New Generation Cafe Culture and the Construction of Urban Bodies

Abstract

In recent years, the number of Starbucks and similar places and the number of people spending time in these places has been increasing in Turkey. There is an extensive literature on these places and coffee-consumption culture, which has gained widespread acceptance especially among students and the middle classes. However, in this study, we specifically sought to understand how it operates in situations such as the construction of class belonging and the presentation of the self for male and female students at Foundation Universities in Ankara. For this purpose, we designed an ethnographic field study that included in-depth interviews, participant observation, and observation of the social media accounts of 15 female and 15 male Private (Waqf) University students. We completed this field study by reaching a total of 26 students. Our fieldwork showed us that as the leisure activity of coffee consumption is much more than consuming coffee and spending leisure time. These spaces and their consumption culture play a crucial role in the construction of urban, middle-class male and female identities. In this study, in relation to the existing literature on this subject, we have tried to show how coffee consumption constructs representations such as body, subject, and belonging, while not neglecting layers such as gender and urbanity.