This article discusses the relationship between affective body politics and gendered norms of urban belonging in Istanbul, Turkey. As I will show, there are specific body ideas and affective desires that link a classified and racialised appearance with notions of modernity, femininity and urban belonging. In Turkey's largest city, Istanbul, bodily self-fashioning is about expressing and sometimes producing spatial and social difference and distinction. Drawing on Engin Isin's concept of everyday "acts" through which subjects constitute themselves as citizens, I propose the notion of "aesthetic citizenship" to highlight the crucial role of beautification and adherence to gender norms for those who are constructed as female in a competitive urban environment. I argue that gendered, classified and racialised bodies are constituted and classified through a "visual economy of recognition" that makes them signs of urban belonging or a visceral sense of foreignness.