer through the display of (feigned or success-
fully self-induced) emotions by the worker, as originally suggested by
Hochschild (1983) and widely adopted in the field. Particularly co

ing are the underlying assumptions about the individual, which ar
on a binary of alienated/authentic selves, and blunt the concept's a
cal and critical edge (Brook 2009; Weeks 2007). Divination labors i
but are neither limited to nor centered on the worker's managem
emotional displays in order to create particular emotional states
tomers. They rather depend on interpersonal processes of affective
ment that foster emotional incitement and identification and blur
boundaries between self and other and managed and spontaneous f
The concept of feeling labor is informed by scholarship on imm
particularly affective, labor that strives for a holistic analysis of la
is reconfigured in postindustrial capitalism (Hardt and Negr
Lazzaratto 1996). My work contributes to nascent affective labor
that highlight the capitalist production and channeling of flows o
that connect disparate bodies and individuals and create spaces
flourishing of subjectivities and social relations (Ducey 2007; Hard
2007; Negri 1999; Wissinger 2007). Informed by this scholarship,
to abandon atomistic individualist and instrumentalist undertones that
might accompany the concept of emotional labor in favor of an awareness
of the pre-individuai, pre-cognitive, and deeply social processes of affec-
tive labor. Feeling labor highlights the creation of a decisively interper-
sonal affective space for emotional experience and articulation through
attunement. I choose the term "feeling labor" over "affective labor" in
order to preserve my attention to the culturally meaningful processes of
social construction of emotions attended to by the emotional labor litera-
ture, alongside nonrepresentational affective processes addressed by the
affective labor literature. I also choose feeling labor over affective labor
in order to retain the emphasis placed on gendered inequalities by emo-
tional labor literature, which inherits a rich genealogy of feminist thinking
on reproductive and caring labors that is not adequately engaged by theo-
rists of affective labor (Shultz 2006).
Commodified Intimacy
Commercial divination is an intimate business; it creates an intimate if
transient relationship between the reader and the client. While intimacy
and economic transactions have never been exclusive of each other
(Zelizer 2005), we undeniably live in times of unprecedented commodifi-
cation of intimacy (Hochschild 2012; Illouz 2007). Scholars explore the
co-constitution of intimacy and commodification (see Constable 2009 for
200 GENDER & SOCIETY /April 2015
a review) by examining intensified boundary-setting efforts in domains

where intimate relations are enmeshed with economic ones (Hochschild
2012; Zelizer 2005) and by inquiring into the specificity of contemporary
commodified intimacies (Bernstein 2007; Illouz 2007). Following the lat-
ter line of inquiry, I argue that emergent intimacies of commercial divina-
tion create new relations of anonymity and authenticity that are relatively
free from some of the constraints imposed by patriarchal inequalities.
I approach the intimacies of commercial divination as the creation of
potentially empowering sociabilities that emerge dialectically from the
commodification of feeling labors. Here I am informed by and contribute
to affective labor scholarship in its emphasis on the empowering poten-
tials of the relationalities constituted through affective labor (Hardt 1999;
Weeks 2007). These potentials are also echoed in caring and emotional
labor scholarships, with calls to highlight those labors that fall outside
hegemonic models of family and gender by examining how sexually and
racially marginalized communities care for their members in alternative
ways (Barker and Feiner 2009). Examples include assisting minority fam-
ily members in survival, passing, and resistance (Devault 1999) and offer-
ing gender-nonconforming friends and partners recognition of their
gender identities (Ward 2010). Inspired by these, I highlight the empower-
ing potentials of the commodified intimacies of divination for the margin-
alized populations they serve. While doing so, I also keep in perspective
the nonreciprocal and exploitative nature of commodified intimacies for
the workers.
GENDERED LABOR OF DIVINATION IN TURKEY
Divination from coffee grounds has long been part of women's

in Turkey. In a society where women socialize mainly with each
gender-segregated, domestic gatherings and where properly h
guest includes serving Turkish coffee, women regularly socialize
coffee cups. Coffee divinations are an ordinary part of women's
ity and serve to build and maintain homosocial relations. Th
women an occult language to share the intimate pleasures and
femininity, providing women with an opportunity of strategizi
solidarity. They belong squarely to feminine domesticity and ar
typed as an epithet of normative femininity.
Coffee divination is an everyday way of relating to and car
someone. Cup readers, whether amateurs or workers, describe d
as a way of "spending good time with" as well as "relaxing," "comfort

ing," "motivating," "improving the morale," "raising the spirits,"
"pleasing the heart" of someone. Similar to other forms of care labor, fr
more elementary ones like attentive listening to more elaborate a
scripted ones like singing lullabies, divination serves psychological nee
and improves the general well-being of others. While women occasional
read their male relatives' or acquaintances' fortunes, divination is pre-
dominantly performed by women in the service of women. This femini
feeling labor is socially constructed as an unskilled and unproduct
activity that is devalued as empty entertainment at best and criminal ch
latanry at worst.
While coffee divinations have sporadically served as an income-gene
ating activity, only over the last decade have they been transformed in
commodified service offered in public businesses called fortunetelling
cafés. Commodification pushed divination from the privacy of femin
domesticity to the publicness of the market economy. This move tran
formed a relation of socializing and caring into a capitalist relation
laboring and consuming. At the same time, commodification created a
opportunity to craft a livelihood from reading cups amid limited empl
ment chances, constraining gender norms, and a legal ban on commerci
divination.
Commercial divination is a feminized employment niche in whi
those feminized along hierarchies of age, gender, and sexuality in a het
opatriarchal society gain access to paid work. While the majority of f
tunetellers consist of poor and lower-middle-class, straight, cisgen
women, divination work also draws some young heterosexual men as we
as men and women who are marginalized on the basis of sexual orient
tion and gender identity, such as gay men and transsexual women, into
ranks. There are some divination workers with very little to no form
education and/or job experience as well as some with university diplo
or postgraduate degrees, but high school graduates constitute the major
Most have previous employment experiences and some have entrep
neurship histories. Compared to women, both straight and gay men w
work as café fortunetellers are not only a rare sight, they are also younger
better educated, more likely to be single, and less likely to depend on th
café income to support themselves or their families. For transsex
women, divination provides one of the very few relatively accessi
employment venues.
Although the commodification of feeling labors allows feminiz
groups to participate in the labor market, the same process globa
channels them into jobs that offer little income, security, or status and are
devalued and stigmatized (Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2002). Commercial
divination is no exception; it is characterized by low and irregular
incomes, flexible and long hours, a lack of job security or benefits, low
status, and high stigma. In the case of fortunetellers in Turkey, secularist
politics criminalizing fortunetellers interact with and intensify their gen-
dered devaluation and stigmatization.
Fortunetellers were criminalized in early twentieth-century Turkey as
part of an ambitious secularization project that outlawed various religious
and spiritual practitioners deemed traditional and superstitious (Korkman
2011). While often thought of as incompatible with Sunni Islamic ortho-
doxy, divination was widely practiced in courtly as well as popular circles
in the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish republic's predecessor (Ayduz 2006;
Fleischer 2010). Imperial diviners ranged from highly educated male
astrologers who were elite officials of the empire to poor women who read
beans at street corners or their clients' homes (Kafadar 1993). In an effort
to break with the Ottoman past, perceived as backward, in the name of
secularist modernization, the modern Turkish state criminalized fortune-
tellers, some of whom then diffused into an underground economy. This
history, particularly that of the informal and feminized sectors, remains to
be written. Today, divination remains a criminal offense punishable by up
to 15 years in prison while in practice persecutions are rare and often
target explicitly Islamic and male diviners. Criminal status and occasional
persecution notwithstanding, contemporary fortunetelling businesses
enjoy widespread tolerance thanks to their focus on coffee cup readings,
a seemingly non-Islamic and feminized genre of divination (Korkman
2011, 2014). In this context, even though fortunetellers' criminal status
rarely puts contemporary cup readers in legal trouble, it ensures that their
work remains informal, underground, stigmatized, and devalued, similar
to other contexts of disenfranchisement of women who perform reproduc-
tive labor (Glenn 2010).
The larger constraints of gendered labor in Turkey make commercial
divination a reasonable employment choice despite its informal and
criminalized status. Only less than a third of the working-age female
population are currently holding or actively seeking employment in
Turkey (TurkStat 2013). More than one third of these are employed in the
informal sector (Toksoz 2007). For poorly educated, married, urban
women, employment remains largely limited to the informal sector (Cinar
1994; Dedeoglu 2010; White 2004). Women earn approximately half of
what men earn (Kasnakoglu and Dayioglu 1997). Social policies based on
the ideal of a male breadwinner family, such as inadequate child care pro-
visions, are further entrenched through the neoliberal privatization of care
and dismantling of social security, rendering women dependent on male
family members for social security and contributing to their exclusion from
the labor force (Bugra and Yakut-Cakar 2010). In this context, the precari-
ousness of divination work does not present itself as extraordinary.
The proliferation of commercial divination reflects the increasing com-
modification of feminized labors, particularly in the informal service sec-
tor, under neoliberalism. Women's labor has been increasingly
commodified during the recent decades of neoliberalization of the Turkish
economy, despite the fact that Turkey's female labor force participation
rate has historically been and remains low.2 The decline in women's agri-
cultural employment as unpaid family laborers has resulted in an increased
ratio of wage labor among working women, aided by slowly increasing
urban female labor force participation rates (Dayioglu and Kirdar 2010).
This (relatively weak) feminization of the labor force is mainly triggered
by the growth of the service industry (Ilkkaracan 2012). Additionally,
periodic economic crises brought by economic liberalization push women
into paid work, especially in cases where husbands become unemployed
(Baslevent and Onaran 2003).
For young and LGBTQ individuals, unemployment and discrimination
heavily constrain work options. Unofficial unemployment rates, which
include marginally attached, discouraged, and underemployed workers,
are 23 and 26 percent for women and youth, respectively (DISK-AR
2013). Given the absence of legal protections against sexual orientation
discrimination, workplace discrimination is rampant for lesbian, gay, and
bisexual individuals (Ozturk 201 1). Exclusion from work opportunities is
part of the blatant discrimination and violence occurring against trans-
sexual women whose employment is pigeonholed into sex work (Selek
2011; Zengin 2011). In such a milieu, divination provides a reasonable
opportunity of paid work for urban poor women, unemployed youth, and
marginalized LGBTQ individuals.
METHODS
This article is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in

Turkey, between 2005 and 2007. During this time, I followed co
as they circulated among friends, relatives, neighbors, and, incre
strangers, in the privacy of homes as well as in public businesses
to amateurs and professionals who read fortunes and listened to those who
had their fortune read. I attended women's informal house gatherings as
well as fortunetelling parties at homes. I visited the houses and offices of
underground fortunetellers. I spent time at fortunetelling cafés, observing
and talking to fortunetellers, their employers, and their clients. I observed
hundreds of fortunetelling sessions and participated in dozens.
In addition to informal conversations, I conducted 20 semistructured
in-depth interviews with café fortunetellers. The first part of the interview
focused on the respondent's life history, starting with a description of their
natal family and continuing with questions concerning life-cycle mile-
stones like school, work, marriage, and childbirth. This focus on private
life gave the informants confidence to speak about their ordinary and
personal experiences early on in the interview and provided an opportu-
nity to develop trust. In most cases, life history narratives naturally gave
way to an account of early fortunetelling experiences. The second part of
the interview questions inquired about various dimensions of divination.
While my identity as a woman and native of Turkey helped me gain
access, the criminalized and informal status of commercial divination
rendered recording interviews challenging and representative sampling
impossible. Given the lack of a roster of divination workers or businesses
and the idiosyncrasies of building rapport under the shadow of a criminal-
izing law, I initially sampled on the basis of convenience and later
deployed purposeful sampling to increase diversity. I reviewed my field
notes and self-transcribed interviews in order to identify salient themes. I
organized the data thematically around emerging topics informed by my
theoretical concerns. The following discussion provides an analysis of
two major themes concerning labor and intimacy in divination. In order to
protect my informants' confidentiality, I use pseudonyms and withhold or
change potentially identifying information.
FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
Feeling Labors of Divination

Divination workers repeatedly describe their labor process as a l
feeling. The most common description offered by fortunetellers t
how they read fortunes - in other words, how they see what they see
cup and why they say what they say - is "I feel." The feeling labor
nation consists of a particular modality of feeling (with) the client. Cr
and maintaining an affectively charged space is an accomplishme
requires the deployment of the skilled labor of the fortuneteller, who aff
tively attunes to the client and vocalizes that tune in the genre of cof
divination. If successful, the clients hear the sound playing as uniqu
theirs and join in.
The feeling labor of divination facilitates the production, experien
and expression of emotions through an affectively intense ritualized in
action. Feeling labor includes, but is qualitatively different from, em
tional labor that "requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order
sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of min
others" (Hochschild 1983, 6-7). Feeling labor affects the mood of oth
through the creation of an enchanted intersubjective space in which
client can explore, experience, and engage with various emotions with
guidance of the worker. Feeling labor certainly depends on, but is n
reducible to, affective labor that is characterized by "the creation an
manipulation of affects" (Hardt 1999, 96). The feeling labor of divin
is based on the mobilization of affective capacities and flows in orde
animate an occult language of emotions that fosters the articulation
desires, aversions, longings, and apprehensions.
Feeling labor is directed, first of all, toward the creation and mai
nance of an affectively intense atmosphere that affects and moves t
client strongly and deeply, irrespective of the particular emotional ac
into which this affectivity might be translated. Before everything else, th
client needs to get into an excitedly/anxiously expectant mood, read
be affected. Summoning such affective intensity takes a charismatic
ence and an impressive opening of the session on the part of the rea
and, of course, a customer whose attention is focused on the reader, w
is literate in the genre, and who is "open," in the lingo of divination,
read/affected. The reader further incites agitated anticipation on the
of the client through suspense and surprise, increasing the capacitie
both the reader and the client to affect and to be affected. The reader's
initial scanning of the coffee residues at the bottom of the cup, gaze qui-
etly focused on a seemingly random shape identified in the residues,
unexpected comment, unusual phrasing - all feed the attention and
engagement of the client. The focused look, nervous tapping, nodding,
abrupt exclamation, quick question of the client - all feed the reader. The
client and the reader are continuously aligned and realigned as they feel
each other, producing and sustaining an affectively intense atmosphere
throughout the session.
The reader and the client develop the capacities to summon, experi-
ence, and articulate emotions in the representational realm offered by the
cup reading genre only out of an amorphous intensity of flows of affect

animating the intersubjective space of divination. It is in this enchanted
space that the boundaries between self and other, and spontaneous and
manufactured feelings are blurred as the reader and the client feel
(through) each other. Readers probe the client by offering partial and
vague cues and prompts, describing a tall man to be met, offering a few
letters of a name to be guessed by the client, depicting an ailing body part,
or suggesting travel to a remote destination, all of which incite the client
to feel. Clients provide feedback to the reader to the extent that they are
(dis)affected by the interaction, guiding the reader to follow a particularly
moving subject or to pursue other avenues that might provoke more
engagement. Through this affective circuit, the reader and the client feel
each other, feeding the intersubjective space in which affects circulate
interpersonally before they dissolve or gain traction to be individuated and
articulated. This affective intersubjectivity of feeling labor renders the
boundaries of the individual as an independent, already formed, and con-
tained interiority, and the boundaries between impromptu and manufac-
tured feelings obsolete.
The coffee divination genre offers a template through which fortune-
tellers can voice (their clients' potential) emotions, allowing the recipients
to engage with a shadowy sketch of their most intimate selves at a safe
distance. Coffee divination starts with the recipient drinking a cup of
ground-rich Turkish coffee. Consuming the coffee creates a magical and
personalized connection between the drinker and the coffee grounds,
which can then be read as a reflection of the drinker's fortune.
Prognostications usually start by sketching the client as a stick figure w
a few basic lines (like marital and employment status) and continue by
adding a few contours (like a personality trait and a dominant mo
descriptor). This initial personalization allows clients to enter the cup,
to speak, and identify as the (hypothetical) person being described by t
reader.
The main body of divination sessions consists of descriptions of pas
and present scenarios that address the client's previous and existing ci
cumstances, and future scenarios that reflect possibilities, narrated in a
emotional style befitting the situation being described, ranging from la
entation to celebration. Cup readers encourage their clients to subjectiv
embody the narrated desires and fears, hopes and regrets, and expectatio
and frustrations by inviting them to situate themselves in these scenar
and experience the emotions that arise from imagining oneself as the ve
subject of the situations being described. Consumers' affective openne
and capacity for identifying with the emotions articulated by the rea
are essential to the successful delivery of the commercial service of d
nation. As a highly personalized service that materializes only in
interactional moment of its provision, divination demands that clien
participate in the production of the service by consuming the readin
moving, personally relevant, and meaningful. To ensure this, clients m
and often do verbally communicate with the fortuneteller before, dur
and after the session. Nevertheless, in order to perform as an engag
recipient, it is sufficient that clients turn inward and approach their
mate lives through the lenses the reader provides.
Workers' and clients' spontaneous and ongoing feeling and feeding
the affective interpersonal space of divination is essential to feeling l
This is because, unlike emotional labor directed toward setting the c
tomers in the right mood of contentment during their consumption
particular service, feeling labor is not limited to creating and maintai
a particular mood. On the contrary, fortunetellers aim and are expecte
move their clients, both in the sense of making them feel something
in the sense of moving them across the emotional spectrum. Rea
strive to open clients to experience a range of affective intensities a
emotional states, to move them, for example, from peaceful tranquilit
agitated anticipation and from cautious hope to overwhelming worry.
The range of feeling offered by divination is pressured to shrink, and t
rebound, by the contradictory influences of commodifícation. On the
hand, following the imperatives of service industry, readings are incr
ingly valued for their capacity to produce what is generically called "
tomer satisfaction." As the literature on emotional labor attests, the l
of commodified service provision usually prioritizes the production
positive emotional state in the client. Commercial fortunetellers
keenly aware of this. Semra, a married woman with two adult childr
puts it candidly, if rather disenchantedly: "You come and sit down,
hear pleasing things, and you leave. Predictions may or may not turn
to be true. But at that moment, you feel happy." Indeed, many fortun
ers recalibrate their performances on their way from amateur or und
ground commercial contexts to fortunetelling cafés. They balance "t
bad news with the good," self-censor to "never speak of death,"
monitor clients in order "not to devastate an already depressed person
confident cup reader bluntly declares, "I certainly relax people. But th
all about me. I can speak in such a way that the client gets anxious. Th
spirits would not be raised if I told them that their past was horrible, the
present sucks, and their future will only get worse!" This reader is
partially justified in his confidence, since the range of affective and emo-
tional experiences offered in commercial divination is influenced not only
by the abstract principles of the market but also by café managers who
seek to limit intense and negative feelings. While employee training is
nonexistent and managerial oversight and intervention is very limited in
fortunetelling cafés, employers still exercise some control over the labor
process through selective hiring and firing to exclude readers who are
deemed "too intense" or "too negative."3 Other mechanisms for manage-
rial control include "job interviews," which includes a sample divination
session, and customer feedback.
On the other hand, divination clients expect a reasonable range of
affective and emotional experiences triggered by a variety of both posi-
tively and negatively charged predictions. For this reason, the very meas-
ures taken to ensure customer satisfaction may breed discontent and even
threaten to disqualify the service itself. A single woman in her early twen-
ties, whom I had accompanied to a fortunetelling café, returned to our
table after her session with a young male reader with an annoyed expres-
sion on her face and quickly advised her friend who was waiting her turn
with a closed cup not to waste her money. "It was no fortunetelling," she
declared with contempt, "just pleasantries and advice." She was not alone
in her disappointment, as I heard such complaints regularly. A divination
session might be judged dissatisfactory and even declassified as a proper
divination service if it is deemed too tame, flat, instrumentally oriented
toward pleasing the consumer, and exclusively oriented toward creating
pleasant feelings. In other words, the standardizing and sanitizing influ-
ences of commodification that exert pressure on the spontaneity and
diversity offered by divination along the affective/emotional spectrum
threaten to destroy the service itself.
These contradictory forces situate readers in a delicate position from
which they work meticulously to read, respond to, and successfully affect
their clients in order to ensure that while the clients are affectively moved
and incited to engage with a variety of emotions, including sadness, anxi-
ety, and fear, they remain safely anchored to the fortuneteller so that they
can be led to emotional security and an uplifted mood by the end of the
session. Esra, an articulate single woman in her late thirties, eloquently
expresses this fragile balance: "It is like opening a wound, and you better
not open it unless you know how to heal it. . . . One of my clients told me
the most beautiful thing. She told me, 'Esra, you make me walk naked in
the snow and not get cold.'" The most adept fortunetellers are the ones
who can walk their clients through worry, despair, hope, and faith, and
leave them deeply affected but safely unscathed. Nevertheless, adept

not, all commercial fortunetellers face the contradictory pressures of c
modification and must negotiate the range of affective and emoti
experiences they survey in relation to their personal and professio
skills and preferences, and the expectations of their clients and employ
Commodified Intimacies of Divination
The feeling labors of divination create and function through an inti-

macy between the reader and the recipient whose intimate life is the very
subject of divination. Divination depends on psychic and informational
intimacy, on the revelation of personal realms that are not accessible to
third parties. Put simply, divination deals in the currency of privacy. The
main concern of divination sessions is personal life. People do not get cup
readings to hear about the results of coming elections or the best stocks to
invest in. They get cup readings to hear about prospective suitors, unfaith-
ful spouses, controlling parents, and misbehaving children, about the
scheming enemies as well as the faithful supporters found among one's
relatives and friends, about lost jobs and failed family businesses as well
as the signs of new prospects, about personal debts to be paid or collected,
about houses or cars to be bought or sold, about exams to be passed or
failed, about mundane as well as grave illnesses, and about those yet to be
born and die. In this parade of private troubles and joys, the shameful and
the scandalizing appear alongside the proper and the ordinary. The hidden
affair is revealed after the heralding of a respectable marriage, the secre-
tive abortion follows the coveted birth of a son. In short, cup readings are
deeply about the intimate in all its banality and obscenity.
Divination provides a culturally intelligible template for intimacy
through which the reader and the recipient can readily enter the terrain of
the personal and private through a close, if transient, interaction.
Fortunetellers working in the public space of cafés strive to create an
intimacy-inducing setting through various strategies. They accept clients
individually, usually at a table situated in a secluded corner and/or a pri-
vate room. They keep their voices down, play background music as white
noise, and explicitly assure uneasy clients of confidentiality. They intro-
duce themselves by their first names, and expect the client to do the same.
All these gestures help frame a commercial encounter as an intimate one
exclusive of third parties. But the hallmark of intimacy between the reader
and the client is the revelation of the personal and private, both during the
cup reading and the conversation that often follows.
This focus on the private and personal and the intimacy that fore-
grounds and springs from it are not new. Cup readers, whether amateurs
in houses or professionals in cafés, always deal in intimate futures. What
is new in commercial divination is the changing nature of this intimacy.
As an "intimate labor" (Boris and Parrenas 2010) caught up in global
commercialization, both the feeling labors of divination and the intima-
cies they depend on and produce are increasingly shaped by commodifica-
tion.4 Commodification removes divination from embedded social
networks to join capitalist flows of commodities and services in the mar-
ket.5 The transfer of divination from the moral economy of the domestic
sphere to the monetary economy of the public sphere transforms the
parameters of intimacy.
When circulating within the reciprocal networks of enduring social ties
among family, neighbors, and friends, divination is rooted in the already
established intimacies of kinship and community. In this context, feeling
labors of divinations are provided within a reciprocal chain of care labor
exchanges and community building practices.6 Here, divination serves as
a medium of producing, expressing, and sustaining relational intimacy as
well as negotiating the prescribed terms of intimacy accompanying a rela-
tionship. Through cup readings, younger siblings can advise their elders
without being disrespectful, concerned friends can offer criticism on a
sensitive topic without coming off as rude, nosy neighbors can speculate
on the marriage of the couple next door without sounding intrusive, and
curious mothers can inquire about their daughters' romantic lives without
explicitly questioning. Divination works on the relational boundaries set
by the conventions of intimacy in existing relationships between readers
and recipients, allowing for temporary breaches and producing deeper
intimacies.
In the context of lasting social ties, the entry that divination provides
into otherwise inaccessible terrains of intimacy might serve a range of
relational purposes. Divination can be a medium of checking on, advising,
comforting, inspiring, encouraging, celebrating, and supporting. It can
also serve as a tool of questioning, manipulating, controlling, shaming,
and sanctioning. Especially in the context of familial and communal rela-
tionships that situate the individual as a gendered member of a social
group, every revelation involves risking exposure. Being exposed under
the patriarchal gaze of the family and the neighborhood might cost free-
dom from judgment over and intervention into one's private life. Depending
on participants' social statuses and vulnerabilities, exposure might trigger
disciplining, gossip, exclusion, and even physical violence, particularly in
the context of hierarchical kinship ties, but also in the context of comm
nal pressures of the neighborhood. This is the dark side of socially embe
ded intimacies.
Commodification of divination creates the necessary conditions for the
emergence of a new regime of intimacy. Brought together at a fortunetell-
ing business under a commercial contract that reduces the interaction to
the bare exchange of a fee for a service provided in a standard period of
time in the provider's workplace, the reader and the client are strangers
conducting an economic transaction in a limited time and space, under no
obligation to develop or sustain a relationship. Displaced from the situated
networks of friendship, family, and neighborhood, the individual is liber-
ated from binding ties in the anonymity of urban public space and the
market. The move of intimate coffee divinations from the realm of femi-
nine domesticity to that of the market and the city recalibrates the relation-
ships between the public and private. It is in this new context that the
intimate form and contents of divination acquire a new character and
function.
Sanctioning intimacy as a commodified experience unbound from
social expectations and freed to circulate among strangers, commercial
divination fosters anonymous intimacies. Sengul, a divorcee in her late
thirties with a college degree who started reading cups after a full year of
desperate job seeking, explains: "People share very private issues. We are
strangers; we are not from their social circles. So there is no chance that
what they share might be heard by someone who knows them." The fleet-
ing relationships between readers and clients foster a novel type of inti-
macy valued precisely for the anonymity it affords clients. While this new
intimacy is sometimes described in the familiar vocabularies of kinship,
neighborliness, and friendship, the fact remains that readers cannot effec-
tively gossip about their clients. Anonymity neutralizes the risks that
accompany the revelation of intimate information. It is precisely this ano-
nymity that renders the commodified intimacy of divination authentic for
clients who can genuinely explore their feelings and desires only in the
absence of the looming threat of social sanctioning. In other words, the
authenticity of the intimacy in this commercial interaction is deeply struc-
tured by its anonymity and valued exactly for its "bounded authenticity"
(Bernstein 2010).
This is why women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals constitute the cli-
entele of commercial divination. Patrons of fortunetelling cafés are over-
whelmingly local women representing a diversity of socioeconomic
backgrounds, ages, and marital statuses, while male customers are a
212 GENDER & SOCIETY / Apríl 2015
minority and consist almost exclusively of single young adults, some of

whom identify as gay. Commodification strips cup readings from the dis-
ciplining heteropatriarchal gaze and democratizes this social practice,
providing a space for those whose intimate lives, particularly sexual
desires, are excluded from dominant cultural narratives and controlled
through heteropatriarchal violence. While divinations usually place the
recipient in normative scenarios prescribed by heterosexist imperatives, as
evidenced by an almost universal inclusion of predictions about marriage
and parenthood, they also regularly address the fragilities and disappoint-
ments of such gendered normativity and the diversions and escapes from
it. For instance, adult women can explore how they feel about their (intra-
or extra-)marital relations and younger men and women their premarital
relations. LGBTQ individuals sometimes find a hospitable platform for
engaging with their private lives in commercial divination as well. For
example, a female client in her early thirties was delighted to be offered
predictions about her female romantic partner when the young male for-
tuneteller who read tarot cards along with coffee residues directed her
attention to a specific card with a queen figure and inquired if it might
represent her romantic interest. Indeed, I encountered several café fortu-
netellers who devised ways to acknowledge the same-sex desires of their
clients in their prognostications, sometimes simply by taking advantage of
the fact that personal pronouns are not gendered in Turkish. Commercial
divination provides women, youth, and LGBTQ populations with a venue
to explore their personal and private troubles and joys, which are down-
played as trivial and insignificant, if not targeted as improper and intoler-
able, in mainstream public culture. Thus, the commodification of intimacy
creates potentially empowering spaces for those who are marginalized in
their families, neighborhoods, and larger communities.
On the other hand, commodification of intimacy means that readers are
obliged to care for their clients intimately without the expectation of reci-
procity that accompanies noncommercial social ties. Readers gain access
to intimate knowledge about their clients without gaining leverage over
them through that information. In order to provide anonymous intimacy
as a commercial service, the workers themselves have to retreat into a
position of "intimate anonymity" (Rodriguez 2007), rendering their feel-
ings irrelevant and invisible in the context of the unequal relations
between workers and customers. As divination moves out of the norms
and bonds of friendliness, neighborliness, and kinship to appear as a com-
mercial service in the market, the feeling labor of divination is recast as a
relationship of capitalist production and consumption. Divorced from the
expectations of emotional reciprocity and relational intimacy, fee

labors of commercial divination are not symmetrical, and workers' f
ings do not matter but are subordinated to those of their employers
customers.
This asymmetry is particularly daunting for fortunetellers who provid

a devalued, criminalized, and stigmatized service with no institutional,
occupational, or educational credentialing mechanisms, rendering eac
encounter with a new client a challenge. The low status and high stigm
attached to the occupation render workers further vulnerable to customer
who may challenge, ridicule, refuse to pay, and even threaten to sue them
Nermin, a married woman in her early fifties with two children, explain
tiredly:
There are so many people, thousands of people. Their expectations vary.

You have to respond to their expectations. There are the know-it-alls. There
are those who ask questions you cannot answer. It is actually a very hard
job. Very difficult, really very difficult. It is so hard to deal with people.
Dealing with numerous customers with individual demands and having to

satisfy them from the subordinate position of the worker is often challeng-
ing and emotionally draining. Unreciprocated feeling labors wear readers
out, requiring self-care to replenish themselves and making it harder to
provide feeling labor outside of work. For example, Nermin narrates with
sadness how she gets too weary to hear her children's or spouse's troubles
after a day of hearing everyone else's. The challenge is most pronounced
for women who are expected to provide feeling labors, under their many
guises, to friends, neighbors, and, most importantly and often asymmetri-
cally, to family members. Therefore, commodification of intimacy has
different implications for divination workers and clients, even though
both groups are recruited from the same pool of individuals oppressed in
heteropatriarchal hierarchies.
CONCLUSION
Social and economic life under late capitalism is increasingly ch

ized by commodified intimacies produced through devalued feelin
of feminized social groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwo
understudied occupational and geographical setting, this article pr
gendered analysis of the feeling labors of divination and the int
these labors instigate. Recruiting as well as catering to those
feminized and disempowered by heteropatriarchal authority, the economy

of commercial divinations generates novel forms of labor and intimacy in
postindustrial capitalism. The move of coffee divinations from the situated,
reciprocal, domestic, and in-kind exchanges among friends, neighbors, and
relatives to the disembedded, unidirectional, public, and monetary
exchanges among workers and clients creates both challenges and oppor-
tunities for the producers and consumers of feeling labors. The divination
sector provides precious employment chances for women, youth, and
LGBTQ individuals who are excluded from and discriminated against in
the labor market. However, these workers are channeled into an informal
niche where their feminized labor is devalued under conditions of precari-
ousness exacerbated by neoliberalization of the Turkish economy and
secularist criminalization by the Turkish state. Furthermore, while the
commodified intimacies of commercial divination render feeling labors
nonreciprocal among those who now gather around coffee cups as workers
and clients, anonymous circuits of disembedded intimacy catalyzed by
commodifícation provide empowering spaces for those who are marginal-
ized in their families, neighborhoods, and larger communities.
The growing significance of gendered production and consumption of
feeling labors suggests the need for further inquiry into these processes in
order to delineate their complex and contradictory implications from a
feminist perspective and to tease out emergent dynamics of the relation-
ship between labor and gender in a transnational world shaped by postin-
dustrial capitalism and neoliberalization. In this article, I contribute to this
endeavor through two main interventions. First, synthesizing and expand-
ing on the concepts of emotional and affective labors, I coin the term
"feeling labor" to explore the production and consumption of an affective
intersubjective space of emotional experience. In doing so, I seek to retain
the emotional labor scholarship's attention to gendered processes and
inequalities shaping the commodifícation of feminized labors while tran-
scending individualist and dichotomous assumptions underlying the con-
cept of emotional labor in dialogue with the literature on affective labor.
Secondly, I highlight the exploitative as well as empowering potentials of
commodified intimacies produced by feeling labors for gender and sexual
minorities. My analysis suggests that feminized feeling labors and the
commodified intimacies they generate present a complex set of gendered
constraints and possibilities, an insight relevant not only for those who
seek their gendered fortunes in coffee divinations, but also for all those
recruited to produce and consume feeling labors in their myriad forms and
contexts in a transnational world. The concept of feeling labor contributes
to the development of our scholarly and feminist capacities for feeling the
feminized, immaterial, devalued, and often unrecognized labors that are
increasingly and globally recruited through commodification for the pro-
duction of gendered and sexualized intimacies.
NOTES
1 . 1 follow Cvetkovich (2012), who prefers the term feeling over affect or em
tion precisely for its impreciseness, which allows it to simultaneously conjur
precognitive affective and culturally constructed emotional dimensions of
same phenomenon.
2. Female labor force participation actually declined during the 1990s
2000s, dropping from 34.3 percent in 1988 to 21.6 percent in 2008 (World B
2009), but has been recovering since the late 2000s and reached 30.8 percen
2013 (TurkStat 2013).
3. Employers also selectively hire and fire to avoid criminalization (Kork
2014).
4. For an insightful discussion of gendered labor and intimacy in Turkey, see
Ozyegin (2001) on "intimacy work" that domestic workers and their employers
perform to strategically mask, negotiate, or amplify the class tension intrinsic to
their intimate encounters.
5. For an extended discussion of the commodification of divination in the
context of the larger processes of commodification of culture and cultural politics
in Turkey, see Korkman (2014).
6. See Mills (2007) on the role of coffee divinations in constituting the neigh-
borhood as an intimate social space.
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FEELING LABOR: Commercial Divination and Commodified Intimacy in Turkey

Author(s): ZEYNEP KURTULUS KORKMAN

Commercial Divination and Commodif

ZEYNEP KURTULUS KORKMAN

This article approaches commercial divination as a lens to examine the gendered c

Keywords: affective labor; commodifled intimacy; divination; emotional labor; Turk

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I am grateful to Salih Can Aciksoz, Patricia MacCorquodale, H

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 29 No. 2, April 2015 1 95-2 1 8

My work refines our understanding of labor and intimacy with its f

THEORIZING EMOTIONAL/AFFECTIVE LABOR

While divination requires effort at various levels, including physical,

Hochschild (1983) and widely adopted in the field. Particularly co

a review) by examining intensified boundary-setting efforts in domains

GENDERED LABOR OF DIVINATION IN TURKEY

Divination from coffee grounds has long been part of women's

as a way of "spending good time with" as well as "relaxing," "comfort

This article is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in

FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION

Feeling Labors of Divination

cup reading genre only out of an amorphous intensity of flows of affect

leave them deeply affected but safely unscathed. Nevertheless, adept

Commodified Intimacies of Divination

The feeling labors of divination create and function through an inti-

minority and consist almost exclusively of single young adults, some of

expectations of emotional reciprocity and relational intimacy, fee

This asymmetry is particularly daunting for fortunetellers who provid

There are so many people, thousands of people. Their expectations vary.

Dealing with numerous customers with individual demands and having to

Social and economic life under late capitalism is increasingly ch

feminized and disempowered by heteropatriarchal authority, the economy

Ay duz, Salim. 2006. Osmanli devleti'nde muneccimbasilik muessesesi.

Boris, Eileen, and Rhacel Salazar Parrenas. 2010. Introduction. In Intimate

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983. The managed heart: Commercializatio

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