Retailed lives: Governing gender and work in globalizing Istanbu

This study examines the conditions and possibility of the emergence of a new working class, or a novel sort of a lower-middle class, alongside other parallel social inequalities in the city of Istanbul. Through participant observation in retail stores and conducting interviews I explore the interplay of individuals (retail workers, store managers and other professional employees of corporations, and customers from different segments of society), transnational capital, and the State in the rapidly neoliberalizing Turkey. I show that the logic behind the creation of "the army of retail workers" can be grasped through the concept of governmentality in which certain populations, problems, tactics, and technologies have been developed in order to present modernity and globality to a particular group of the urbanites. I contend that when the glitzy apparel store, or the shopping mall, is framed as a workplace instead of a non-place of consumption and pleasure, the silence of the army of the retail workers can be broken and the hidden class relations is rendered visible. I demonstrate how a significant aspect of this phenomenon is about constituting subjectivities of workers --i.e. the specific desires, aims, aspirations, fears, and channels of resistance, to push them take up modern, decent, successful, self-improving subject positions and identities. I maintain that gender and sexual relations play a foundational role in the formation of this new class. While a different, alternative sort of masculinity is produced and consolidated in the shopping mall and queerness becomes mostly tolerable and acceptable in apparel stores, new types of femininity are also designated and imposed. Retail workers are seemingly freer than their peers to pick up their own gender and sexual identities and construct who they are in terms of gender and sexual relations. Here, I specifically focus on the case of Istanbul to explicate how the transpositional processes of neoliberalization and globalization create new gaps, mechanisms, mentalities, populations, and subjectivities, and how they actually affect and reshape ordinary people's lives in the Global South.