Feeling Labor

Abstract

This article approaches commercial divination as a lens to examine the gendered contents and discontents of labor and intimacy in the neoliberal era. While coffee divinations have long been a feminized medium of socializing and caring in Turkey, they were recently transformed into a commodified service that recruits women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals as workers and consumers. In dialogue with scholarship on emotional and affective labors, I conceptualize divination as “feeling labor” that produces an affective intersubjective space for the incitement, experience, and articulation of emotions. The feeling labors of divination create commodified intimacies through which women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals explore their feelings. However, these intimacies are produced at the expense of devalued labors of those who are feminized along the heteropatriarchal hierarchies of gender, age, and sexual orientation. Attending to the gendered production and consumption of feeling labors and the intimacies they create are central to understanding the relationships between gender and labor in postindustrial capitalism.

Keywords

affective labor commodified intimacy divination emotional labor Turkey

A middle-aged woman, with blond-highlighted brown hair and well-manicured hands, stares anxiously at the tiny ceramic coffee cup 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 herself. 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 examining 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 minutes 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 businesses that have proliferated in the last decade in Turkey, where women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals gather around coffee cups for fortunetelling sessions. What makes these social interactions novel and significant is that people gathering around coffee cups do not simply provide and consume 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.

My work refines our understanding of labor and intimacy with its focus on a previously ignored feminized niche of service work, namely divination, in the understudied context of contemporary urban Turkey. While expanding the scope of feminist knowledge into new occupational and geographical realms through original ethnographic data, I engage with and contribute to the growing literatures on emotional and affective labors (Hardt 1999; Hochschild 1983; Negri 1999) and commodified intimacies (Bernstein 2007; Boris and Parrenas 2010; Constable 2009; Hochschild 2003, 2012; Zelizer 2005). I conceptualize divination as feeling labor that produces an affective intersubjective space for the incitement, experience, and articulation of emotions. I argue that feeling labors of commercial divination produce commodified intimacies through which women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals explore their feelings. I conclude that these gendered intimacies are produced through the recruitment of the devalued labors of those who are disempowered along heteropatriarchal hierarchies of gender, age, and sexual orientation. More broadly, I demonstrate that the commodification of feminized and unrecognized forms of feeling labor forges novel gendered and sexualized intimacies under late capitalism. I also show that attending to the gendered production and consumption of feeling labors reveals their contradictory implications for the empowerment of gender and sexual minorities.

Theorizing Emotional/Affective Labor and Intimacy

Feeling Labor

Recognizing and theorizing divination as work is challenging, as our common sense and social scientific understandings of work prevent us from acknowledging the labor involved in divination. The taken-for-granted demeaning of fortunetellers as charlatans and their clients as dupes reflects an underlying assumption that divination labor does not produce value. Our theoretical tools for studying labor, traditionally modeled on male and artisanal or industrial forms of work, also render the effort involved in divination invisible. However, the increasing feminization of the labor force and the growing centrality of services, communications, and information sectors are challenging our understandings of work, inspiring concepts like emotional and affective labors to account for the emergent forms of work that characterize the postindustrial global 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 displaying 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 analytically 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 managing the mood of the customer through the display of (feigned or successfully self-induced) emotions by the worker, as originally suggested by Hochschild (1983) and widely adopted in the field. Particularly constraining are the underlying assumptions about the individual, which are based on a binary of alienated/authentic selves, and blunt the concept’s analytical and critical edge (Brook 2009; Weeks 2007). Divination labors include but are neither limited to nor centered on the worker’s management of emotional displays in order to create particular emotional states in customers. They rather depend on interpersonal processes of affective attunement that foster emotional incitement and identification and blur the very boundaries between self and other and managed and spontaneous feelings.

The concept of feeling labor is informed by scholarship on immaterial, particularly affective, labor that strives for a holistic analysis of labor as it is reconfigured in postindustrial capitalism (Hardt and Negri 2001; Lazzaratto 1996). My work contributes to nascent affective labor studies that highlight the capitalist production and channeling of flows of affect that connect disparate bodies and individuals and create spaces for the flourishing of subjectivities and social relations (Ducey 2007; Hardt 1999, 2007; Negri 1999; Wissinger 2007). Informed by this scholarship, I seek to abandon atomistic individualist and instrumentalist undertones that might accompany the concept of emotional labor in favor of an awareness of the pre-individual, pre-cognitive, and deeply social processes of affective labor. Feeling labor highlights the creation of a decisively interpersonal 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 literature, 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 emotional labor literature, which inherits a rich genealogy of feminist thinking on reproductive and caring labors that is not adequately engaged by theorists 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 commodification of intimacy (Hochschild 2012; Illouz 2007). Scholars explore the co-constitution of intimacy and commodification (see Constable 2009 for 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 latter line of inquiry, I argue that emergent intimacies of commercial divination 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 potentials 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 family members in survival, passing, and resistance (Devault 1999) and offering gender-nonconforming friends and partners recognition of their gender identities (Ward 2010). Inspired by these, I highlight the empowering potentials of the commodified intimacies of divination for the marginalized 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 culture in Turkey. In a society where women socialize mainly with each other in gender-segregated, domestic gatherings and where properly hosting a guest includes serving Turkish coffee, women regularly socialize around coffee cups. Coffee divinations are an ordinary part of women’s sociability and serve to build and maintain homosocial relations. They offer women an occult language to share the intimate pleasures and pains of femininity, providing women with an opportunity of strategizing and solidarity. They belong squarely to feminine domesticity and are stereotyped as an epithet of normative femininity.

Coffee divination is an everyday way of relating to and caring for someone. Cup readers, whether amateurs or workers, describe divination as a way of “spending good time with” as well as “relaxing,” “comforting,” “motivating,” “improving the morale,” “raising the spirits,” and “pleasing the heart” of someone. Similar to other forms of care labor, from more elementary ones like attentive listening to more elaborate and scripted ones like singing lullabies, divination serves psychological needs and improves the general well-being of others. While women occasionally read their male relatives’ or acquaintances’ fortunes, divination is predominantly performed by women in the service of women. This feminized feeling labor is socially constructed as an unskilled and unproductive activity that is devalued as empty entertainment at best and criminal charlatanry at worst.

While coffee divinations have sporadically served as an income-generating activity, only over the last decade have they been transformed into a commodified service offered in public businesses called fortunetelling cafés. Commodification pushed divination from the privacy of feminine domesticity to the publicness of the market economy. This move transformed a relation of socializing and caring into a capitalist relation of laboring and consuming. At the same time, commodification created an opportunity to craft a livelihood from reading cups amid limited employment chances, constraining gender norms, and a legal ban on commercial divination.

Commercial divination is a feminized employment niche in which those feminized along hierarchies of age, gender, and sexuality in a heteropatriarchal society gain access to paid work. While the majority of fortunetellers consist of poor and lower-middle-class, straight, cisgender women, divination work also draws some young heterosexual men as well as men and women who are marginalized on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, such as gay men and transsexual women, into its ranks. There are some divination workers with very little to no formal education and/or job experience as well as some with university diplomas or postgraduate degrees, but high school graduates constitute the majority. Most have previous employment experiences and some have entrepreneurship histories. Compared to women, both straight and gay men who 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 their café income to support themselves or their families. For transsexual women, divination provides one of the very few relatively accessible employment venues.

Although the commodification of feeling labors allows feminized groups to participate in the labor market, the same process globally 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 gendered 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 orthodoxy, 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 fortunetellers, 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 reproductive 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 provisions, 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 precariousness of divination work does not present itself as extraordinary.

The proliferation of commercial divination reflects the increasing commodification of feminized labors, particularly in the informal service sector, 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 agricultural 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 2011). Exclusion from work opportunities is part of the blatant discrimination and violence occurring against transsexual 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 Istanbul, Turkey, between 2005 and 2007. During this time, I followed coffee cups as they circulated among friends, relatives, neighbors, and, increasingly, strangers, in the privacy of homes as well as in public businesses. I talked 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 milestones 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 opportunity 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 criminalizing 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 labor of feeling. The most common description offered by fortunetellers to explain how they read fortunes—in other words, how they see what they see in the cup and why they say what they say—is “I feel.” The feeling labor of divination consists of a particular modality of feeling (with) the client. Creating and maintaining an affectively charged space is an accomplishment that requires the deployment of the skilled labor of the fortuneteller, who affectively attunes to the client and vocalizes that tune in the genre of coffee divination. If successful, the clients hear the sound playing as uniquely theirs and join in.

The feeling labor of divination facilitates the production, experience, and expression of emotions through an affectively intense ritualized interaction. Feeling labor includes, but is qualitatively different from, emotional labor that “requires one to induce or suppress feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the proper state of mind in others” (Hochschild 1983, 6-7). Feeling labor affects the mood of others through the creation of an enchanted intersubjective space in which the client can explore, experience, and engage with various emotions with the guidance of the worker. Feeling labor certainly depends on, but is not reducible to, affective labor that is characterized by “the creation and manipulation of affects” (Hardt 1999, 96). The feeling labor of divination is based on the mobilization of affective capacities and flows in order to animate an occult language of emotions that fosters the articulation of desires, aversions, longings, and apprehensions.

Feeling labor is directed, first of all, toward the creation and maintenance of an affectively intense atmosphere that affects and moves the client strongly and deeply, irrespective of the particular emotional accent into which this affectivity might be translated. Before everything else, the client needs to get into an excitedly/anxiously expectant mood, ready to be affected. Summoning such affective intensity takes a charismatic presence and an impressive opening of the session on the part of the reader and, of course, a customer whose attention is focused on the reader, who is literate in the genre, and who is “open,” in the lingo of divination, to be read/affected. The reader further incites agitated anticipation on the part of the client through suspense and surprise, increasing the capacities of 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 quietly 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, experience, 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 contained interiority, and the boundaries between impromptu and manufactured feelings obsolete.

The coffee divination genre offers a template through which fortunetellers 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 with a few basic lines (like marital and employment status) and continue by adding a few contours (like a personality trait and a dominant mood descriptor). This initial personalization allows clients to enter the cup, so to speak, and identify as the (hypothetical) person being described by the reader.

The main body of divination sessions consists of descriptions of past and present scenarios that address the client’s previous and existing circumstances, and future scenarios that reflect possibilities, narrated in an emotional style befitting the situation being described, ranging from lamentation to celebration. Cup readers encourage their clients to subjectively embody the narrated desires and fears, hopes and regrets, and expectations and frustrations by inviting them to situate themselves in these scenarios and experience the emotions that arise from imagining oneself as the very subject of the situations being described. Consumers’ affective openness and capacity for identifying with the emotions articulated by the reader are essential to the successful delivery of the commercial service of divination. As a highly personalized service that materializes only in the interactional moment of its provision, divination demands that clients participate in the production of the service by consuming the reading as moving, personally relevant, and meaningful. To ensure this, clients might and often do verbally communicate with the fortuneteller before, during, and after the session. Nevertheless, in order to perform as an engaged recipient, it is sufficient that clients turn inward and approach their intimate lives through the lenses the reader provides.

Workers’ and clients’ spontaneous and ongoing feeling and feeding of the affective interpersonal space of divination is essential to feeling labor. This is because, unlike emotional labor directed toward setting the customers in the right mood of contentment during their consumption of a particular service, feeling labor is not limited to creating and maintaining a particular mood. On the contrary, fortunetellers aim and are expected to move their clients, both in the sense of making them feel something and in the sense of moving them across the emotional spectrum. Readers strive to open clients to experience a range of affective intensities and emotional states, to move them, for example, from peaceful tranquility to agitated anticipation and from cautious hope to overwhelming worry.

The range of feeling offered by divination is pressured to shrink, and to rebound, by the contradictory influences of commodification. On the one hand, following the imperatives of service industry, readings are increasingly valued for their capacity to produce what is generically called “customer satisfaction.” As the literature on emotional labor attests, the logic of commodified service provision usually prioritizes the production of a positive emotional state in the client. Commercial fortunetellers are keenly aware of this. Semra, a married woman with two adult children, puts it candidly, if rather disenchantedly: “You come and sit down, you hear pleasing things, and you leave. Predictions may or may not turn out to be true. But at that moment, you feel happy.” Indeed, many fortunetellers recalibrate their performances on their way from amateur or underground commercial contexts to fortunetelling cafés. They balance “the bad news with the good,” self-censor to “never speak of death,” and monitor clients in order “not to devastate an already depressed person.” A confident cup reader bluntly declares, “I certainly relax people. But this is all about me. I can speak in such a way that the client gets anxious. Their spirits would not be raised if I told them that their past was horrible, their present sucks, and their future will only get worse!” This reader is only partially justified in his confidence, since the range of affective and emotional 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 managerial 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 positively and negatively charged predictions. For this reason, the very measures taken to ensure customer satisfaction may breed discontent and even threaten to disqualify the service itself. A single woman in her early twenties, whom I had accompanied to a fortunetelling café, returned to our table after her session with a young male reader with an annoyed expression 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 influences 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, anxiety, 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 or not, all commercial fortunetellers face the contradictory pressures of commodification and must negotiate the range of affective and emotional experiences they survey in relation to their personal and professional skills and preferences, and the expectations of their clients and employers.

Commodified Intimacies of Divination

The feeling labors of divination create and function through an intimacy 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, unfaithful 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 secretive 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 private room. They keep their voices down, play background music as white noise, and explicitly assure uneasy clients of confidentiality. They introduce 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 foregrounds 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 intimacies they depend on and produce are increasingly shaped by commodification.⁴ Commodification removes divination from embedded social networks to join capitalist flows of commodities and services in the market.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 relationship. 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 relationships 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 freedom 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 communal pressures of the neighborhood. This is the dark side of socially embedded intimacies.

Commodification of divination creates the necessary conditions for the emergence of a new regime of intimacy. Brought together at a fortunetelling 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 liberated from binding ties in the anonymity of urban public space and the market. The move of intimate coffee divinations from the realm of feminine domesticity to that of the market and the city recalibrates the relationships 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 fleeting relationships between readers and clients foster a novel type of intimacy 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 effectively gossip about their clients. Anonymity neutralizes the risks that accompany the revelation of intimate information. It is precisely this anonymity 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 structured by its anonymity and valued exactly for its “bounded authenticity” (Bernstein 2010).

This is why women, youth, and LGBTQ individuals constitute the clientele of commercial divination. Patrons of fortunetelling cafés are overwhelmingly local women representing a diversity of socioeconomic backgrounds, ages, and marital statuses, while male customers are a minority and consist almost exclusively of single young adults, some of whom identify as gay. Commodification strips cup readings from the disciplining 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 disappointments 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 fortuneteller 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 fortunetellers 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 downplayed as trivial and insignificant, if not targeted as improper and intolerable, 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 reciprocity 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 feelings 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 commercial 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, feeling labors of commercial divination are not symmetrical, and workers’ feelings do not matter but are subordinated to those of their employers and customers.

This asymmetry is particularly daunting for fortunetellers who provide a devalued, criminalized, and stigmatized service with no institutional, occupational, or educational credentialing mechanisms, rendering each encounter with a new client a challenge. The low status and high stigma attached to the occupation render workers further vulnerable to customers who may challenge, ridicule, refuse to pay, and even threaten to sue them. Nermin, a married woman in her early fifties with two children, explains 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 challenging 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 asymmetrically, 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 characterized by commodified intimacies produced through devalued feeling labors of feminized social groups. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in an understudied occupational and geographical setting, this article provides a gendered analysis of the feeling labors of divination and the intimacies these labors instigate. Recruiting as well as catering to those who are 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 opportunities 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 precariousness 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 commodification provide empowering spaces for those who are marginalized 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 relationship between labor and gender in a transnational world shaped by postindustrial capitalism and neoliberalization. In this article, I contribute to this endeavor through two main interventions. First, synthesizing and expanding 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 commodification of feminized labors while transcending individualist and dichotomous assumptions underlying the concept 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 production of gendered and sexualized intimacies.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Salih Can Aciksoz, Patricia MacCorquodale, Hisyar Ozsoy, and Ruken Sengul for reading and commenting on drafts of this article. I sincerely thank Gul Ozyegin and Kathleen Jenkins for providing an opportunity to share and offering valuable feedback on an earlier version of this work at the College of William and Mary in 2013. I am also thankful to Umut Yildirim for the invitation to present this work at the Sociocultural Anthropology Meeting, 2014, and to Kathleen Weston for her commentary. Special thanks to the editor, Joya Misra, and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

Notes

Zeynep Kurtulus Korkman is an assistant professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. Her research interests include transnational feminisms; gendered labor and affect; politics of family and reproduction; the public sphere and counterpublics; commodification and cultural politics; and religion, secularism, and the occult, particularly in Turkey and the larger Middle East.

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