Listening for Secular Bodies: Western Art Music, Occidentalism, and Belonging in Neo-liberal Istanbul

Over the past several decades, the city of Istanbul has been transformed under Turkey's Islamic populist regime by processes of economic and cultural liberalization that have challenged twentieth-century state secularist and Occidentalist orthodoxies. Among these transformations has been a proliferation of practices of performing and listening to Western art music long associated with those orthodoxies. In this dissertation, I examine the ways that practices of listening shape secular bodies and their modes of belonging in Istanbul. With the rise of Islamic populism and a widespread sense among secularists that contemporary Turkey is defined by an inability to listen, practices of listening to Western art music become a primary means through which people tune their emotions and senses to shape themselves as secular sovereign subjects. These ostensibly universal practices of listening produce novel modes of belonging to the city that draw upon material traces of Istanbul's cosmopolitan past activated by Western art music to produce a secular acoustic urban geography. Scholars have alternately tended to deploy the autonomous, secular body as an aspirational straw man of Western modernity against which to frame accounts of the particularity of its religious others or, more recently, claimed that secular bodies themselves only emerge through differentiation from religion. Here, I demonstrate ethnographically that secular bodies and the secular sovereign subjectivity that they undergird are actively forged through practices of listening to Western art music. At the same time, where scholars have suggested that listening transcends the borders of the body and subjectivity, I show that listening is integral to constructing and maintaining the boundaries of secular bodies in Istanbul.