PhD Candidate Müge Yuce, "Displaced Intimacies: Mobility, Morality, and the Politics of Urban Space under Neoliberal Islam in Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue"

CHR Summer Doctoral Fellow Talk

Wednesday, September 24, 2025 12:00 PM to 1:00 PM EDT
Horizon Hall 6325 and zoom

Müge Yüce (PhD Candidate, Cultural Studies) is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at George Mason University and a graduate certificate student in Women’s and Gender Studies. Her research explores the intersections of gender, sexuality, and political economy with a focus on visual and performance cultures in Turkey, engaging questions of visibility, space, memory, and resistance, particularly through the lens of political humor and transnational feminisms.

Project: "Displaced Intimacies: Mobility, Morality, and the Politics of Urban Space under Neoliberal Islam in Istanbul’s Istiklal Avenue"

My project examines how Istanbul’s İstiklal Avenue has been reshaped under the AKP government through a fusion of neoliberal urban development and Islamic moral governance, aiming to regulate public intimacy, desire, and dissent. Through aggressive gentrification, securitization, and cultural sanitization, independent bookstores, LGBTQ+ venues, and radical art spaces have been replaced by multinational retail chains, surveillance infrastructure, and state-sanctioned “family-friendly” leisure zones. Using ethnographic observation, oral history interviews, spatial mapping, and archival research, my study explores these shifts in detail, investigating how neoliberal Islam restructures urban space, regulates mobility, and displaces oppositional communities along İstiklal Avenue. In its questioning of how material, cultural, and political transformations of space under AKP's neoliberal Islam have produced new forms of exclusion, visibility, and belonging, this project connects directly to the CHR’s 2025–26 theme of “Space, Territory, and Mobility."