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"Purdah."
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The stigma matrix : gender, globalization, and the agency of Pakistan's frontline women
As developing states adopt neoliberal policies, more and more working-class women find themselves pulled into the public sphere. They are pressed into wage work by a privatizing and unstable job market. Likewise, they are pulled into public roles by gender mainstreaming policies that developing states must sign on to in order to receive transnational aid. Their inclusion into the political economy is very beneficial for society, but is it also beneficial for women? In The Stigma Matrix Fauzia Husain draws on the experiences of policewomen, lady health workers, and airline attendants, all frontline workers who help the Pakistani state, and its global allies, address, surveil, and discipline veiled women citizens. These women, she finds, confront a stigma matrix: a complex of local and global, historic, and contemporary factors that work together to complicate women's integration into public life. The experiences of the three groups Husain examines reveal that inclusion requires more than quotas or special seats. This book advances critical feminist and sociological frameworks on stigma and agency showing that both concepts are made up of multiple layers of meaning, and are entangled with elite projects of hegemony.
eBook
Indian females in the twenty-first century: how they have fared? An analysis using geospatial techniques
Gender equality and women empowerment have been on the top of the agenda globally. Achieving gender equality and empowering all women and girls has been mentioned by the United Nations in its Sustainable Development Goal (SDG-5) as a target. Various efforts and initiatives have been taken at global, regional and local level to eliminate gender inequality. Women in India have been stereotyped and discriminated since ancient times due to the patriarchal mindset. Social evils such as sati, purdah system, female foeticide, female infanticide, dowry, domestic violence have been faced by women. Various constitutional and legal provisions have been framed to eliminate such evils. In contemporary times, women have become sensitised about their rights and have come a long way in terms of women empowerment. Various schemes have been launched by central and state governments for emancipation of women. However, the patriarchal mindset still exists and gender biasness is still experienced by women both in public and private space. The paper attempts to analyse the level of women empowerment in different states of India. The study is based on the secondary data collected from various government sources. An analysis of the reasons responsible for the trends has also been done. It has been found in the study that female literacy has a positive bearing on the health and decision-making of females. Also, government support in the from of infrastructure and schemes act as a catalyst in women empowerment. Women-centric organisations and Self Help organisations have promoted economic empowerment and decision-making of females.
Journal Article
Halal Dating, Purdah, and Postfeminism
Drawing on forty interviews, this article employs the framework of sexual projects to investigate how middle-class Muslim women navigate the contradictory requirements of sex and agency at the intersection of postfeminism and purdah in Karachi, Pakistan. While existing accounts of embedded agency risk reinscribing dualisms between Islam and the West, the three-pronged sexual projects approach stresses the relational and temporal dimensions of action and agency, focusing on the continuities and interconnections between them. Pakistani women manage the contradictory requirements of sex and agency in this context by crafting a middle-of-the-road response—halal dating—a sexual project that bears surprising affinities with the American hookup. Both halal dating and the hookup deploy strategic ambiguity, a strategy of impression management aimed at protecting women’s reputations by allowing them to occupy both sides of the slut/virgin binary. Both halal dating and the hookup galvanize allies for symbolic, logistical, and affective support, and both activate agency by jettisoning love, exchanging temporally costly commitments for truncated, affectively constrained, rational kinds of intimacy. A sexual projects framework not only allows us to glean similarities between these different contexts, it provides a crucial entry point for understanding what kinds of cultural, relational, and temporal arrangements are acquiring hegemonic authority in a global era, with what implications for inequality. Demonstrating how a sexual projects framework works, this article offers new insights for feminist conceptions of agency.
Journal Article
Islam and social changes among university-going urban youth in Bangladesh
There have been marked differences between many urban youths and the older generation in practising Islam in Bangladesh. In the contemporary expression of Islam, many urban youths in Bangladesh adopt an approach where they are inclined to explain various Islamic discourses in a modernistic way through adopting an Islamic code of life. Simultaneously negating the traditional idea of the incompatibility of Islam with modernity is also an essential phenomenon in this discourse. ‘Self-conscious sense of collective identity’ and the concept of belonging to a global Islamic community is motivating many of these contemporary urban youths in Bangladesh to search for the ‘pure’ form of Islamic practices. These new manifestations eventually affect their urban social sphere while they either reject many traditional Islamic norms or adopt ‘more authentic’ Islamic norms. Thus, this qualitative paper argues that the expression of Islam among many urban youths has to be seen as an adaptive strategy in an ongoing struggle to make sense of Islamic life in a more complex, modern and Westernised world.
Journal Article
Women’s Low Employment Rates in India
Indian women’s labor force participation rates have long demonstrated a U-shaped relationship with their education, rather than a more conventional positive linear relationship. The low rates of employment for moderately educated women are usually explained either as a result of the cultural stigma of women’s employment in a patriarchal society or because of the lack of demand from white-collar and light manufacturing jobs for women with middle levels of education. Using especially well-suited data from two waves of the India Human Development Survey, we test these explanations by examining the education–employment relationship in districts with low cultural stigma (low observance of purdah) and high proportions of (salaried) employment considered “suitable” for women. We find little support for either the cultural or structural explanations: the education–employment relationship remains U-shaped in districts with low stigma or with more “suitable” salaried employment. Instead, we suggest a better explanation lies in the high levels of gender segregation where most white-collar jobs are reserved for men. We simulate what the education–employment relationship would look like if these white-collar occupations were female-dominated as they are in most places in the world and find a more conventional linear relationship.
Journal Article
GENDER SCRIPTS AND AGE AT MARRIAGE IN INDIA
Research on marriage in developing countries has been somewhat narrow in scope because of both conceptual and data limitations. While the feminist literature recognizes marriage as a key institutional site for the production and reproduction of gender hierarchies, little is known about the processes through which this relationship operates. This article uses data from the newly collected India Human Development Survey 2005 for 27,365 ever-married women aged 25-49 to explore ways in which different dimensions of gender in Indian society shape the decisions regarding age at marriage. We explore the impact of three dimensions of gender: (I) economic factors, such as availability of wage employment, dowry expectations, and wedding expenses; (2) indicators of familial empowerment, such as women s role in household decision making and access to and control over resources; and (3) markers of gender performance, such as observance of purdah and male-female separation in the household. Results from hierarchical linear models confirm the importance of markers of gender performance but fail to demonstrate a large role for economic factors and familial empowerment.
Journal Article
The Thermometer Broke! Digital Purdah, Class, and Gender Transgressions on Pakistani TikTok
Research on women’s social media practices in Muslim societies has primarily focused on middle-class or elite women, such as influencers, activists, and members of online communities. However, we know little about working-class women’s use of social media in Muslim contexts. Using ethnography and interviews, I analyze TikTok’s early popularity with working-class women in Pakistan and report three main findings. First, TikTok’s initial reception in Pakistan was fractured across class lines; whereas middle-class and elite women dismissed it, working-class women flocked to it, and TikTok became associated with a “low-class” femininity. Second, women engaged in a range of gender transgressions on TikTok. Third, women simultaneously crafted new practices of “digital purdah,” or veiling, on TikTok. I contribute to scholarship on digital purdah by, first, showing how women combine tools available on TikTok with other veiling strategies to conceal their identity while expressing their sexuality and second, arguing that “digital purdah” is compatible, rather than incongruous, with gender transgressions on TikTok. By showing how co-constituted class and gender dynamics shaped the simultaneous popularity and moral disapproval of TikTok in Pakistan, I argue for increased attention to class dynamics in studies of new social media platforms.
Journal Article
Socio-economic determinants of women’s livelihood time use in rural Bangladesh
Achieving gender well-being and equality is one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations. A close examination of female livelihood time allocation can reveal gender inequality in livelihood choices between males and females. Using the feminist political ecology framework, this paper examines how gendered knowledge, roles, and responsibilities influence female livelihood time use in a patriarchal society like Bangladesh. We use a nationally representative household survey data to create Multiple Linear Regression Model to understand the association between economic, cultural, and environmental shocks with the total time allocation toward livelihood activities by women. Our results suggest that use of ‘Purdah’ by Muslim women acts as a negative detrimental factor towards their livelihood time allocation, thus affirming the complex role of culture and gendered economic activities. Women also allocate less time toward livelihood activities during pregnancy and/or breastfeeding. We find that female livelihood time use also depends on their ability to speak in public, their autonomy in livelihood decision processes, and their ownership in business enterprises. This research suggests creating more robust and gender sensitive policies in Bangladesh that can help achieve the United Nation’s goals of Sustainable Development.
Journal Article
Digital aspirations: ‘wrong‐number’ mobile‐phone relationships and experimental ethics among women entrepreneurs in rural Bangladesh
‘Wrong‐number’ mobile‐phone relationships are initiated by men dialling random numbers, but they enable young women entrepreneurs in Bangladesh to experiment with the boundaries of fearful excitement; negotiate purdah, dowry, and gender norms; and reimagine their futures. These virtual relationships thus constitute a field of cultural struggle for young women that involves ambivalence, ethical‐boundary work, cultural critique and the recognition of social alternatives, and the expansion of aspirations. These processes are vernacularized in women's notions of ‘being digital’, a Bangladeshi idiomatic response to the contradictions of contemporary social life. Aspirations digitales : relations par « faux numéros » sur téléphone portable et éthique expérimentale parmi les entrepreneuses du Bangladesh rural Résumé Les relations par « faux numéro » sur téléphone portable sont initiées par des hommes qui appellent des numéros au hasard. Pour les jeunes femmes entrepreneuses du Bangladesh, c'est un moyen d'explorer les limites des frissons d'excitation, de négocier purdah, dot et normes genrées et de réimaginer leur futur. Ces relations virtuelles constituent ainsi, pour ces jeunes femmes, un champ de lutte culturelle dans lequel s'inscrivent ambivalence, action à la limite de l’éthique, critique culturelle et reconnaissance des alternatives sociales, et élargissement des aspirations. Ces processus, que les femmes bangladaises appellent « être digitale » constituent une réponse vernaculaire aux contradictions de la vie sociale contemporaine.
Journal Article