Working Out Desire is an engaging and theoretically informed ethnographic account of Istanbulite women’s interest in sport and exercise (spor merakı), which has transformed these women’s lives in myriad ways. In this fascinating ethnography, Sertaç Sehlikoğlu illustrates how Istanbulite women’s ever-growing passion for physical exercise is not a “banal” fad but an “object of desire” that reveals women’s agentive aspirations to reconfigure their subjectivity beyond the confines of the domestic sphere. By participating in physical exercise, these women do not simply work out their bodies but also recalibrate their relationship to their body image, gender roles, sexuality, faith, and familial duties—“physically, emotionally, and imaginatively” (6).
Working Out Desire is based on the ethnographic fieldwork Sehlikoğlu undertook in 2008 and 2011–12. Thanks to the interviews she conducted with nearly a hundred female gymgoers, Sehlikoğlu introduces the reader to the recreational world of women from all class positions and different...
