Rethinking New Womanhood

234 Pages·2018·2.469 MB·English

by  Nazia Hussein

RETHINKING NEW
WOMANHOOD
Practices of Gender, Class, Culture
and Religion in South Asia
Edited by
NAZIA HUSSEIN
Rethinking New Womanhood
Nazia Hussein
Editor
Rethinking New
Womanhood
Practices of Gender, Class, Culture
and Religion in South Asia
Editor
Nazia Hussein
Department of Sociology
Birmingham City University
Birmingham, UK
ISBN 978-3-319-67899-3 ISBN 978-3-319-67900-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932370
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Contents
Introduction 1
Nazia Hussein
Part I Politics of Representation: New Woman in
Literature and the Media 23
‘(New) Woman’ as a Flashpoint Within the Nation:
The Border as Method in Tales of Modernity 25
Nandita Ghosh
Made in Bangladesh: The Romance of the New Woman 47
Elora Halim Chowdhury
The New Heroine? Gender Representations in
Contemporary Pakistani Dramas 71
Virginie Dutoya
v
vi Contents
Part II New Women Subjects in Everyday Life: Practices
of Gender, Sexuality, Class, Culture and Religion 95
Bangladeshi New Women’s ‘Smart’ Dressing: Negotiating
Class, Culture, and Religion 97
Nazia Hussein
Nepalese (New) Women Workers in the Hotel Industry:
Exploring Women’s Work and Respectability 123
Mona Shrestha Adhikari
Merging Career and Marital Aspirations: Emerging
Discourse of ‘New Girlhood’ Among Muslims in Assam 147
Saba M. Hussain
Earning as Empowerment?: The Relationship Between
Paid Work and Domestic Violence in Lyari, Karachi 169
Nida Kirmani
Heterosexual Profession, Lesbian Practices: How Sex Workers’
Sexuality Right Positions Through Intersection of Sexuality,
Gender, and Class Within the Hierarchy of LGBT Activism
in Bangladesh 189
Shuchi Karim
‘New’ Feminisms in India: Encountering the ‘West’
and the Rest 211
Sushmita Chatterjee
Index 227
List of Contributors
Mona Shrestha Adhikari is an independent development consultant currently
based in Switzerland. She holds a PhD in Women and Gender Studies from the
University of Warwick (UK) and a master’s degree in Development Studies, spe-
cialising in gender from the Institute of Social Studies (the Netherlands). Her
research interests and publications relate to gender, work, women’s empower-
ment and gender and trade. She has more than 20 years’ work experience in
international organisations, non-governmental organisations and the private sec-
tor in various capacities in Ethiopia, Mongolia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Switzerland.
Sushmita Chatterjee is Associate Professor of Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality
Studies in the Department of Cultural, Gender, and Global Studies at
Appalachian State University, North Carolina. Sushmita’s research and teaching
interests focus on postcolonial studies, feminist-queer theory, democratic the-
ory, visual politics, transnational analysis, and animal studies. Her most recent
publications include “What Does It Mean to Be a Postcolonial Feminist? The
Artwork of Mithu Sen” in Hypatia (2016) and “‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood:
What Is ‘New’ About the ‘New Woman’?” in Gender, Place and Culture (2016).
Elora Halim Chowdhury is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of
Women’s & Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She
received her PhD in Women’s Studies from Clark University, Massachusetts
(2004). Her teaching and research interests include transnational feminisms, crit-
ical development studies, gender violence and human rights advocacy, n arrative
and film with an emphasis on South Asia. She is the author of Transnationalism
Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (2011),
vii
viii List of Contributors
which was awarded the National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldua
book prize in 2012, and the co-edited volume (with Liz Philipose) Dissident
Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism and Transnational Solidarity (2016). Elora has
published academic essays, fiction and creative non-fiction in journals and anthol-
ogies on topics as varied as violence, women’s organizing in the Global South,
transnational feminist praxis, nationalism and culture, women’s cinema, and
Islam and gender politics in South Asia. Currently she is working on a book proj-
ect titled, Ethical Encounters: Reconciling Trauma and Healing in Bangladesh
Muktijuddho Films. Elora serves as the vice-president of the National Women’s
Studies Association and as the series editor to the Dissident Feminisms series at the
University of Illinois Press.
Virginie Dutoya holds a PhD in political science from Sciences Po, Paris, and
is a permanent researcher at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique
(CNRS). Her current research interests include women’s political representation
and participation in India and Pakistan, feminist and LGBT politics in these
countries, focusing on the effects of globalization and transnational circulations
of concepts, tools and funding. Her most recent publications include Defining
the “queers” in India: The politics of academic representation (India Review, 15:2,
2016, 241–271) and, in French, Une demande faite au nom des femmes? Quotas
et représentation politique des femmes en Inde et au Pakistan (1917–2010) », (Revue
française de science politique, 66:1, 2016, 49–70).
Nandita  Ghosh is Associate Professor of English at Fairleigh Dickinson
University, USA. Her work focuses on postcolonial studies. She has published
articles in journals: Lan-guage in India, Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial
Studies, South Asian Review, Working USA, Deep Focus: A Film Quarterly, and the
International Feminist Journal of Poli-tics as well as in the Routledge Handbook on
Contemporary India. She currently teaches courses on imperialism, postcolonial-
ism, globalization, environment, gender, and South Asian literatures at Fairleigh
Dickinson University.
Saba Hussain is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Warwick.
She has worked as a Lecturer in sociology at the Bath Spa University and as a
research associate at UCL Institute of Education. She completed her PhD at the
University of Warwick looking at Muslim girls’ schooling and identity in contem-
porary India. Her research interests are in the area of ‘new’ womanhood/girlhood’,
gender, identity, education and organisations in the context of globalisation. Saba
has also worked with organisations such as the World Bank, DFID and Oxfam
and others as a social development specialist. She has published co-authored
List of Contributo rs ix
research on women and religion’s representation in the media in Exchanges:
Warwick Research Journal. She also blogs for Kafila and for Discovering Society.
Nazia  Hussein is Lecturer in Sociology at Birmingham City University,
UK. She completed her PhD in Women and Gender Studies from University of
Warwick. Hussein publishes and teaches in gender, race, ethnicity and religion
with a particular focus on South Asia and Bangladesh. Her most recent publica-
tions are “Negotiating Middle-Class Respectable Femininity: Bangladeshi
Women and Their Families” (2017) in SAMAJ and “Reading the New Women
of Bangladesh Through Mobile Phone Advertisements” in the edited collection
Media and Cultural Identity: Texts and Contexts by University Press Dhaka. She
is a regular contributor for Discovery Society, Feminist and Women’s Studies
Association UK and Ireland and Kafila.
Shuchi Karim is Researcher of Gender and Diversity Studies in Radboud
University, Netherlands. She completed her PhD from International Institute of
Social Science (ISS), Netherland. Shuchi’s research interests are in sexualities,
heteronormativity, gender and identity in Bangladesh. She has published in
OIDA International Journal of Sustainable Development and Gender, Technology
and Development.
Nida Kirmani is Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Humanities
and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. She has
published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, devel-
opment, and urban studies in India and Pakistan. Her book, Questioning ‘the
Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality, was pub-
lished in 2013 by Routledge. Her current research focuses on urban violence,
gender, and insecurity in Karachi.
List of Tables
The New Heroine? Gender Representations in Contemporary Pakistani
Dramas
Table 1 Issues addressed in the corpus 79
Merging Career and Marital Aspirations: Emerging Discourse of ‘New
Girlhood’ Among Muslims in Assam
Table 1 Nature and composition of schools in the sample 150
xi