“Educated gender, unattached desires: Muslim pious women's narratives

The narratives and practices articulated in the realms of romance, love, and
sexuality, I argue, offer a privileged vantage point for understanding the
multi-layered and complex ways in which new pious women’s configurations of the
self, marriage, and sexuality are produced and made relevant to a new desired
society. Narratives collected through in-depth interviews with upwardly-mobile young
pious women in Istanbul provide the empirical foundation for this paper. I elaborate
the interconnections between democratization in inmate relations and democratization
in social order by explicating three desires: Hermeneutic Curiosity in imagining and
defining the ideal Muslim Man; Marriage of Compatibility in articulating a
paradigmatic shift from marriage of logic; and Corporeal Compatibility (tensel uyum)
in (re)defining sexual desire and practices.