Is There a Turkish Secular Body? Race, Religion, and Embodied Politics of Secularism

While Charles Hirschkind presents an ambiguous response to the question “Is There a Secular Body?”, this study argues that, in the Turkish context, a secular body not only exists but is also conducive to racializing practices. Drawing on ethnographic insights from Istanbul’s nightlife—differing from previous research which focused on spatial differentiation and gentrification—this article examines how nightlife spaces intersect with secular subjectivity and the implications of these intersections. By broadening understandings of race and racialization in Turkish genealogy, the secular body is understood to emerge as a site of struggle where modernity and anxieties about backwardness are embodied through assemblages and temporalities that designate certain bodies as lagging behind in progress. Furthermore, this study contributes to the body of scholarship on the entanglements of race, religion, and identity in non-Western contexts, demonstrating how the secular and the race–religion constellation are co-constituted in everyday life.