“Men Are Less Manly, Women Are More Feminine”: The Shopping Mall as a Site for Gender Crisis in Istanbul

In this chapter I will examine the gendered and sexualized experiences of retail workers who are employed by transnational companies in shopping malls in Istanbul, Turkey. Here I argue that the feminine gender regime at the malls contradicts the prepotent gender order of Turkish society and triggers a “gender crisis” through which workers encounter a set of different rules, norms, and codes and circumspectly recalibrate their gendered selves and bodies in order to make sense of the relations in the workplace environment as active, happy, and “successful” individuals.