New Desires, New Selves: Sex, Love, and Piety Among Turkish Youth (2015, NYU Press)

New desires, New Selves: Sex, Love and Piety among Turkish Youth (2015, NYU Press)  provides a unique investigation of self-making among upwardly-mobile young adults in Turkey through the critical lenses of love and sexuality. Based on 87 in-depth interviews with a diverse group of young Turks in Istanbul who represent the most salient differences based on class origin, religious devotion, and sexual orientation, it links individual biographies with the “biography” of a nation, elaborating their interconnections in the creation of new selves in a country that has existed uneasily between West and East, modern and traditional, secular and Islamic. For these young people, sexuality, gender expression, and intimate relationships in particular serve as key sites for reproducing and challenging patriarchy and paternalism. As New desires, New Selves evocatively shows, the quest for sexual freedom and escape from patriarchal constructions of selfless femininity and protective masculinity promise both personal transformations and profound sexual quilt and anxiety.