Nazia Hussein - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Nazia Hussein

Routledge eBooks, Apr 1, 2022

Women's Studies International Forum

Muslim New Womanhood in Bangladesh, Apr 1, 2022

Muslim New Womanhood in Bangladesh, 2022

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2016

Through a review of the 2012 documentary film The World before Her directed by Nisha Pahuja, this... more Through a review of the 2012 documentary film The World before Her directed by Nisha Pahuja, this article provides a critical reflection on how neoliberal governmentality appropriates women’s bodies and subjectivities in two women’s boot camps in India: the Miss India contest and the Hindu militant Durga Vahini camp. Studies on appropriation of women’s bodies in the neoliberal ideology of the market and in varied religious ideologies have generated rich feminist insights into the structures of women’s oppression across the world. Feminist academic research has traditionally looked at market- and religion-based oppressions separately. In this critical reflection we articulate how women’s bodies get incorporated into the service of varied ideologies, namely neoliberal capitalism and religious fundamentalism, through processes of ritualisation, responsibilisation and subjectivation. Drawing on the shared elements of neoliberal (capitalism) and Hindutwa (Hindu fundamentalism) ideologica...

Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Research Journal, 2015

Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, t... more Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, this paper investigates Bollywood’s role in creation of hierarchical identities in the Indian society wherein Muslims occupy the position of the inferior ‘other’ to the superior Hindu ‘self’. Focusing on Muslim heroines, the paper demonstrates that the selected narratives attempt to move away from the older binary identity narratives of Muslim women such as nation vs. religion and hyper-sexualised courtesan vs. subservient veiled women, towards identity narratives borne out of Muslim women’s choice of education, career and life partner, political participation, and embodied practices. However, in comparison to signs of change the sites of continuity are strongly embedded in the religious-nationalistic meta-narrative that drives the paradigms of Indian femininity/ womanhood. To conclude, the nature of the recent deployment of Muslim heroines in Bollywood reinforce the hierarchy between t...

South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2017

Negotiating Middle-class Respectable Femininity: Bangladeshi Women and their ...

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/knowledge/socialscience/bangladeshiwomen

Journal of Intercultural Studies, 2010

... systems of thoughts which result from contingent turns in history, rather than rationally pre... more ... systems of thoughts which result from contingent turns in history, rather than rationally predictabletrends. ... of different Fair & Lovely products published in both India and Bangladesh during the ... four different products of the brand and there will be one older advertisement from the ...

Rethinking New Womanhood

This chapter places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of n... more This chapter places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood among affluent middle-class women of Dhaka, Bangladesh. I study women’s hybrid sartorial practices to investigate how new women merge the boundaries of respectable middle-class Bengali cultural attire of sari and salwar kameez with working-class Islamic religious attire of hijab and upper-class and Western women’s sexualised attires, a hybrid aesthetic practice which I call smart dressing. New women’s practices of smart dressing distinguish them as a symbolic group challenging the boundaries of tradition and modernity, local and global, and provide an image of womanhood that is contrary to the poor, uneducated, traditional, bound by religion, sexually constrained, and victimised ‘third-world woman’.

This thesis places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of ne... more This thesis places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood among affluent middle-class women of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using qualitative research methods, combining audio-visual materials, focus group discussion and multiple in depth interviews, I examine the complex and heterogeneous constructions of new womenhoods in relation to women’s negotiations with public and private sphere roles and Bangladeshi norms of female propriety. My conceptual framework facilitates analysis of the everyday interactional negotiations of new women in relation to their gendered and classed practices of respectable femininity, and the potential for this boundary work to enhance their agency. My analysis illuminates three aspects of the dialogical nature of respectable femininity and new womanhood. First, new women are part of the neoliberal affluent middle class and they construct their class identity as a status group, claiming inter-class and intraclass di...

This paper highlights tensions in the continuity of coloniality and the decoloniality of gender a... more This paper highlights tensions in the continuity of coloniality and the decoloniality of gender as represented within portrayals of new women in Bollywood, through an analysis of the heroines’ dance, sexuality, anger and consumption. This reading of Bollywood’s new women alludes to the (im)possibility of decolonising gender in South Asia, arguing that the emergent female subjects of these movies find themselves in cross-pulls between the need for self-realisation, neo-liberalism, and national identity. Our analysis reveals within these multiple cross-pulls there are moments that rupture the narratives of coloniality/modernity, by proposing a version of what Partha Chatterjee’s called ‘our modernity’. These narrative ruptures allow us to challenge historically received notions of identity and representations of Third World women, and of gender in South Asia. At the same time, the characters analysed within this paper continue to uncritically subscribe to colonial forms of modernity, ...

Covering India, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal, Rethinking New Womanhood effectively introduces a... more 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 ...

Third World Thematics: A TWQ Journal