Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class


Book Description

This book uses everyday consumption as a lens to analyze how South Asian Muslim American women negotiate racial, religious, gendered, classed, and often political identities. In particular, Ternikar examines the use of food and clothing as well as social media accounts among this important immigrant population, offering new insight that goes beyond examining Muslim American women through the lens of hijab. This timely and nuanced interdisciplinary study draws on both sociology of consumption theory and intersectional feminism and will be valuable for courses in gender and women’s studies, sociology of consumption, and women and religion.




Rethinking New Womanhood


Book Description

Covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, Rethinking New Womanhood effectively introduces a ‘new’ wave of gender research from South Asia that resonates with feminist debates around the world. The volume conceptualises ‘new womanhood’ as a complex, heterogeneous and intersectional identity. By deconstructing classification systems and highlighting women’s everyday ongoing negotiations with boundaries of social categories, the book reconfigures the concept of ‘new woman’ as a symbolic identity denoting ‘modern’ femininity at the intersection of gender, class, culture, sexuality and religion in South Asia. The collection maps new sites and expressions on women and gender studies around nationhood, women’s rights, transnational feminist solidarity, ‘new girlhoods ’, aesthetic and sexualised labour, respectability and ‘modernity’, LGBT discourses, domestic violence and ‘new’ feminisms. The volume will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including gender studies, sociology, education, media and cultural studies, literature, anthropology, history, development studies, postcolonial studies and South Asian studies.




Arranged Marriage


Book Description

Arranged Marriage: The Politics of Tradition, Resistance, and Change shows how arranged marriage practices have been undergoing transformation as a result of global and other processes such as the revolution of digital technology, democratization of transnational mobility, or shifting significance of patriarchal power structures. The ethnographically informed chapters not only highlight how the gendered and intergenerational politics of agency, autonomy, choice, consent, and intimacy work in the contexts of partner choice and management of marriage, but also point out that arranged marriages are increasingly varied and they can be reshaped, reinvented, and reinterpreted flexibly in response to individual, family, religious, class, ethnic, and other desires, needs, and constraints. The authors convincingly demonstrate that a nuanced investigation of the reasons, complex dynamics, and consequences of arranged marriages offers a refreshing analytical lens that can significantly contribute to a deeper understanding of other phenomena such as globalization, modernization, and international migration as well as patriarchal value regimes, intergenerational power imbalances, and gendered subordination and vulnerability of women.




Navigating the Everyday as Middle-Class British-Pakistani Women


Book Description

This ethnographic study of middle-class British-Pakistani women in Manchester explores the sense of belonging they create through recognition and social status. Belonging in these communities is enacted through the performance of different identities—class, ethnicity, nationality, generation, age, religion, and gender—that earn them social power and status among family and friends. To prove they are “model migrants,” worthy of respect and recognition, these women perform various and intersecting identities to maximize status and social capital in diverse situations. Far from being passive victims of racial, religious, or cultural discrimination, middle-class British-Pakistani women challenge prejudice against Muslims and British-Pakistanis through certain practices, objects, performances, and relationships, serving as ambassadors for their religious and ethnic identity through their conduct and interaction with others in daily life.




Asian American Women and Men


Book Description

Labor, laws, and love. Yen Le Espiritu explores how racist and gendered labor conditions and immigration laws have affected relations between and among Asian American women and men. Asian American Men and Women documents how the historical and contemporary oppression of Asians in the United States has (re)structured the balance of power between Asian American women and men and shaped their struggles to create and maintain social institutions and systems of meaning. Espiritu emphasizes how race, gender, and class, as categories of difference, do not parallel but instead intersect and confirm one other.




American Muslim Women


Book Description

"Focusing on women, who sometimes move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaced and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice, this ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideas of racial harmony amd equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities."--Page 4 of cover.




Terrifying Muslims


Book Description

Ethnographic research in Pakistan, the Middle East, and the United States helps to explain how transnational working classes from Pakistan are produced in the context of American empire and its War on Terror.




South Asian Racialization and Belonging After 9/11


Book Description

How do contemporary cultural and literary texts from the diaspora or from South Asia iterate patterns of racial surveillance and prejudice against South Asians in the United States after 9/11? This collection delves into the underpinnings of American imperialism and identity politics after 9/11.







South Asian American Stories of Self


Book Description

This book acknowledges and discusses the now politically infamous aspects of an American Muslim woman’s life such as Islamophobia and hijab, but it more importantly examines how women actually deal with these obstacles, intentionally shifting the lens to capture a more holistic, nuanced understanding of their human experiences. This text is based on a three-year-long qualitative interdisciplinary cultural and developmental psychology and gender systems study. It uniquely organizes risks, protective factors, and coping mechanisms according to developmental life stages, from teenage to adulthood. Results show how second-generation Muslim American women’s identities develop during adolescence (11-18), emerging adulthood (19-29), and adulthood (30-39) within multiple socio-cultural contexts. Discussions regarding Muslim Americans often erroneously equate “Muslim” with “Arab” or “Middle Eastern.” By focusing on South Asian Muslim Americans, this work bluntly discusses the overlaps of South Asian culture with Islam, an important contribution to the field since the majority of immigrant Muslims in America are of South Asian descent. This study adds nuance and detail to American Muslim girls’ and women’s experiences while fighting misinformation and stereotypes. It is a significant contribution to anthropological developmental psychology and cultural psychology. The focus on a historically academically marginalized population is beneficial to students, researchers, and professionals in the field.