ChapterPDF Available

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

Authors:

Abstract

The politics of gender, class, and sexuality has put women’s sexual diversity issues at the bottom of LGBT activism in Bangladesh. Focusing on women’s same-sex desires, this chapter specifically looks at a group of female sex workers who practice heterosexuality as labour and homosexuality as personal sexual desire. Choosing ‘lesbian’ as a strategic label to make space within LGBT discourse and activism, this group of women challenges the politics of sexual identity, labelling, and representation. These women’s ‘personal is/and political’ practices mark the emergence of ‘new sexualities’ in Bangladesh, and their almost invisible presence in an otherwise educated middle-class fabric of sexuality rights activism questions our middle-class framed understanding of heteronormativity, womanhood, sexualities, and rights discourses.
RETHINKING NEW
WOMANHOOD
Practices of Gender, Class, Culture
and Religion in South Asia
Edited by
NAZIA HUSSEIN
Rethinking New Womanhood
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
Nazia Hussein
Editor
Rethinking New
Womanhood
Practices of Gender, Class, Culture
and Religion in South Asia
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.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
© e Editor(s) (if applicable) and e Author(s) 2018
is work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
the whole or part of the material is concerned, specically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of
illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microlms or in any other physical way, and
transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar
or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed.
e use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication
does not imply, even in the absence of a specic statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant
protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
e publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book
are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or
the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any
errors or omissions that may have been made. e publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional
claims in published maps and institutional aliations.
Cover illustration: © JohnnyGreig/Getty Images
Printed on acid-free paper
is Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer International Publishing
AG part of Springer Nature.
e registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Editor
Nazia Hussein
Department of Sociology
Birmingham City University
Birmingham, UK
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
v
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
Contents
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
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Womens 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
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
vii
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? e
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, narrative
and lm with an emphasis on South Asia. She is the author of Transnationalism
Reversed: Women Organizing Against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh (2011),
List of Contributors
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
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, ction and creative non-ction 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 scientique
(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 eects of globalization and transnational circulations
of concepts, tools and funding. Her most recent publications include Dening
the “queers” in India: e 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
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
ix List of Contributors
research on women and religion’s representation in the media in Exchanges:
Warwick Research Journal. She also blogs for Kala 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 eir Families” (2017) in SAMAJ and “Reading the New Women
of Bangladesh rough 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 Kala.
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.
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
xi
List of Tables
e 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
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
1
© e Author(s) 2018
N. Hussein (ed.), Rethinking New Womanhood,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_1
Introduction
NaziaHussein
South Asian women are in crisis. e region has been identied as one of
the worst places in the world to be a female, along with sub-Saharan
Africa (World Vision 2016). South Asian women’s position in society is
constantly evaluated within patriarchal domination, right-wing national-
ism, religious fundamentalism, and capitalist exploitation. Under these
conditions, it has become essential to revisit the dynamic area of womens
identity constructions in the region.
Colonial nationalist discourse in India responded to similar condemna-
tion of tradition-bound Indian women by creating the image of the ‘new
woman’, who was culturally rened and educated, yet also a devoted wife
and mother. She represented a reformed tradition and nationalism based
on the grounds of modernity and also marked her superiority to Western
women, traditional Indian women, and low-class women (Chatterjee
1989). Partha Chatterjee (1989) called this a new patriarchy, which capi-
talised on women with the ambiguous honour of representing a distinc-
tively modern national culture. To respond to the present predicament of
N. Hussein (*)
Department of Sociology, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
2
the oppressed South Asian woman, we reconstruct contemporary ‘new
womanhood’ in the region as a self-constructed—as opposed to imposed
by patriarchal powers—agential complex intersectional identity. Using
poststructuralist methods and deconstructing classication systems and
discourses, this volume remakes ‘new women’ as those who perform con-
stant boundary work to expose, negotiate, and challenge the boundaries of
identity around ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’, culture and religion, local and
global, class hierarchy, and discourses around sexuality and feminism. e
purpose of the volume is to unpack and undo existing discourses around
South Asian womanhood in order to evaluate how women use their het-
erogeneous practices of ‘new womanhood’ as a privilege in neoliberal soci-
eties and the implications of these practices for gender relations.
To date, the impact of scholarship on gender in South Asia has been
centred around three things: new and innovative empirical studies to
broaden the eld of feminist research and its contribution to South Asian
studies such as religious fundamentalism, secularism, economic develop-
ment etc.; rethinking of theoretical concepts from various scholarly elds
such as colonialism, nationalism, women’s movements, human rights, war,
peace, globalisation, labour etc. (Loomba and Lukose 2012; Roy 2012),
and opening up new areas of inquiry that complicate the understanding of
gender through a focus on intersections between gender and class, caste,
ethnicity, sexuality, and religion (Fernandes 2014). is volume addresses
all three areas, primarily contributing to the third—reconguring ‘new
womanhood’ as a symbolic identity denoting ‘modern’ femininity at the
intersection of gender, class, culture, and religion in South Asia. Studying
‘new womanhood’ through these intersections enables a more complex,
dynamic, and plural understanding of the concept than the existing, exclu-
sively class-based ones. is volume provides disciplinary and interdisci-
plinary understandings of the concept, highlighting heterogeneous
constructions of the ‘new woman’. rough this focus on ‘new’, however,
we do not propose replacement of old categories of womanhood with
newer ones. Rather, we resist any boundaries of identication and highlight
the process of identity construction as one that is never ending and per-
petually unnished. e volume captures the depth and range of various
sites and expressions of femininities in the region today, addressing issues
like cultural and literary representation, sexualities, education, labour, fash-
ion, feminism, women’s empowerment, and domestic violence.
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
3
Redefining theThird-World Woman
For a long time, postcolonial feminists have been concerned, among
other things, with analysing and rejecting the production of the ‘third-
world woman’ as a singular, monolithic subject by both some Western
and some middle-class, urban third-world scholars (Mohanty 2003;
Mani 1992; Kandiyoti 1991; Spivak 1993). Both Western (in all its com-
plexities and contradictions) and local elite feminist scholars use textual
strategies to set themselves as the norm and codify others such as rural,
working class cultures and their struggles as ‘others’ to this norm. Recently,
three South Asian countries—Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India—were
placed in the top ve most dangerous countries to be born a woman by
omson Reuters Foundation (Bowcott 2011). Other South Asian coun-
tries appear no better. For example, in Bangladesh, studies of gender-
based violence identify social, economic, and political structures in the
country as discriminatory towards women, denying women any agency
or autonomy (Jahan 1994; White 1992; Zaman 1996, 1999). Similarly,
in the 1980s female factory workers in Bangladesh were presented as the
emblem of capitalist and patriarchal exploitation (Elson and Pearson
1981a, b; Chapkis and Enloe 1983). More contemporary scholarship
around Islam highlights fatwas1 against NGOs and credit institutions,
which are seen to be facilitating rural poor women’s independence, as
repressive religious measures against women (Feldman 1998; Hashmi
2000; Shehabuddin 1999; Shehabuddin 2008). Meanwhile the practice
of the Islamic veil or hijab is often identied as oppressive, agging the
need for partnership with Western organisations and cultures to set an
agenda for political action in the country.
Forceful critiques of the construction of the South Asian third-world
woman as a monolithic group oppressed by social structures have been
prominent in the region since colonial times. In historical writings Mani
(1992), Sunder Rajan (1993), Loomba (1993), and Sangari and Vaid
(1990) characterise women in colonial India as agents in political struggle
rather than passive victims of oppression. Generalisations about Islam’s
oppression of women in contemporary South Asia have been refuted
using Mahmood’s (2005) provocative exploration of the Eurocentric
understanding of the key feminist notion of agency and the need for
theorising religious agency in Bangladesh (Rozario 2006; Hussain 2010;
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
4
White 2010), Pakistan (Jamal 2012; Roomi and Harrison 2010), and
India (Kirmani 2013). In Sri Lanka, women have been redened by
Nesiah (2012) as agents of peace rather than just victims of conict
through a study of women’s inclusion in conict resolution and reconcili-
ation positions in state’s policy. Similarly, Abdela (2008) argues that in
Nepal, issues of land distribution, minority rights, and federalism- related
dierences between Maoists and the Seven Party Alliance are resolved
using woman-identied values, such as patience and empathy, in political
engagement.
Following this tradition, our theorisation of ‘new womanhood’ in
South Asia not only challenges the essentialised notion of the oppressed
‘third-world woman’ but also establishes ‘new women’ of South Asia as
part of a new and potentially powerful symbolic social group, whose aspi-
rations resemble what Mohanty (2003) identied as those of the privi-
leged of the world—located geographically in both the global North and
the South. South Asian ‘new women’ are symbolically produced through
the challenging of normative practices of gender and sexuality, new aspi-
rations around education, employment, fashion, and feminism, and self-
construction of their identity as global neoliberal subjects.
Redefining ‘New Woman’
e nineteenth-century Victorian ‘new woman’ has been congured as a
type, a symbol, and a gure of feminist rebellion. Predominantly a jour-
nalistic phenomenon—a product of discourse—the ‘new woman’ with
her short haircut and practical dress, her demand for access to higher
education and to voting and income rights, challenged the accepted views
of femininity and female sexuality as docile and subservient. e new
woman was viewed as an ambiguous gure who triggered both anxiety
and debate in Victorian Britain (Beetham and Heilmann 2004, p.1). e
concept was a somewhat semi-ctional one, with only some precise simi-
larities with the lived experiences of the upper middle-class feminists of
the late nineteenth-century women’s movements (Ledger 1997, p. 3).
e ‘new woman’ was set in opposition to the ‘pure’ and ‘traditional’
identity of the Victorian woman, who was a nurturing wife, subordinate,
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
5
and dependent on her husband with a strong emphasis on cultural purity,
virtue, integrity, and honour—which symbolised the Victorians’ respect-
ability in society (Beetham and Heilmann 2004).
During the same period in New Zealand, the new woman was pre-
sented in similar ways—in rational dress, especially knickerbockers, and
frequently riding a bicycle (Simpson 2001). Unlike in Britain, however,
New Zealand’s new woman tried to reconcile her position with conven-
tional beliefs about femininity to create alternative yet respectable identi-
ties (ibid.:54). Particularly when riding a bicycle, they employed a number
of ‘protective’ strategies, such as ignoring remarks from bystanders, riding
in groups, and avoiding certain streets and places where they might nd
themselves in vulnerable situations in relation to unwelcome attention.
In the early twentieth century in Germany, China (Schmid 2014),
Korea (Suh 2013), and Uzbekistan (Kamp 2011), the ‘new woman
became a symbol of social transformation through women’s education,
participation in paid work, consumerism, social freedom, fashion, and
beauty practices. Women’s increased access to jobs, education, and par-
ticipation in consumer culture through their income oered them greater
independence from superstitions, arranged marriages, and extended fam-
ily settings in rural areas, and granted access to Western fashion. But soon
after, the ‘new woman’s’ lifestyle choices, such as night-time socialising in
dance halls and bars in Berlin and Shanghai or provocative Western
clothes and hairstyles in Korea, began to be associated with sexual pro-
miscuity and immoral consumption. ‘New women’ were blamed for the
ills of society due to their excessive spending on Western fashion pollut-
ing national culture, loss of sexual and moral order due to increased par-
ticipation in night life, and nally increased presence in the labour force
and the drop in childbearing (Schmid 2014).
Colonial literature in India represents ‘new women’ as those who prac-
tised respectable femininity within the home and the public sphere, as
opposed to the understanding of the ‘new woman’ in other parts of the
world as a symbol of decadence. e middle-class ‘new Indian woman’
was expected to acquire education and cultural renement which would
make her a worthy companion to her husband, but she would not lose
her feminine spiritual (domestic) virtues or jeopardise her place in the
home (Chatterjee 1989, p.628; Gilbertson 2011, p.119). New women’s
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
6
nationalism, femininity, and middle-class morality were evident in their
merits of pativrata (the perfect wife) (Leslie 1989), merged with the
Victorian image of the ‘perfect lady’ (Banerjee 2006, p.78). During the
early and mid-nineteenth century, the Indian nationalists split the domain
of culture into two spheres—the inner domestic and spiritual worlds of
women, which represented the Indian nations true identity; and the outer
material world of men, which fostered Western modernisation. e
domestic and spiritual ‘new women’ of colonial India marked India’s ‘own
version of modernity’ and the country’s anti-colonial stance. e nation-
alist ideology of the middle-class Indian woman and her domestic virtue
distinguished ‘new women’ from both Western culture and the ‘tradi-
tional’ or ‘low-class’ India (Chatterjee 1989). is ‘new woman’ is also
visible in various colonial literatures (Roye 2016; Bezbaruah 2016; Azim
2002; Chatterjee 1989). It is worth noting that despite this divide
between the public and private, many women of the time, both Hindu
and Muslim, such as the Muslim writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain, par-
ticipated actively through their writing in the nationalist movement to
free India from imperialist power and at the same time to free women
from the seclusion of the home (Azim 2010).
Hence, the ‘new woman’ of the nineteenth and early twentieth centu-
ries was the female gure of ‘modernity’, which took its own course in
dierent parts of the world, breaking the boundaries of normative forms
of femininity through education, paid work, visibility in the public
sphere, redening sexuality, and fashion. In this volume, to study postco-
lonial South Asia, we use Partha Chatterjee’s (1997) conceptualisation of
‘our’ modernity, which he denes as the experiences of societies which
entered modernity under double violence—the violence of imperialism
and the violence of alien structures of modernity such as capitalism,
industrialisation, individuation, and the gradual decline of communal
forms of belonging. South Asia’s history of colonialism distinguishes its
own version of modernity from the European one. For postcolonial soci-
eties, contemporary processes of globalisation, migration, and capitalism
are not new phenomena but build upon older histories of colonialism,
race, and empire (Loomba and Lukose 2012). While Western modernity
looks at the present as the site of one’s escape from the past, ‘our’ moder-
nity sees the past as when there was beauty, prosperity, and a healthy
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
7
sociability. Hence, postcolonial South Asia’s relationship with modernity
is ambiguous; to fashion ‘our’ modernity, we need to have the courage to
reject the modernities established by others (Chatterjee 1997, p.20). In
this volume, we see past and present, the local and the global as necessar-
ily interconnected. e regional framework of this volume should not be
misread as local to South Asia only; rather, we scrutinise the politics of
the postcolonial local to understand the relationship between the local
and the global.
Contemporary ‘New Women’ ofSouth Asia
Contemporary perspectives on ‘new womanhood’ in South Asia can be
categorised into two groups: the ‘new woman’ represented in the media
and literature and the ‘new woman’ engaged in neoliberal economy, con-
sumerism, and transnational mobility, constantly negotiating with social,
political, and economic changes around her.
Constructions of the ‘new Indian woman’ have been analysed by femi-
nist scholars through explorations of media such as television commer-
cials (Sunder Rajan 1993; Munshi 2001), beauty pageants (Oza 2001;
Runkle 2004), popular magazines (Daya 2009; apan 2004), and nov-
els (Daya 2010; Mahajan 2015; Roye 2016; Bezbaruah 2016). ese
depict ‘Indian new women’ as an ‘object’ and their bodies as the surface
upon which contradictory cultural messages are inscribed through a
depiction of past and present, local and global, traditional and modern
(Talukdar and Linders 2013). However, the majority of this literature is
limited to studies of women’s bodies as a vehicle of expressing ‘supercial
modernity’, failing to penetrate beyond appearance. apans (2004)
study of Indian women’s magazines demonstrates that magazines project
new Indian women’s bodies as glamorous through their choice of con-
sumer goods, yet emphasise that such a lifestyle can be achieved by Indian
women who are status conscious, economically independent, capable of
taking decisions, ‘modern’, yet enshrined in tradition through adherence
to family and national values, thus expressing their Indianness (ibid.,
p. 410). Similarly, in the Bollywood movie English Vinglish, the ‘new
woman’ protagonist is a model of development and modernisation
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
8
who embraces crossing borders to the USA, seeking opportunities to
learn a new language and lifestyle, and moving beyond the restrictions of
the local and traditional, yet remains Indian, Hindu, nationalist, family-
bound, and domestic—legitimising truly Indian qualities of motherhood
and wifely duties (Chatterjee 2016). However, some alternative perspec-
tives are also available. Hard Kaur, an Indian-born, British-raised female
hip-hop artist, is dened as the ‘new Desi (of homeland) woman’ who
represents young, transnational, future-oriented, capable, and assertive
postcolonial femininity, as opposed to meek, subservient, docile femi-
ninities of the past (Dattatreyan 2015).
Like the majority of the studies in India, the Bangladeshi media repre-
sentation of ‘new woman’ is similar to the Victorian new woman, who
represented the fallen woman, thus not respectable, a contrast to the
‘angel in the house’ image of ideal domestic womanhood, the respectable
ones. e ‘new woman’ represented in Bangladeshi media, particularly in
television, is professional, ‘modern’, ‘bold’, and ‘outrageous’ (Begum
2008). In terms of appearance, the new woman in Bangladeshi media has
short hair and wears the sari in a modern way2, demonstrating her edu-
cated middle-class taste. Yet Begum notes how the narrative of the dra-
mas often depicts these women as a dark force, disobedient of elders, who
behave outside the prevalent value system of joint families, engage in
immoral consumerism, and reject caring and nurturing roles. Hussein’s
(2017a, b) research participants self-identify as new women but disavow
media representation of modern women as ‘new woman’. As new women
audiences, the participants argue that the Bangladeshi media represents
either traditional women bound by patriarchal oppression or Westernised
overambitious and hypersexual women; both representations fail to cap-
ture the complexities of new women’s lives, which intersect with gender,
class, and cultural and religious systems simultaneously. Alternatively,
Chowdhury (2010) identies the ‘new woman’ in Bangladeshi media as
an ‘ecient’, ‘skilled’, and ‘trained’ development professional, whose
(middle) class position allows her to transcend gendered vulnerabilities
and assume the role of ‘feminist saviour’, rescuing the poor, rural, unedu-
cated women who are victims of the patriarchal system of society (ibid.,
p.316). Chowdhury argues that representation of the new woman as
saviour of women victims symbolises her as an agent of neo-patriarchal
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
9
relations among dierentially located women and reects a consensual
(patron) and contractual (the one to be saved) structure of patriarchy,
much like that between men and women: the development expert who
provides services to the client.
Feminist scholars have drawn on Partha Chatterjee’s (1989) theorisa-
tion whereby negation of private and public or home and outside world
is used to explain classed gender subjectivities and the practices that
dene postcolonial new women. is is most prominent in economically
liberalised India, particularly in the 1990s, where a substantial amount
of research that addresses contemporary Indian womens balance of old
and new, traditional and modern, and national and Western conceptual-
ises these women as middle-class new women. With a strong emphasis
on class and gender, Radhakrishnan (2011) identies the Indian new
women as IT workers who are urban, upper-caste, educated, English-
speaking professionals, who identify with the symbolic and cultural
identities of India’s middle class and are bearers of nationalist, family-
and home- centred Indian culture, yet economically are a segment of the
global elite class (ibid., p.8). ey are ‘at the frontline of the global
economy, and assert their symbolic position at the helm of new India’
(ibid., p.5). Talukdar and Linders (2013) identify new liberal Indian
women as part of a modest segment of a ‘new’ middle class, who cannot
be dened solely through material signs (e.g. income, wealth, work, edu-
cation) but are new in terms of their distinctive social and political iden-
tity, which is an outcome of their close encounter with liberalisation
(ibid., p.108). In Bangladesh, the class reference remains intact, and
‘new womanhood’ is dened as urban middle-class women, whose edu-
cation and profession provide them with the respectability and ‘accept-
ability’ to live their lives on their own terms (Karim 2010; Hussein
2015). Living ‘on their own terms’ may include non-heteronormative
relationships (Karim 2010), avoiding the stigma of divorce (Parvez
2011), hybrid fashion, 50-50 work-life balance, and female individuali-
sation (Hussein 2015). Feminist concerns in Bangladesh have changed
to address ‘new’ women of the country who are ghting for their rights
around sexuality, marriage, transnational mobility, and paid employ-
ment, rather than motherhood, children, and housework, considered
matters relevant for previous generations of women (Azim 2007).
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
10
Although ‘new womanhood’ did not gain as much attention in feminist
research in other parts of South Asia, like Pakistan, Nepal, and Sri Lanka,
these countries still address ‘new’ practices of femininities as legitimate,
such as career aspirations and female militancy in Sri Lanka (Fernando
and Cohen 2013; iranagama 2014), romantic love, fashion, and com-
modied beauty practices in Nepal (Liechty 2003), and religious moder-
nity in Pakistan (Jamal 2013; Toor 2014). Although the public discourses
around ‘new womanhood’ in South Asia raise important questions about
gendered postcolonial modernity, they are also a useful tool to analyse the
permeable boundaries of gender, class, and cultural and religious norms
and to evaluate how ‘new women’, whether as an object in the media or as
a subject outside of it, can test these boundaries and self-construct them-
selves as the ‘new woman’.
‘New women’ of South Asia distance themselves from other women
within their country and from Western women, creating inter- and intra-
group distinctions in their communities (Hussein 2015, 2017a, b).
Distinctions are drawn in four ways. First, class boundaries are drawn
between ‘aggressive’ westernised women, who give up their families to ful-
l career goals, and respectable middle-class women, who are ‘not so ambi-
tious’ and view a career as a supplement to married life and children
(Radhakrishnan 2011, p. 149). It is also recognised that many women
must assume the breadwinner role in families and use their economic
power to hire domestic help to look after their family (ibid., p.153).
Others co-opt other female family members such as mothers-in-law, or
paid household help, who carry out new women’s domestic chores for
them, so they can achieve 50–50 work-life balance and maintain respect-
ability (Hussein 2017a, b). In Nepal, Liechty (2003) demonstrates that
middle-class women constantly distance themselves from prostitutes, who
are from the lower classes and sexually available in the public sphere, as
opposed to the respectable middle-class women who are visible in the pub-
lic sphere, but are still within the bounds of middle-class sexual propriety.
Existing literature on ‘new women’ in South Asia constructs them as those
practising respectable femininity, which is fundamentally a middle- class
symbolic capital. But as Saba Hussain in this volume articulates, respect-
able femininity is associated with larger progress of communities and
nations and an expectation of enactment by individual women and girls
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
11
from all class backgrounds. Such a discourse of respectable femininity
helps reimagine nations like India as developed and communities like
Hindus and Muslims as modern or progressive. Elora Chowdhury expands
this further in her chapter by arguing how narratives of ‘[new] women’s
uplift’ and emancipation in the region fail to convey the precarity of the
everyday struggles of ‘new women’, regardless of their class, living on the
borders of neoliberal progress.
Second, cultural boundaries construct ideal femininity through wom-
en’s conscious engagement with cultural and nationalist attires such as
the sari and the containment of the sexuality or ‘wayward modernity’ of
the West. But Indian ‘new women’ merge cultural boundaries through
hybrid physical appearance, combining national and Western fashion,
body size (thinness), and make-up. However, such hybrid sartorial choices
are often condemned by womens parents-in-law in India (apan 2009).
But professional women have challenged such scrutiny by their families
through negotiation and strategising to practise multiple fashions in the
diverse locations of workplace and family (ibid., p. 130). As Nazia
Hussein demonstrates in this volume, in Bangladesh ‘new women’ par-
ticipants merge the boundaries of various classed, cultural, and religious
clothing practices to construct hybrid and context-specic ‘smart’ cloth-
ing practices as a distinctive practice of new womanhood. Finally, in
terms of religious boundaries, in Pakistan Jamal (2013) demonstrates
how women of Jamaat-e-Islami, an Islamic political party, embrace
‘modernity’ in relation to education, employment, political participation,
and so on, yet reject notions of individual autonomy in matters of reli-
gious beliefs and practices. In this volume, Virginie Dutoya claims that
Pakistani Muslim heroine characters in television serials claim their ‘new
womanness’ through disassociating themselves from the superstition and
ignorance of uneducated Muslim women and the arrogance of Western
female heroines on cable television, simultaneously negotiating the
boundaries of religion and culture. Similarly, Nandita Ghosh in the vol-
ume studies a Brahmin new woman character who eats non-vegetarian
food, rejects arranged marriage, and has a boyfriend—all practices far
outside the parameters of Hindu upper-caste Brahminical norms.
is volume also expands the above-mentioned boundaries to gender
and geographical boundaries. Gender boundaries are drawn by agging
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
12
practices of ‘new femininities’ located within the context of material
existence that are fullled through consumer goods but also through
recognition of women’s desires and approaches of queering gender and
sex. Queer groups have shifted from rooting their claims for rights of
same- sex relationships and gender nonconformity to sex workers’ rights,
women’s choices and practises of sexualities, and gender identities. In
this volume Karim claims the acknowledgement of sexuality as part of
constructions and expressions of new femininities and womanhood—
particularly recognising women’s sexuality in its plurality within the
realms of various public/private spaces that they occupy. For geographi-
cal boundaries, Elora Chowdhury and Sushmita Chatterjee in this vol-
ume rightly note that it is also important to scrutinise transnational
circulations of narratives of women’s liberation and feminism in the
South. Chowdhury focuses on transnational media representation of
Bangladeshi female garment workers exposing structural inequality of
globalisation, colonial relations between capitalist West and certain
populations in the global South who are subjected to extreme violence
and suering. In her exploration of ‘new feminisms’ in India which are
adaptations of feminist movements often identied as Western, Chat-
terjee questions the very construction of geographical boundaries when
it comes to feminist politics.
e chapters in this volume suggest that boundaries of a variety of
social categories determine ‘new womanness’ across time and space. In
this way, without explicitly identifying as an intersectional study, the
majority of the chapters of the book articulate ‘new womanhood’ as a
complex, intersectional, and heterogeneous identity. In the following sec-
tion, I explain the concept of boundary work as the primary tool for the
analysis of ‘new womanhood’ in this volume.
Boundary Work ofNew Women
It is necessary to embed an empirical volume on South Asian ‘new woman-
hood’ into wider theories of boundaries and boundary work. Practices of
‘new womanhood’ constantly challenge and reinvent boundaries of gender/
sexuality, class, culture, and religion. A classical element of the social sci-
ence tool kit, the idea of boundaries, has gained much renewed interest in
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
13
studies of social and collective identity. Studying social relations through
the concept of boundaries allows us an insight into how subjects create,
maintain, negotiate, contest, and recreate social dierences, for example,
gender, sexuality, class, culture, and religion. It also enables us to look at
cultural mechanisms of production of hybrid cultures. Lamont (1992)
denes boundary work as personal investment in identity, ‘an intrinsic part
of the process of constituting the self; they [boundaries] emerge when we
try to dene who we are: we constantly draw inferences concerning our
similarities to, and dierences from, others, indirectly producing typica-
tion systems’ (ibid., p.11). Lamont’s acknowledgement of ‘typication sys-
tems’ indicates that boundary work guides and organises both the self and
other social identities into categories. Boundary properties, for example,
permeability, salience, durability, and visibility, as well as mechanisms ‘asso-
ciated with the activation, maintenance, transposition or the dispute,
bridging, crossing and dissolution of boundaries’ (Lamont and Molnar
2002, p.187) are particularly important for the studies in this volume.
Practices of new womanhood are a form of symbolic boundary work
that separates these women into a symbolic group based on feelings of
similarity and group membership that crosses national and regional bor-
ders. New women are a symbolic group or practices of new womanhood
are a symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1992) that women studied in this vol-
ume adopt to establish their distinction from other women. Symbolic
capital is the form any other kind of capital (economic-money, property;
cultural-education, fashion; social friends and community relations) can
take once they are perceived and recognised as legitimate. is process of
legitimisation is a key mechanism in the conversion of symbolic capital
(Skeggs 1997, p.8). Legitimisation occurs when one’s privileged taste and
capitals are considered part of one’s ‘natural’ capacity, misrecognising all
others as inferior and reproducing dominance of the privileged. In this
volume, new women legitimise heterogeneous practices of gender such as
lesbian and asexual identities (Karim, Ghosh), hybrid cultural practices
such as fusion clothing and context-specic aesthetic labour (Hussein,
Adhikari), reinvention of respectable femininity not just as a middle-class
capital but as an aspiration for all classes (Hussain), shifting gender order
within patriarchy (Kirmani, Dutoya) and new womans transnational dis-
positions (Chowdhury, Hussein, Chatterjee). Hence, new womanhood is
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
14
an essential medium through which women acquire status and distinction
and monopolise resources and create social boundaries (e.g. sexual, cul-
tural, or religious).
‘distinctions can be expressed through normative interdictions (taboos),
cultural attitudes and practices, and patterns of likes and dislikes. ey play
an important role in the creation of inequality and the exercise of power…
[it] also refers to the internal distinctions of classication systems and to
temporal, spatial, and visual cognitive distinctions in particular’ (Lamont
et al. 2015, p.850).
For this volume gender as an intersectional subjectivity is not pre-
reexive or unconscious. e chapters of the volume recognise the ambiv-
alent and nuanced eorts of the dominated—in this case women—to
capture subjecthood wanting to change and adapt with an ability to add
value to themselves. e volume demonstrates femininities—for us, new
womanhood—as agential, heterogeneous, and uid subjectivities in
which individuals make their own choices, are critical of their situations,
and think and organise, individually or collectively, against oppression.
Such a construction of South Asian women as political subjects, as opposed
to docile and oppressed objects, challenges the ‘oppressed postcolonial
women’ predicament in dominant South Asian gender perspectives.
In this endeavour, the volume is organised around two major themes:
(a) politics of representation—new woman in literature and the media,
and (b) practices of gender, sexuality, class, culture, and religion—new
women subjects in everyday life. Within the thematic sections, the
chapters provide original research ndings and critical assessment of the
eld of scholarship under consideration. e chapters make two signi-
cant intellectual contributions. First, they expand, challenge, and help
reconceptualise existing approaches to the study of women and gender in
South Asia and the global South. However, these revisions are in continu-
ous dialogue with mainstream women and gender studies in the global
North, providing a global perspective on gender. Second, the studies in
the volume develop and expand the eld of South Asian studies. e
chapters show how rethinking constructions and practices of women and
gender can contribute to new developments in studies of the region.
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
15
Politics ofRepresentation: New Woman
inLiterature andtheMedia
Scholars’ unpacking representations of ‘new woman’ as an object in the
media, literature, or beauty pageants has deepened contemporary under-
standing of the ways in which conceptions of the global intersect with
nationalist narratives and of the ways in which new subjectivities are
positioned in liminal spaces, unable to be reduced to xed identity cate-
gories or social locations. e chapters in this section expand our under-
standing of the representation of women, culture, nation, and identity in
India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
Nandita Ghosh uses an innovative approach of ‘border as method’ to
examine how women’s bodies and sexuality serve as important boundary
markers of power and citizenship, of violence and exclusion, and of
negotiation and transformation. rough the theory of ‘border strug-
gles’, Ghosh analyses how women resist constraints and open up new
possibilities in two selected novels from the 1980s and 1990s and in the
news coverage of the 2012 Park Street rape case of Suzette Jordan in
Kolkata, India. She shows us how India’s 30-year national discourse of
modernity and neoliberalism stumbles when encountering the non-sub-
missive female bodies of ‘new women’. Elora Chowdhury uses visual and
literary representations of Bangladeshi women in the garment industry
to highlight the emerging identities of the empowered woman in the
capitalist workforce, as well as structural inequalities that constrain their
autonomy. She questions racialised and gendered labour in the context of
the neoliberal capitalist globalisation of the political economy and denes
‘new women’ as dutiful workers dependent on wages who are neither
self- sucient nor autonomous, yet are socially constructed as emanci-
pated through narratives of capitalist modernity. Virginie Dutoya shifts
our focus to pro-women television dramas of metropolitan Pakistan,
which explicitly address ‘women’s issues’ such as child marriage, polyg-
amy, violence, the right to education, or parents’ preference for boys. She
argues that these drama serials respond to the representation of the vic-
tim status of Pakistani women in the international media, which has
become a source of ‘national shame’ for the country.
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
16
Practices ofGender, Sexuality, Class, Culture,
andReligion: New Women Subjects
inEveryday Life
Formulations of ‘new woman’ subjects have been most diverse in dierent
time periods and spaces. e ‘new’ is often presented as a harbinger of
modernity and progress, a code for the eclipse of tradition by wayward
modernity, and nally a result of global discourses around capitalism and
cosmopolitanism. In this volume, following contemporary feminist
trends, we provide a picture of women’s emancipation, initiated, devel-
oped, and achieved by women themselves to gain value as a ‘new woman’
in their respective societies. is is done through exploring social catego-
ries of class, culture, religion, and sexuality.
ree chapters in this section address intersections of gender and class
through the concept of ‘respectable femininity’ without explicitly using
intersectionality as a theoretical framework. Nazia Hussein uses women’s
sartorial choices as a tool to argue that by merging boundaries of class and
respectable vs. ‘modern’ clothing practices Bangladeshi neoliberal middle-
class women self-construct their ‘new womanhood’, at the intersection of
gender, class, culture, and religion (Islam). Her analysis frames the sym-
bolic value of ‘new womanhood’ as a marker of departure from the
boundaries and constrictions of national culture and religious (Islamic)
norms within which most gender scholarship of the region has been con-
ned. Mona Adhikari researches hotels and casinos in Nepal to assess
how women workers maintain respectability while conforming and nego-
tiating with organisational policies of aesthetic and sexualised labour.
Saba Hussain provides an unprecedented explanation of practices of ‘new
girlhood’ among Muslim girls from diverse class backgrounds in Assam
through balancing career and marital aspirations. She uses concepts of
respectability, ‘appropriate aspirations’, and post-feminist girlhoods,
eectively highlighting future pathways of ‘new woman’ research both in
South Asia and more globally.
Nida Kirmani explores the impact of engagement in paid work on
women’s empowerment and, in particular, on their ability to negotiate and
resist violence at the hands of their husbands and other family members.
She argues that, despite the persistence of patriarchal structures, womens
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
17
narratives demonstrate the emergence of new models of womanhood at
the local level as a result of paid employment, which provides their fami-
lies opportunities of social mobility (in class structure) and cultural shifts
enabling women to challenge abusers and end abusive relationships.
Shuchi Karim looks at a group of Bangladeshi female sex workers who
practise heterosexuality as labour and homosexuality as personal sexual
desire, questioning politics of sexual diversity. She argues that these sex
workers’ ‘personal is/and political’ practices, and their almost invisible
presence in an otherwise educated middle-class fabric of sexuality rights
activism, question our middle-class-framed understanding of heteronor-
mativity, womanhood, sexualities, and rights discourses in Bangladesh.
Finally, Sushmita Chatterjee studies Blank Noise, the Pink Chaddi cam-
paign, Besharmi Morcha, and other forms of urban feminist activism in
India as ‘new feminisms’ to rethink the complex, hybrid nature of new
feminist theory and activism to ‘counter-perform’ the language of the
oppression of women in South Asia. She provides a timely review of Indian
feminisms’ engagement with ‘Western’ feminist activism and future path-
ways for feminist activism in the country.
Trends andDirections
e chapters in this volume capture the richness and diversity of feminist
scholarship on ‘new women’ of South Asia. We defy any attempts at gen-
eralisation of a complex region and the complex concept of ‘new woman-
hood’. We provide an important review of the key debates that have
emerged from feminist scholarship on ‘new womanhood’ and reveal a
range of methods and substantive new themes that preoccupy contempo-
rary feminist scholars. Apart from challenging monolithic constructions
of oppressed ‘South Asian woman’, this volume introduces new
approaches and challenges to existing paradigms in the study of gender
and inequality. In this attempt, we have recreated ‘new womanhood’ not
just as a middle-class gender identity, like the existing studies available on
the concept, but rather as a symbolic identity that can be assumed by
women of any class, culture, and religion to traverse binaries of local and
global, tradition and modernity, oppression and empowerment, change
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
18
and stasis to recognise that women themselves construct and reconstruct
their identities in relation to societal change. We argue that ‘new wom-
en’s’ gains are vested in a wider feminist politics and they have the poten-
tial to positively inuence the terrain of possibilities for all women.
Notes
1. A ruling on a point of Islamic law given by a recognised authority.
2. A sari can be draped in numerous styles. In the modern style most of the
cloth is draped around the waist with a single segment going across the
breasts and the left shoulder to cover the upper body. e midri is left
bare in this style of wearing a sari.
References
Abdela, L. 2008. When Will they Ever Learn? Women, Men and Peace-building.
Open Democracy. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/democ-
racy_power/5050/women_men_peace_building. Accessed 16 Aug 2017.
Azim, F. 2002. Women and Freedom. Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3 (3): 395–405.
———. 2007. Women and Religion in Bangladesh: New Paths. Open
Democracy. Available at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/article/women_
and_religion_in_bangladesh_new_paths. Accessed 12 Jan 2015.
———. 2010. Getting to Know You, or the Formation of Inter-Asian Identities.
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 11 (2): 165–173.
Banerjee, S. 2006. Subverting the Moral Universe: ‘Narratives of Transgression’
in the Construction of Middle-Class Identity in Colonial Bengal. In Beyond
Representation: Colonial and Postcolonial Constructions of Indian Identity, ed.
C.Bates. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Beetham, M., and A. Heilmann. 2004. New Woman Hybridities: Femininity,
Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930. London: Routledge.
Begum, A. 2008. Magical Shadows: Women in the Bangladeshi Media. Dhaka:
South Asian Publishers.
Bezbaruah, R. 2016. e Voice of Subaltern: Indira Goswami’s Giribala.
International Journal of Innovative Research and Development 5 (6): 240–242.
Bourdieu, P. 1992. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
19
Bowcott, O. 2011. Afghanistan Worst Place in the World for Women, but India
in Top Five. Guardian [online] 15 June Available at: https://www.theguard-
ian.com/world/2011/jun/15/worst-place-women-afghanistan-india.
Accessed 14 Aug 2017.
Chapkis, W., and C.Enloe, eds. 1983. Of Common Cloth: Women in the Global
Textile Industry. Amsterdam: e Transnational Institute.
Chatterjee, P. 1989. Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonialized Women: e
Contest in India. American Ethnologist 16 (4): 622–633.
———. 1997. Our Modernity. Rotterdam: Sephis.
Chatterjee, S. 2016. ‘English Vinglish’ and Bollywood: What Is ‘New’ About
the ‘New Woman’? Gender, Place & Culture 23 (8): 1179–1192.
Chowdhury, E.H. 2010. Feminism and its ‘Other’: Representing the ‘New
Woman’ of Bangladesh. Gender, Place and Culture 17 (3): 301–318.
Dattatreyan, E.G. 2015. Hard Kaur: Broadcasting the New Desi Woman.
Communication, Culture & Critique 8 (1): 20–36.
Daya, S. 2009. Embodying Modernity: Reading Narratives of Indian Women’s
Sexual Autonomy and Violation. Gender, Place and Culture 16 (1): 97–110.
———. 2010. Eating, Serving, and Self-Realisation: Food and Modern
Identities in Contemporary Indian Women’s Writing. Social & Cultural
Geography 11 (5): 475–489.
Elson, D., and R.Pearson. 1981a. Nimble Fingers Make Cheap Workers’: An
Analysis of Women’s Employment in ird World Export Manufacturing.
Feminist Review 7: 87–107.
———. 1981b. e Subordination of Women and the Internationalization of
Factory Production. In Of Marriage and the Market, ed. K. Young,
C.Wolkowitz, and R.McCullagh. London: CS Books.
Feldman, S. 1998. (Re)presenting Islam: Manipulating Gender, Shifting State
Practices, and Class Frustrations in Bangladesh. In Appropriating Gender:
Women’s Activism and Politicized Religion in South Asia, ed. P. Jeery and
A.Basu. NewYork/London: Routledge.
Fernandes, L., ed. 2014. Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia. London/
New York: Routledge.
Fernando, W.D.A., and L.Cohen. 2013. Respectable Femininity and Career Agency:
Exploring Paradoxical Imperatives. Gender, Work & Organization 21 (2): 141–169.
Gilbertson, A. 2011. Within the Limits: Respectability, Class and Gender in
Hyderabad. Ph.D.University of Oxford.
Hashmi, Taj I. 2000. Women and Islam in Bangladesh: Beyond Subjection and
Tyranny. London: Macmillan Press Ltd..
Hussain, N.A. 2010. Religion and Modernity: Gender and Identity politics in
Bangladesh. Women’s Studies International Forum 33: 325–333.
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
20
Hussein, N. 2015. Boundaries of Respectability: New Women of Bangladesh.
Ph.D.University of Warwick.
———. 2017a. Negotiating Middle-Class Respectable Femininity: Bangladeshi
Women and their Families. SAMAJ 16: 1–21.
———. 2017b. Reading the New Women of Bangladesh through Mobile
Phone Advertisements. In Media and Cultural Identity: Texts and Contexts, ed.
Z.H.Raju, and Asaduzzaman. Dhaka: University Press Ltd.
Jahan, R. 1994. Hidden Danger: Women and Family Violence in Bangladesh.
Dhaka: Women for Women: Research and Study Group.
Jamal, A. 2012. Global Discourses, Situated Traditions, and Muslim Women’s
Agency in Pakistan. In South Asian Feminisms, ed. A.Loomba and R.Lukose.
Durham/London: Duke University Press.
———. 2013. Jamaat-e-Islami Women in Pakistan: Vanguard of a New Modernity?
NewYork: Syracuse University Press.
Kamp, M. 2011. e New Woman in Uzbekistan: Islam, Modernity, and Unveiling
Under Communism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Kandiyoti, D., ed. 1991. Women, Islam and the State. London: Macmillan.
Karim, S. 2010. Living Sexualities and Not Talking ‘Straight’: Understanding
Non- Heterosexual Women’s Sexuality in Urban Middle-class Bangladesh.
OIDA International Journal of Sustainable Development 1 (6): 67–78.
Kirmani, N. 2013. Questioning the ‘Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an
Urban Indian Locality. London/New Delhi: Routledge.
Lamont, M. 1992. Money, Morals, and Manners: e Culture of the French and
the American Upper-middle Class. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lamont, M., and V. Molnár. 2002. e Study of Boundaries in the Social
Sciences. Annual review of sociology 28 (1): 167–195.
Lamont, M., S. Pendergrass, and M.Pachucki. 2015. Symbolic Boundaries.
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences 23: 850–855.
Ledger, S. 1997. e New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the n de siècle.
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Leslie, J.1989. e Perfect Wife: e Orthodox Hindu Woman According to the
Stridharmapaddhati of Tryambakayajvan. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Liechty, M. 2003. Suitably Modern: Making Middle-class Culture in a New
Consumer Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Loomba, A. 1993. Dead Women Tell No Tales: Issues of Female Subjectivity,
Subaltern Agency and Tradition in Colonial and Post-colonial Writings on
Widow Immolation in India. History Workshop 36: 209–227.
Loomba, A., and R.A. Lukose, eds. 2012. South Asian Feminisms. Durham/
London: Duke University Press.
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
21
Mahajan, P. 2015. Evolution of New Woman: A New Façade of Indian Culture
in the Select Novels of Manju Kapur and Shobha De. International Journal of
Social Science and Humanity 5 (2): 200–203.
Mahmood, S. 2005. Politics of Piety: e Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Mani, L. 1992. Cultural History, Colonial Texts: Reading Eyewitness Accounts
of Widow Burning. In Cultural Studies, ed. L.Grossberg, C.Nelson, and
P.Treichler. London: Routledge.
Mohanty, C. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing eory, Practicing
Solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Munshi, S. 2001. Marvellous Me: e Beauty Industry and the Construction of
the ‘Modern’ Indian Woman. In Images of the ‘Modern Woman’ in Asia: Global
Media, Local Meanings, ed. S.Munshi. Richmond: Curzon.
Nesiah, V. 2012. Uncomfortable Alliances: Women, Peace and Security in Sri
Lanka. In South Asian Feminisms, ed. A.Loomba and R.Lukose. Durham/
London: Duke University Press.
Oza, R. 2001. Showcasing India: Gender, Geography, and Globalization. Signs:
Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26: 1067–1095.
Parvez, K. N. 2011. Social Changes and Women-Initiated Divorce in Dhaka,
Bangladesh: Gaining or Losing Power? M.Phil. e University of Bergen.
Radhakrishnan, S. 2011. Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New
Transnational Class. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Roomi, M.A., and P. Harrison. 2010. Behind the Veil: Women-only
Entrepreneurship Training in Pakistan. International Journal of Gender and
Entrepreneurship 2 (2): 150–172.
Roy, S., ed. 2012. New South Asian Feminisms: Paradoxes and Possibilities.
London/New York: Zed Books Ltd.
Roye, S. 2016. Politics of Sculpting the ‘New’ Indian Woman in Premchand’s
Stories: Everything the Mem is Not. South Asia Research 36 (2): 229–240.
Rozario, S. 2006. e New Burqa in Bangladesh: Empowerment or Violation of
Women’s Rights? Women’s Studies International Forum 29: 368–380.
Runkle, S. 2004. Making Miss India: Constructing Gender, Power and the
Nation. South Asian Popular Culture 2: 145–159.
Sangari, K., and S.Vaid, eds. 1990. Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial
History. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Schmid, C. 2014. e ‘New Woman’, Gender Roles and Urban Modernism in
Interwar Berlin and Shanghai. Journal of International Women’s Studies 15
(1): 1–17.
Shehabuddin, E. 1999. Beware the Bed of Fire: Gender, Democracy, and the
Jama’at-i-Islami in Bangladesh. Journal of Women’s History 10 (4): 148–171.
Introduction
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
22
———. 2008. Reshaping the Holy: Democracy Development and Muslim Women
in Bangladesh. NewYork: Columbia University Press.
Simpson, C. 2001. Respectable Identities: New Zealand Nineteenth-Century
‘New Women’ on Bicycles. e International Journal of the History of Sport 18
(2): 54–77.
Spivak, G.C. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. London: Routledge.
Suh, J.2013. e ‘New Woman’ and the Topography of Modernity in Colonial
Korea. Korean Studies 37 (1): 11–43.
Skeggs, B. 1997. Formations of Class & Gender: Becoming Respectable. London:
Sage.
Sunder Rajan, R. 1993. Real and Imagined Women: Gender, Culture and
Postcolonialism. London: Routledge.
Talukdar, J., and A.Linders. 2013. Gender, Class Aspirations, and Emerging
Fields of Body Work in Urban India. Qualitative Sociology 36 (1): 101–123.
apan, M. 2004. Embodiment and Identity in Contemporary Society: Femina
and the ‘New’ Indian Woman. Contributions to Indian Sociology 38 (3): 411–444.
———. 2009. Living the Body: Embodiment, Womanhood and Identity in
Contemporary India. London: SAGE Publications Ltd.
iranagama, S. 2014. Female Militancy: Reections from Sri Lanka. In
Routledge Handbook of Gender in South Asia, ed. L.Fernandes. London/New
York: Routledge.
Toor, S. 2014. e Political Economy of Moral Regulation in Pakistan: Religion,
Gender and Class in Postcolonial Context. In Routledge Handbook of Gender
in South Asia. London, ed. L.Fernandes. NewYork: Routledge.
White, S. 1992. Arguing with the Crocodile: Gender and Class in Bangladesh.
London: Zed Books.
White, S.C. 2010. Domains of Contestation: Women’s Empowerment and
Islam in Bangladesh. Women’s Studies International Forum 33 (4): 334–344.
World Vision. 2016. Behind the Curtain: Best, Worst Places in the World to Be a
Girl. Available at: https://www.worldvision.org/gender-equality-news-sto-
ries/behind-the-curtain. Accessed 14 Aug 2017.
Zaman, H. 1996. Women and Work in a Bangladesh Village. Dhaka: Narigrantha
Prabartana/ Feminist Bookstore.
———. 1999. Violence Against Women in Bangladesh: Issues and Responses.
Women’s Studies International Forum 22 (1): 37–48.
N. Hussein
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
Part I
Politics of Representation: New
Woman in Literature and the Media
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
25
© e Author(s) 2018
N. Hussein (ed.), Rethinking New Womanhood,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_2
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within
theNation: TheBorder asMethod
inTales ofModernity
NanditaGhosh
Introduction
is chapter examines the late twentieth- to early twenty-rst-century
literary and news stories which narrate the New Woman as a signier that
destabilizes established meanings within the nation. Middle-class females
modify or subvert their assigned roles by freely embracing a lifestyle of
their choice that breaks with normative gender and class expectations
specic to their contexts. Partap Sharma’s novel Days of the Turban, pub-
lished in 1986, looks at gender within the context of Sikh nationalism in
the 1980s. Gulnari breaks codes of respectability when she joins the Akali
movement as a revolutionary and interacts with men of dierent castes
and faiths. Anita Nair’s novel, Ladies Coupѐ, published in 2001, looks at
gender in the 1990s. Akhila, a 45-year-old income-tax clerk, buys a one-
way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari. She breaks conservative
Tamilian Brahmanical norms governing her behaviour when she decides
to explore if a woman can live feasibly without marriage. In news stories
N. Ghosh (*)
Department of LLWP, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ, USA
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
26
of the 2012 Park Street rape case of Kolkata, Suzette Jordan, a single
working mother, broke a number of taboos when she was gang raped: of
being out late, of accepting drinks at a bar, and of taking a ride home
from strangers. ese ctional and news stories are juxtaposed with each
other and close read as narrative speech-acts,1 each of which represents
specic moments within a decade. ese narratives are contextualized
against representative interdisciplinary scholarship on gender and nation-
alism over the past 30 years in India. In these stories, the women’s choices
serve as ashpoints within the nation, problematizing its self-denition
as a modern entity.
is chapter wishes to look at border as method; in so doing, it leans
on Mezzadra and Neilson’s (2013) discussions of the border. Under the
late twentieth-century capital, they opine; crises in transformations of
state sovereignty disallow borders from rmly demarcating spaces, peo-
ple, and activities by failing to trace clear lines between what remains
inside or outside of territories. It is in this ambivalent space of temporary
borders that this chapter examines how womens bodies and sexuality
serve as important boundary markers of power and citizenship, of vio-
lence and exclusion, and of negotiation and transformation. Border
struggles, then, refer to everyday practices by which women internalize or
resist these constraints and open up new possibilities. e women in
these stories trespass on disallowed terrain and experience violence. Using
the idea of a border as method, this chapter seeks to reect on a 30-year
national discourse of modernity and neoliberal challenges during a glo-
balized era, a discourse that falters when encountering non-submissive
female bodies. Borders are sites where the fault lines of these contradic-
tions emerge, revealing other relationships between gender and national-
ism under global capital.
The New Woman Then andNow
In order to examine relationships between gender and nationalism in the
late twentieth- to early twenty-rst-century postcolonial texts, it is neces-
sary to analyse icons of the New Woman in this period and trace her
genealogy to the nineteenth-century imperial British debates concerning
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
27
the woman question. Oen (2000) points out that the nineteenth- century
nationalism made women’s conditions, roles, and responsibilities central
to nation-building eorts. Women were to be trained as wives and moth-
ers, because these roles were essential to the nation. Such eorts at gender
training opened the door to feminist activism regarding womens equal
access to knowledge, print culture, the arts, and professions; womens free-
dom to move in public, to vote, to express their sexuality, and to enjoy full
citizenship rights; and women’s state recognition and support for mother-
hood and childcare. By the late nineteenth century, the New Woman
came to denote educated, employed, single, upper-middle-, and middle-
class women. She threatened marital monogamy by experimenting with
her sexuality. She could take to the streets in political protest. She drank,
smoked, and enjoyed a hectic social life. As per Otto and Rocco (2011),
by the early decades of the twentieth century, media representations made
the New Woman at once a symbol of progress and decadence.
ese contradictions also occur in colonial India. As scholars on gen-
der in South Asia have argued, the construction of Indian womanhood in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, forged in the interstices
of anti-colonial struggle, tied the emergence of a ‘respectable’ middle-
class female subjectivity closely to the nation.2 Professional and semi-
professional occupations marked a new, comprador class under the
British that functioned as an aspirational elite, comprised predominantly
of English-educated, upper-caste Hindu men who were rooted in land
revenue rather than business. is national bourgeoisie, nding itself dis-
empowered and culturally critiqued as backward and uncivilized by the
British, divided the nation into public and private domains. e public
domain was the ocial world under British rule, while the private realm
of the home was where the moral and spiritual values of the nation were
protected. e upper-caste, upper-middle-class New Woman, who
embodied those values, belonged to this domain. e nationalist elite
enacted laws against child marriage, legalized widow remarriage, and pro-
moted women’s education to a limited extent.3 e New Woman drew
upon notions of bourgeois domesticity, ideals of Victorian womanhood,
and a puried Vedic past in order to reinvent traditions for the project of
national regeneration. She was to be educated and modern in order to be
an appropriate wife for these elite men and contribute to the larger body
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
28
politic. However, unlike westernized women, she was also to remain
chaste, pious, disciplined, modest, and unselsh. e New Woman stood
for an imagined, unied India. e lower-class and lower-caste working
woman was excluded from this ideal.
Given such a history, feminist scholars point out how each successful
challenge to orthodox patriarchy by middle-class women has also
strengthened the new nationalist patriarchy and the class/caste stratica-
tions of Indian society. is ambivalence has led Jayawardena (1986) to
pessimistically conclude that the nationalist struggle did not permit a
revolutionary feminist consciousness in India. However, Sangari and
Vaid (1989) argue that a feminist historiography recognizes that all
aspects of reality are gendered and that gender dierences are structured
by the wide set of social relations: race, ethnicity, class/caste, nation, and
sexuality. It is from within such challenges of feminist historiography that
Mrinalini Sinha (1994) poses the problem of locating Indian woman-
hood and the politics of feminism in colonial India: the simultaneous
proliferation of discourses about women and their surprising marginal-
ization in these same discourses. By insisting on historicizing the identity
of the Indian woman, we can begin to critique the implications of the
resurgence of an essentialized and ahistorical identity, divorced from the
political and economic contexts in which it is produced and which it
helps sustain (Sinha 1994). In the same spirit, Durba Ghosh (2013)
reveals how women revolutionaries became inscribed in nationalist histo-
riography as New Women who, as ideal mothers, wives, daughters, and
sisters, acted violently to resist British rule and whose radical violence,
while not respectable, was deemed noble in support of the national proj-
ect (Ghosh 2013, p.356).
Consequently, various feminist scholars attribute to these nineteenth-
century icons of the New Woman, the task of laying the foundation for
future reforms through the twentieth century.4 e women’s movement
evolved rather slowly at rst, from the early twentieth century through
1947. For instance, the rst all-India conference was held in the 1920s. By
the 1970s and 1980s, it had splintered into rural and urban groups5 which
variously protested against child and alcohol abuse, sex slavery, rape, dowry,
bride burning, atrocities against Dalit women, and lack of alimony for
divorced Muslim women and upheld the need for equal inheritance laws
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
29
for Christian women, equal wages, maternity leave, and working women’s
hostels. ese struggles were in solidarity with Dalits, peasants, landless
labourers, and union workers. Women’s studies burgeoned in colleges
where feminist historians dismantled the Hindu nationalist narratives by
uncovering other suppressed histories. rough the 1980s, women’s orga-
nizations agitated for open, gender-sensitive democratic processes. e
1990s and 2000s provided contexts for neoliberal policies of market-led
economic growth, the rise of a new and expanded middle class, and the
increased destitution of the working poor. Icons of the New Woman, cir-
culating once again a century after the colonial moment, become the means
through which these tensions are negotiated.
e late twentieth- and early twenty-rst-century icons of the New
Woman are hybrid and even contradictory. Such a woman is often aggres-
sive, condent, and urban. She fuses middle-class respectability with a
professional career, Indian values with global citizenship. She is projected
as possessing a pan-Indian identity. She is emancipated and yet hetero-
normative. She may indulge in illicit forms of sexuality but remains the
guardian of the nation’s morality; therefore, the discourse of the state ren-
ders invisible adultery, domestic violence, and forced marriages. She con-
sumes newly available commodities and enjoys the benets of economic
liberalization. Not all working women have high salaries, however. Poor
women are forced to work but are ignored by the emancipatory discourse
of the neoliberal state, which upholds the middle-class New Woman as its
prime beneciary; the latter arm the need for neoliberalism just as the
nineteenth-century New Woman armed the need for empire.
Days oftheTurban: Gulnari inthe1980s
e female character Gulnari in Days of the Turban is forced to commit
suicide because her society is simply unable to pardon the many freedoms
that she claims for herself. She is an educated, middle-class woman from
a prosperous, rural Punjabi merchant family in the early 1980s.
She is rst glimpsed in the novel trespassing outside the world of con-
ning domesticity and into the larger world of Sikh militancy, clutching
an apron lled with vegetables, to secretly conspire with Kumhareya, a
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
30
lower-caste Punjabi man, against the Indian government. In this deliberate
camouage, she is a player moulding social rules to enhance her freedom.
She demands the same military training as her male colleagues. She is
unafraid of being caught or imprisoned. Her actions bring her in conict
with the Indian state, which frames her as an anti-national. Her family are
also jeopardized as suspects of harbouring anti-nationals. e Akali move-
ment in the early 1980s accused the Indian government of internal colo-
nization, underdevelopment, and exploitation of Punjab; hence, it
demanded a separate state—Khalistan—that would embody and encapsu-
late the Sikh identity. is demand was repressed by the Indian govern-
ment as terrorism, resulting in communal riots, the sacking of the Golden
Temple, trauma, and migrations to the West. Gulnari’s actions are set
against this context.
She mixes freely with Kumhareya, whom she treats as a comrade.
However, the villagers believe she is having premarital sex and condemn
her for breaking caste laws. Instead of allowing her to pursue a career, her
family wishes her to marry a Sikh living in the Canadian diaspora. She is
presented as a Sikh woman caught between conventional social expecta-
tions and her own desires. Gulnari alternates between acquiescing,
because ‘Girls are brought up to marry by parental arrangement’ (Sharma
1986, p.58), and resisting marriage. Scholars point out the binding qual-
ity of lineage group exogamy and caste endogamy in North Indian male-
dominated kinship systems (Clark 2016; Armstrong 2013; Chowdhry
2000; Niranjana 1997). Families cannot allow their children either to
remain unmarried or to choose to marry outside the caste. Marriages give
a kinship or caste group strength, identity, and advantage in the wider
society and are often tied to the consolidation of land holdings, wages,
and wealth. At the centre of these caste rules lies the need to control
women’s bodies, sexuality, and property inheritance rights. ose who
infringe on caste boundaries meet intense violence. Gulnari bends social
rules while seeming to follow them.
Gulnari’s actions and choices contrast vividly to her beauty, liveliness,
and physical prowess, which render her visible as a sexualized object. She
is described in terms of colour, smell, and shape. Her clothes are blue,
white, and pink. She has a light complexion with brown hair and eyes
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
31
like ‘dancing peacocks, sometimes tabby cat grey’ or ‘coldly grey’ (Sharma
1986, p.55). Her ngers smell of mint and her body has the fragrance of
talcum powder. Yet simultaneously with this conventional, sexualized
evaluation of Gulnari in terms of beauty, Sharma, the author, painstak-
ingly points out the dierences. Gulnari is plump with a duck-like walk
that Sharma assures us will not win a beauty contest. She is attractive
because of her personality: her self-assurance, education, agile mind, and
direct manner—qualities not traditionally associated with women. She is
the New Woman of the 1980s, whose intelligence, unconventionality,
and physical courage enrapture Kumhareya and Balbir, the two men
framing her. e moment when Kumhareya rst glimpses her, she
‘seemed to freeze but without a camera’ (Sharma 1986, p.55) and then
to Balbir she appears as a ‘silhouette against the light that seemed to be
held in the frame of the door’ (ibid., p.61). is positioning of Gulnari
as a silent photograph, who functions as an empty signier upon which
meanings are placed by male lenses, provides an allegory for examining
the interplay between gender and nationalism.
Gulnari crosses too many borders to be able to belong to her society.
Her actions socially disgrace her family. Her father encourages her to
commit suicide to safeguard the family’s honour. She loses her mind
before killing herself. Using the idea of the border as a method, her death
forces a dierent reading of the nation. Gulnari is pathologized as the
radical female presence that goes insane. e story of her death ts with
the convention of honour killings and is melodramatized. It is narrated
through Sharmas impersonal authorial commentary and is presented as a
regrettable but inevitable outcome, especially in the title of the following
chapter, ‘A Way of Life and Death,’ which normalizes the violence against
her by presenting it as routine. Sharma seeks to contain Gulnari’s radical-
ism by silencing her through death. His sympathetic yet conventional
treatment of Gulnari through the realistic novel points to the way in
which women have been notably rendered invisible in constructing a
national community.6 e visibility of women on the stage of politics in
the 1980s challenged the story of India’s emergence as a modern,
developing nation-state by calling attention to the invisibility of women
in the construction of that story.
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
32
Ladies Coupè: Akhila inthe1990s
In Ladies Coupѐ (Nair 2001), Akhila runs away from home in order to
create opportunities for herself which were hitherto unavailable in her
given context. She hails from a lower middle-class Brahmin family living
in a small town in Tamil Nadu. Akhilas father, frustrated with his stag-
nant career, commits suicide when she is 19, and she has to work in order
to support her family. Since she is somewhat educated, she passes the civil
service examination to work as an income-tax clerk. It is in her capacity as
the sole bread earner that she puts her siblings through school, settles their
marriages, looks after her mother, and subsidizes any major family
expense. Her work status brings mixed benets. In most patriarchal soci-
eties, paid work outside the home has more value and enhances one’s self-
worth; however, poorly remunerated work devalues women’s labour and
increases their drudgery. Akhila’s salary is meagre because as a woman she
faces a glass ceiling at work and so feels unfullled by her situation there:
‘She took the train to work every morning from Ambattur. Her job did
not demand much from her; after all, she was just a clerk’ (ibid., p.78).
In her domestic life she is liberated from undertaking domestic chores.
Her family cannot really appreciate her individuality because she func-
tions like a symbolic male head upon whom they place all their expecta-
tions: ‘Akhila had become the man of the household. Someone who would
chart and steer the course of the family’s destiny to safe shores’ (ibid.,
p.76). However, Akhila is not a man and cannot enjoy the same free-
doms, and so she faces a certain amount of erasure at work and at home:
‘What Akhila missed the most was that no one ever called her by her name
any more. Her brothers and sister had always called her Akka. Elder Sister.
At work, her colleagues called her Madam. … So who was Akhilandeswari?
Did she exist at all?’ (ibid., p.84)
Akhila represents an emergent group of economically active, middle-class
women from small towns. In the 1990s—with the opening up of the
Indian economy—such small towns represented a middle India where
the gendered nature of labour markets restricted womens earning poten-
tial, controlled their labour, and constrained them from promoting their
self-interests (Lahiri Dutta and Sil 2014; N.Rao 2014a). Such women
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
33
had the double burden of working at home in addition to their outside
jobs; their daily routines were often a struggle.
e precarious nature of all gendered work, conditioned as it is by
caste and class, is illustrated by Jaya, another character whose situation
parallels Akhila’s with some crucial dierences. Like Akhila, Jaya comes
from a middle-class Brahmin family; her father suers a premature death,
and she is forced into being the sole provider. Unlike Akhila, Jaya is not
trained for any job and turns to sex work in order to sustain her family.
erefore, in the novel, upper-caste women who are ill-educated and eco-
nomically deprived may be forced into the sex tracking industry, which
utilizes their labour while denigrating and violating them. Jaya has to face
the daily violence and shame of sex work, while her family survives on her
earnings. Women’s bodies often bear violent marks of caste and national
aspirations. Jaya, an upper-caste woman, cannot remain chaste, marry, or
maintain her respectability while the Brahmin community revels in her
family’s loss of reputation and straitened circumstances:
‘Even though they didnt live in an agragraham (Brahmin ghetto) the
Brahmin community behaved as though they did. So Sarasa, her whore-
daughter, her blind son, her soon-to-be whore daughters were excommu-
nicated.’ (ibid., p.83)
Scholars like D’Cunha (1997) assert that the sex industry is extremely
protable due to the new forms of sexual needs triggered by migrant
urban workers under capitalism, and so nation states collude with the sex
industry in earning foreign exchange. e novel exposes the conspiracy of
silence regarding sexuality. ere is little discussion of the kind of men
who hire Jaya’s services. According to John and Nair (2000), patriarchies
insist that women as reproductive beings cannot have sexual desire; there-
fore, sex workers are dangerous because their sexuality must be regulated.
Her family, who pimp for her, regulate Jaya’s sexual activities and earn-
ings. She does not show sexual desire but only elicits it. In fact, upper-
caste Hindu women are boundary markers of respectability; their bodies
frame questions of tradition and modernity. As a respectable, traditional
Brahmin woman, Akhila is expected to dress modestly, behave restrain-
edly, full her obligations, follow caste rules, and eat vegetarian food:
‘ey lived quiet starched and ironed lives where there was no room for
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
34
chion like ourishes of feeling or heavy zari-lined silken excesses’ (ibid.,
p.78). She never marries nor does she date:
‘Even then, Amma and her brothers never asked, “What about you? …
Don’t you want a husband, children, a home of your own?” … In their
minds Akhila had ceased to be a woman and had already metamorphosed
into a spinster.’ (ibid., p. 77)
Akhila’s repressed desires nd an outlet when she meets Kathleen Harper,
an Anglo-Indian colleague, who exposes her to the world of eating eggs,
applying cosmetics, and wearing knee-length dresses. As a Christian,
Kathleen is a cultural minority and exists far outside the parameters of
Brahmanical norms; hence, she enjoys a certain amount of freedom and
censure in equal measure as an inappropriate, loose woman:
‘“But you know what they say about Anglo-Indians. ey eat beef and
their esh stinks. Both men and women smoke and drink. And they have
no moral standards like us Hindus. …” Sarala [the Upper Division Clerk]
said [to Akhila]’ (ibid., p.86)
However, Kathleen, who migrates to Australia, does not feel conned by
such judgements. Akhila enjoys several moments of spontaneity with
Kathleen whose irreverent joy is symbolic of everything Akhilas life is
not. We learn that Akhila in her past had a boyfriend who was younger
in age and from a dierent region. She refused to marry him because she
was afraid of the social repercussions. Kathleen and Jaya act as foils in
highlighting Akhila’s structural limitations.
It is important for the reader to acknowledge Akhila’s agency and
empowerment despite the limitations of her context. However, such an
exercise must take cognizance of restrictions in her freedom of movement,
decision-making capacity, caste and class expectations, single status, age,
small town location, and kinship support. e 1990s urban landscape in
India witnessed the start of a globally dependent process of uneven devel-
opment, a rapid downscaling of family solidarity, and insucient employ-
ment (Clark 2016). is is the period of late capital, which exploits
women by devaluing and erasing their labour, conning them to dreary
domestic routines and menial positions at work (Vishvanathan 1997).
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
35
Akhila is embedded in unequal socio-economic interactions which reect
the weight of patriarchal judgement at all times. Having catered to these
norms for most of her life, she rebels suddenly by taking an unexpected
train ride in a ladies’ coupe to Kanyakumari, the southernmost tip of
India. A ladies’ coupe is an enclosed space for women and an archaic
reminder of Victorian attitudes towards respectability and the gendered
division of a female-centric inner from a male-centric outer domain. It is
in such a space that she meets other women who tell their stories by fre-
quently interrupting her own. ese stories function as testimonial
accounts that intersect multiply to shape the novel. Globally, women have
used the genre of the testimony to narrate their stories through the media-
tion of a translator and editor, whom they control in the act of storytell-
ing. e novelist successfully uses this genre to position readers inside
each character’s thoughts and to provide the illusion of an unmediated
intimacy. is positioning of readers proves to be useful in understanding
Akhila’s determination to please herself by taking a solitary holiday, check-
ing into a hotel, and drifting on the beach. e train ride itself becomes a
symbolic border crossing which readers undertake with Akhila as they
contemplate the daily routines that stie her. Using the idea of the border
as a method, it is possible to understand Akhila’s brand of radical protest.
She breaks with her cultural conditioning to have a one-night stand with
an unknown younger man. She leaves home with a one-way ticket giving
her family no guarantees of return. She reaches out to her past lover to
rekindle their relationship outside marriage. Did she leave her job? We do
not know. Akhila is the New Woman in her role of debunking the false
assurances of gender equality given by the neoliberal state. At this point,
the novel rejects its grittily realistic narrative to help Akhila explore alter-
native possibilities that are unavailable within a realistic ending.
The Park Street Rape Case: Suzette in2012
In February 2012, Suzette Jordan made the news headlines7 when she
was raped in Park Street, Kolkata. Suzette went to a nightclub at Park
Hotel where she was supposed to meet a friend who was very late in keep-
ing his appointment. After waiting for him for a few hours, she accepted
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
36
a ride home by a fellow club goer who gang raped her with his friends in
a moving car and then threw her out. Suzette reported this crime but ran
up against a deeply misogynist, patriarchal culture that blamed her for her
tragedy. She was mocked and humiliated at her local police station, at the
hospital by attending physicians, by her neighbours, in the media, and
even by the female chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, who called her story
fabricated. e female police ocer—Damayanti Sen—who arrested
three of the ve rapists was demoted and transferred elsewhere. She was
labelled a sex worker who was supposedly disgruntled at the payment she
had received for services rendered: ‘She had to defend allegations made by
Trinamool Congress MP Kakuli Ghosh Dastidar that the rape was actu-
ally a “sex deal gone wrong”’ (e Hindu 2015). Born into a lower mid-
dle-class Anglo-Indian family of schoolteachers, Jordan married after high
school, had two daughters, and was divorced. She ran a call centre for a
few years unsuccessfully. After her rape, Suzette became an activist and
reached out to other rape survivors. e road to justice was long and gru-
elling, and Suzette did not live to see the process to the end, even though
three of her assailants were eventually caught and convicted. Her story
highlights signal issues concerning gender and the modern nation-state.
As an Anglo-Indian in Bengal, Suzette problematizes Bengali culture’s
secular self-image. As religious and cultural minorities, Anglo-Indians are
often perceived as being poor, undereducated underachievers by the
Bengali mainstream. Anglo-Indian women are often seen as westernized,
promiscuous, disreputable, and lacking upper-caste Hindu family values.
In postcolonial India, Anglo-Indians are often socio-economically
vulnerable and politically underrepresented. All of these prejudices came
into play in the public’s reactions to Suzette’s rape. She was characterized
as a bad mother because she was divorced and had left two young daugh-
ters at home and gone to a bar in the late evening to meet a male friend.
Mothers are not supposed to have a social life away from their families:
‘Other ministers cast aspersions on her character, labelling her a prostitute
and asking ‘what kind of a mother would be out at the discotheque so late
at night?’ (Bhadoria 2014). She was perceived as promiscuous and so
deserving of rape because she had accepted a car ride from unknown men.
Some people labelled her a sex worker who was not raped but rather in
disagreement with her clients over the transaction, the implication here
being that sex workers cannot be raped. In short, Suzette, an Anglo- Indian
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
37
woman, was nothing like the iconic Vedic woman that has dominated the
landscape since the late nineteenth century.
Suzette’s rape instigated an energetic discussion about the endemic cul-
ture of violence against women. Scholars list the types of violence women
endure: wife beating, female feticides, sexual harassment, rape, verbal
abuse, suicide and self-mutilation, discrimination at work, neglect of ail-
ments, and food denial.8 ey opine that unequal power relations within
the family, as well as in state and institutional contexts—specically, inter-
caste violence in defence of honour, personal vendettas, political unrest,
and laws that ignore domestic violence and non-consensual sex—create a
culture where most rapes go unreported, accused rapists are released, and
women feel unsafe. A 1998 report by Saakshi (a Delhi- based NGO) cor-
roborates these opinions through the attitudes of the judges it surveyed:
that women need to preserve their families even if they suer sexual vio-
lence at home, that women are partly responsible for their abuse, that
provocative attire is an invitation to rape, and that rape victims are immoral.
In such a context, to what extent is violence a part of the common gram-
mar and performance of an unregenerate masculinity, these scholars ask. It
is a context, they assert, where political parties have never hitherto priori-
tized women’s issues in their election campaigns. In this context, women
cannot move freely at any time and place or choose their friends or enter-
tainment without repercussions.
Suzette’s raped body became a public terrain on which discussions of
shame and honour were conducted. Some of the scholars engaged in
these discussions point out that, traditionally, a family’s or community’s
honour has always rested on the control of womens bodies and sexuality.9
In patriarchal societies, women who step out of their homes can be sub-
jected to shaming, humiliation, and violence based upon an assumption
that violence is an inevitable outcome of women’s illegitimate desire for
freedom and equality. e prevalence of shame culture is both countered
and perpetuated by the television media, a fact that came to the forefront
with media coverage of Suzette’s rape:
‘“I am tired of hiding my real identity. I am tired of this society’s rules and
regulations. I am tired of being made to feel ashamed. I am tired of feeling
scared because I have been raped. Enough is enough … My name is Suzette
Jordan and I dont want to be known any longer as the victim of Calcutta’s
Park Street rape.”’ (Anon 2015)
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
38
ese scholars note, however, that the collective struggles women fought
through the 1980s and 1990s challenge such assumptions. Consequently,
the meaning of honour changes to belong to women independently.
Women who move freely in public have the right to protect themselves.
At home they have the right to resist domestic violence and question the
gendered division of labour that leaves them little leisure time and restricts
their participation in political activity. ese scholars argue that legal pro-
tections against violence may strengthen these struggles in rewriting the
meaning of honour and shame.
Suzette’s situation has also focused scrutiny on media coverage of rape
and the legal system. Historically in India, the media has often commod-
itized women as objects of desire. Since the 1990s, the media has exploded
with approximately 40 international and domestic cable channels, much
of which are privately owned. Despite these changes, rape coverage remains
gender insensitive, complain certain scholars:10
‘… Indian media organisations are in urgent need of a crash-course on how
to report cases of rape, sexual assault and other incidents of gender-based
violence... It is not uncommon for an implicit narrative of victim blaming
to make its way into news reports.’ (Khullar 2017)
Rape news is descriptive, visual, sensationalized, and normalized with tele-
vision narrowly focusing on violence against urban, middle-class, upper-
caste women and ignoring poor, marginalized women, they elaborate. In
addition, these scholars suspect such media of misleading women into
believing in their own advancement despite evidence to the contrary; in
promoting consumerism, competition, and individualism, it discourages
women from collective activism to eradicate inequality. ese media strat-
egies enhance the neoliberal rhetoric of female empowerment in structural
adjustment policies, they opine. However, these critiques of the media are
enlightening precisely because these are published in the media. Other
media controversies on the law and gender violence are similarly enlight-
ening. For instance, media demands that the paternalistic state protects
women from violence through better policing of the streets, quicker con-
viction of rapists, reform of rape law, and favouring the death penalty over
a 14-year life sentence focus our attention on the legal system. ey also
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
39
cause scholarly disagreements about whether or not legal reforms against
violence encourage women to enact victimhood in exchange for entitle-
ments or if state ocials are involving women in the daily work of gover-
nance to create new possibilities for gendered citizenship.
Suzette Jordan represents a new breed of middle-class and lower-
middle- class Indian women who work in oces, commute on trains or
buses, or shop in cafes and malls to claim public spaces—claims made
possible by new opportunities for employment, mobility, and leisure in
the early twenty-rst century. Yet, as Suzette’s rape testies, these free-
doms are contested by pre-existing misogynistic cultures of violence:
‘Suzette Jordan … has alleged that a popular city restaurant denied her
entry. e reason? e restaurant owner said he could not let her in because
she was the ‘Park Street rape victim’. … Restaurant manager Dipten
Banerjee claimed, “She’s a regular customer who had earlier come with dif-
ferent men and created ruckus in a drunken state. … Hence, I restricted
her entry.”’ (Bhadoria 2014)
Suzette challenged this culture in many ways. She refused to accept any
blame for going to a nightclub, leaving her daughters at home, accepting
a ride from strangers, or being raped. She refused to be shamed into hid-
ing her identity from the public. She insisted that the police and the
government honour her in acknowledging the injustice of her rape:
‘“Why should I hide my identity when it was not even my fault? Why
should I be ashamed of something that I did not give rise to? I was sub-
jected to brutality, I was subjected to torture, and I was subjected to rape,
and I am ghting and I will ght,” she said at the time.’ (Banerjie 2015)
She reached out to anti-rape activists and other rape victims to spread
awareness and express solidarity. Her support base swelled to include all
communities within Bengal and forced the police, law courts, and gov-
ernment to apprehend the rapists and convict them. In all of these ways,
Suzette is the New Woman who crosses many borders to dene what the
relations should be between gender and the nation: ‘She used a horric,
traumatic crime to emerge as a spokesperson of sorts for the larger issue
of violence against women’ (Bhandare 2015). In fact, the car in which she
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
40
was raped represented a border crossing after which her life changed.
Suzette’s life ended, but her actions after her rape started a movement
that was to grow with the December 2012 rape of Nirbhaya in Delhi. It
sparked national and international debates on the sexism in India, and
consequently laws were changed to address gender violence. Such debates
reveal new possibilities of a civil society that is geographically unbound
and gender aware.11
Conclusion: Violence andtheFemale Body
e women in these stories—Gulnari, Akhila, Jaya, Kathleen, Suzette—
present diering female experiences of oppression in the past three
decades, during which India was transforming from a social welfare to a
neoliberal state. ey reveal a contemporary India beset by a corrupt,
inecient bureaucracy, rapidly dissolving rural-based economies, inse-
cure social relations, and unstable markets. How can the precarious con-
ditions of neoliberalism be read as having gendered consequences at the
level of both violence and resistance, asks Atluri (2013). e ctional
characters and media persona encourage readers to think of gender as an
asymmetrical, hierarchical system. ey remind us that gender-based vio-
lence arises from this system, that the concept of ‘woman’ is unstable as a
universal category, and that eliminating gender-based violence requires a
questioning of the gender system itself.
Such a questioning must take into account how conning women to
unpaid and underpaid domestic labour is central to class formation
because it can produce surplus value, assist in capital accumulation, and
subsidize wage labour, Sangari (2000) reminds us. All patriarchal ideolo-
gies exploit personal relationships by idealizing the roles of wife, mother,
daughter, and daughter-in-law, into which domestic labour services are
packaged and cannot be measured in time and money. Capitalism pre-
tends to liberate women but needs to subjugate them because it operates
through patriarchies.
Gulnari, Akhila, and Suzette are national ashpoints revealing the
ambivalent nexus of politics and violence. Using the border as a method
is important in unpacking the cognitive and conceptual hierarchies of
neoliberal capital, which informs the social structures that these women
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
41
inhabit, are exploited by, and resist. e methods by which they resist,
make choices, and create possibilities cause them to redene the colonial
and neoliberal icons of the New Woman.
Notes
1. I am using the term ‘speech-act’ in a specic way. As part of a theory
introduced by J.L.Austin and developed by J.R.Searle, it is concerned
with the ways in which words are used to present information as well as
carry out actions. It privileges external over internal contexts of utter-
ances. Applied to ctional and news stories, statements made by charac-
ters, narrators, and the author express the socio-political agendas of their
contexts. ese texts then ‘act’ within their contexts to reveal relations
between gender and nationalism.
2. See Partha Chatterjee (1989), Uma Chakravarti (1989), Dipesh Chak-
brabarty (1994), Sangari and Vaid (1989), Indira Chowdhury (2001).
3. By the late 1880s, a few women started graduating from universities and
medical schools. ese numbers increased very slowly through the rst
half of the twentieth century. Alice Clark (2016) refers to the 1961 Census
to point out that 14 years after Indian independence, only 2.9 per cent of
urban women were educated to matriculate level or above, a category
which totalled 1.02 million. e distribution of urban women workers
who were matriculates and above working in services was 85.44 per cent.
4. See Ray (1999), Uma Chakravarti (2005), Jain (2005), Armstrong
(2013), Phillips (2015), Dhawan (2010), Bhatt etal. (2010), Wilson
(2015), Agnihotri and Mazumdar (2005), Sen (2005).
5. For example, Nav Nirman in Gujarat, Chatra Yuva Sangarssh in Bihar,
the Chipko Movement in Uttarakhand, and the Kerala Fishworker’s
Movement focused dominantly on gender. Women visibly participated
in the General Railway Strike of 1974, Bombay Textile Strike of 1981,
and the APIKO movement of Karnataka.
6. Sharma’s treatment of Gulnari must be read against the advances and
retreats on gender issues through the 1970s and 1980s. For instance, in
1979–80, the Mathura rape case sparked widespread national protests
that forced crucial changes in the Evidence Act, Criminal Procedure
Code, and the Indian Penal Code. However, in 1986 the Muslim
Women’s Act deprived divorced Muslim women of alimony. In 1987,
Roop Kanwar was burnt to death on her husband’s funeral pyre, in an act
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
42
of sati despite its illegal status. Behind this act were contentious property
disputes between Kanwar and her in-laws.
7. I am referring to news coverage by standard English language dailies like
e Times of India, e Statesman, Hindustan Times, e Telegraph, e
Hindu, and Live Mint, the BBC, and many others. Suzette’s story has
been culled from such coverage.
8. See Mala Khullar (2005), S. Rao (2014b), Geetha (2000), Narayana
(2015), Clark (2016), Lotika Sarkar (1987).
9. See K.Wilson (2015), Roychoudhury (2015).
10. See S.Rao (2014b), Ganguly-Scrase (2003), Narayana (2015), Oza (2006).
11. I lean on Dattatreyan’s (2015) analysis of how rap musician Hard Kaur
creates, through her image as an assertive, strong, and humorous Desi
woman, a globally diuse national community—involving youth in
India and in the UK, Canada, and USA—who are also inspired to assert
these values.
References
Agnihotri, I., and V. Mazumdar. 2005. Changing Terms of the Political
Discourse: Women’s Movement in India, 1970s–1990s. In Writing the
Women’s Movement: A Reader, ed. M.Khullar, 48–79. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Anon. 2015. Suzette Jordan: India Anti-Rape Campaigner Dies After Illness.
BBC. [online] 13 March. Available at: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-
asia-india-31865472. Accessed 12 June 2017.
Armstrong, E. 2013. Gender & Neoliberalism: e All India Democratic Women’s
Association & Globalization Politics. Delhi: Tulika Books.
Atluri, T. 2013. e Young and the Restless: Gender, ‘Youth’, and the Delhi
Gang Rape Case of 2012. Sikh Formations 9 (3): 361–379.
Banerjie, M. 2015. Park Street Rape Survivor Suzette Jordan, Who Took on
Bengal Government, Dies. NDTV. [online] 14th March. Available at: http://
www.ndtv.com/india-news/park-street-rape-survivor-suzette-jordan-who-
took-on-bengal-government-dies-746256. Accessed 12 June 2017.
Bhadoria, S. 2014. Get Out of my Restaurant, You Rape Victim. India Times.
[online] 15 September. Available at: http://www.indiatimes.com/news/india/
rape-survivor-suzette-jordan-denied-entrance-to-restaurant-for-being-rape-
victim-174031.html. Accessed 12 June 2017.
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
43
Bhandare, N. 2015. Suzette Jordan, the Non-Victim. Live Mint. [online] 13 March.
Available at: http://www.livemint.com/Specials/VL1iL5MEiV9I7AOCfsqdYP/
Suzette-Jordan-the-nonvictim.html. Accessed 12 June 2017.
Bhatt, A., M.Murthy, and P.Ramamurthy. 2010. Hegemonic Developments:
e New Indian Middle Class, Gendered Subalterns, and Diasporic Returnees
in the Event of Neoliberalism. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society
36 (1): 127–152.
Chakrabarty, D. 1994. e Dierence—Deferral of Colonial Modernity: Public
Debates on Domesticity in Colonial India. In Subaltern Studies 8: Writings on
South Asian Society and History, ed. D.Arnold and D.Hardiman, 50–88.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Chakravarti, U. 1989. Whatever Happened to the Vedic Dasi? In Recasting
Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. K.Sangari and S.Vaid, 27–87.
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
———. 2005. Re-inscribing the Past: Inserting Women into Indian History. In
Culture and the Making of Identity in Contemporary India, ed. K.Ganesh and
U.akkar, 202–222. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Chatterjee, P. 1989. e Nationalist Resolution of the Women’s Question. In
Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, ed. K.Sangari and S.Vaid,
233–253. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Chowdhry, P. 2000. Enforcing Cultural Codes: Gender and Violence in
Northern India. In A Question of Silence?: e Sexual Economies of Modern
India, ed. M.E.John and J.Nair, 332–367. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Chowdhury, I. 2001. Frail Hero and Virile History: Gender and the Politics of
Culture in Colonial Bengal. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Clark, A.W. 2016. Valued Daughters: First Generation Career Women. ousand
Oaks: Sage Publications.
D’Cunha, J. 1997. Prostitution: e Contemporary Feminist Discourse. In
Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity, ed. M.apan, 230–255. Delhi:
Oxford University Press.
Dattatreyan, E.G. 2015. Hard Kaur: Broadcasting the New Desi Woman.
Communication, Culture & Critique 8: 20–36.
Dhawan, N.B. 2010. e Married New Indian Woman: Hegemonic Aspirations
in New Middle Class Politics. South African Review of Sociology 41 (3): 45–60.
Ganguly-Scrase, R. 2003. Paradoxes of Globalization, Liberalization, and
Gender Equality: e Worldviews of the Lower Middle Class in West Bengal,
India. Gender & Society 17 (4): 544–566.
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
44
Geetha, V. 2000. On Bodily Love and Hurt. In A Question of Silence?: e Sexual
Economies of Modern India, ed. M.E.John and J.Nair, 304–331. New Delhi:
Kali for Women.
Ghosh, D. 2013. Revolutionary Women and Nationalist Heroes in Bengal,
1930 to the 1980s. Gender & History 25 (2): 355–375.
Jain, D. 2005. Feminism and Feminist Expression: A Dialogue. In Culture and
the Making of Identity in Contemporary India, ed. K.Ganesh and U.akkar,
184–201. New Delhi: Sage Publications.
Jayawardena, Kumari. 1986. Feminism and Nationalism in the ird World.
London: Zed.
John, M.E., and J.Nair. 2000. Introduction: A Question of Silence?: e Sexual
Economies of Modern India. In A Question of Silence?: e Sexual Economies of
Modern India, ed. M.E.John and J.Nair, 1–51. New Delhi: Kali for Women.
Khullar, M. 2005. Introduction: Writing the Women’s Movement. In Writing
the Women’s Movement: A Reader, ed. M.Khullar, 1–43. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Khullar, A. 2017. e Media Needs to Rethink How It Reports Rape. e Wire.
[online] 22 February. Available at: https://thewire.in/110750/the-media-
needs-to-rethink-how-its-reporting-on-rape/. Accessed 12 June 2017.
Lahiri-Dutta, K., and P. Sil. 2014. Women’s ‘Double Day’ in Middle-Class
Homes in Small-Town India. Contemporary South Asia 22 (4): 389–405.
Mezzadra, S., and B.Neison. 2013. Border as Method, or the Multiplication of
Labor. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nair, A. 2001. Ladies Coupe. New Delhi: Penguin Books.
Narayana, U.R. 2015. Mainstreaming Women in News—Myth or Reality.
Global Media Journal 8 (1): 1–6.
Niranjana, S. 1997. Femininity, Space and the Female Body: An Anthropological
Perspective. In Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity, ed. M.apan,
107–124. Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Oen, K. 2000. European feminisms 1770–1950: A Political History. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Otto, E., and V.Rocco. 2011. Introduction: Imagining and Embodying New
Womanhood. In e New Woman International: Representations in Photography
and Film from the 1870s rough the 1960s, ed. E.Otto and V.Rocco, 1–16.
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Oza, R. 2006. e Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the
Paradoxes of Globalization. NewYork/London: Routledge.
Philips, D. 2015. e New Miss India: Popular Fiction in Contemporary India.
Women: A Cultural Review 26 (1–2): 96–111.
N. Ghosh
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
45
Rao, N. 2014a. Caste, Kinship, and Life Course: Rethinking Women’s Work
and Agency in Rural South India. Feminist Economics 20 (3): 78–102.
Rao, S. 2014b. Covering Rape in Shame Culture: Studying Journalism Ethics in
India’s New Television News Media. Journal of Mass Media Ethics 29: 153–167.
Ray, R. 1999. Fields of Protest: Women’s Movements in India. Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
Roychoudhury, P. 2015. Victims to Saviors: Governmentality and the
Regendering of Citizenship in India. Gender and Society 29 (6): 792–816.
Saakshi. 1998. Gender & Judges: A Judicial Point of View. New Delhi: Saakshi.
Sangari, K. 2000. Politics of the Possible: Essays on Gender, History, Narratives,
Colonial English. New Delhi: Tulika Books.
Sangari, K., and S. Vaid. 1989. Introduction. In Recasting Women: Essays in
Indian Colonial History, ed. K.Sangari and S.Vaid, 1–26. New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press.
Sarkar, L. 1987. Gender Injustice and Law. Cochin University Law Review 11
(3–4): 435–448.
Sen, I. 2005. A Space Within the Struggle. In Writing the Women’s Movement: A
Reader, ed. M.Khullar, 80–97. New Delhi: Zubaan.
Sharma, P. 1986. Days of the Turban. London: Bodley Head.
Sinha, M. 1994. Gender in the Critiques of Colonialism and Nationalism:
Locating the ‘Indian Woman. In Feminist Revision History, ed. A.L.Shapiro,
246–275. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Vishvanathan, S. 1997. Women and Work: From Housewization to Androgyny.
In Embodiment: Essays on Gender and Identity, ed. M.apan, 291–312.
Delhi: Oxford University Press.
Wilson, K. 2015. Towards a Radical Re-Appropriation: Gender, Development
and Neoliberal Feminism. Development and Change 46 (4): 803–832.
‘(New) Woman’ asaFlashpoint Within theNation: TheBorder
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
47
© e Author(s) 2018
N. Hussein (ed.), Rethinking New Womanhood,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_3
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance
oftheNew Woman
EloraHalimChowdhury
Introduction
is essay is inspired by the predicament of womens oppression and lib-
eration in the Global South. Transnational media outlets and advocacy
organisations frequently dichotomise these phenomena and interpret
them as mutually exclusive rather than in complex conversation with one
another. Within a capitalist and neocolonial reality, oppression and lib-
eration are only legible if they are portrayed as separate entities rather
than overlapping processes that interact in dynamic ways. As a scholar of
transnational feminism whose work focuses on South Asia, I am often
asked to comment on the ‘backwards’ and misogynistic cultures of the
region as well as the so-called social and economic ‘progress’ it has made
through neoliberal schemes like micronance, NGO advocacy, and the
ready-made garment industry. Within this framing, it is clear that prog-
ress is a linear process and that individual self-empowerment is the vehi-
cle in which this is achieved.
E. H. Chowdhury (*)
University of Massachusetts, Boston, MA, USA
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
48
On the one hand, ‘women,’ understood as a homogeneous group, are
perceived to suer at the hands of patriarchal culture and religion and
who are unable to help themselves, yet on the other they are portrayed as
emergent ‘new women’ who are autonomous consumers and modern
citizens. eir ‘newness’ however is dened within expedient frameworks
of corporate globalisation, modernity, and consumption. Lost within this
false dichotomy are the complexities of gender relations and socio-
economic transformations as well as of women’s varied subjugation, social
mobility, and engagement within labour, kin, and community groups.
Dichotomous representations of womanhood are discernable in the
social and cultural discourses of women’s emancipation in Bangladesh. In
recent decades, Bangladesh is witnessing a shift in the representations of
ideal womanhood from the earlier anticolonialist and nationalist era
when the middle-class woman was considered the epitome of spirituality,
domesticity, and the non-Western core of an authentic Indian culture
(Chatterjee 1989, p.240–43). is chapter explores and analyses con-
structions of ‘new womanhood’ in the context of consumption, globalisa-
tion, and modernity within contemporary Bangladesh. I look at visual
and literary representations of the ‘new woman’ across genres of photog-
raphy,lm, ction, and ad campaigns in order to engage an analysis of
the sociocultural issues they depict, specically the changing notions of
gender oppression and emancipation within the context of neoliberal and
capitalist development.
e social construction of the identity of the new woman in colonial
and post-colonial Bengal has been the subject of feminist theorising for
some time. Partha Chatterjee has noted the ideal woman in the nationalist
context was constructed as an elite woman (bhadramahila) in stark con-
trast to both the uneducated, downtrodden, and backward women of
South Asia’s poorer classes and her sexually liberated, modern, and amoral
Western counterparts (Chatterjee 1989). A variation of the Victorian new
woman of England, the ideal nationalist woman’s counterpart in colonial
and post-colonial Bengal and post-independent Bangladesh, has had
diverse applicability across the domains of class and the rural-urban divide.
Sonia Nishat Amin refers to the ‘new woman’ in the context of Bengal as
‘layered,’ ‘a composite of many women,’ and ‘elusive’ (Amin 1994,
p.137–40). At rst blush, it appears that the empowered ‘new woman’ of
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
49
the Global South is a break from colonial rescue narratives and that she in
fact represents an anticolonial and nationalist alternative to the downtrod-
den female of the developing world. However, contemporary construc-
tions of the new woman are very much shaped by discourses of development
and modernisation, processes that rely on the logic of neocolonial
capitalism.
Utilising narratives of ‘women’s uplift’ and emancipation as the bench-
mark of progress, native/local women are put in the contradictory posi-
tions of both the downtrodden/victim and the modern/autonomous
citizen subject. ese competing constructions of the new woman serve
larger progress narratives of both the nation and Western imperialism.
ey replicate the victim-saviour trope of colonial feminism by assigning
agency to the emancipated local woman (as the autonomous self-reliant
worker) while simultaneously representing her as merely the victim of
patriarchal culture or modernisation schemes. ese multiple, compos-
ite, and distinct gures are co-constituted yet emerge as competing repre-
sentations of the contemporary new woman.
ese contradictions came to a head for me in the spring of 2016,
when I gave a lecture on the occasion of International Women’s Week at
a private liberal arts college in the Midwest. My lecture was titled, ‘Power
and (in)visibility: Mapping transnational trajectories of suering, vio-
lence and agency.’ I talked about discourses of women’s empowerment in
the backdrop of neoliberal development and structural violence in
Bangladesh. After my talk, a young woman of colour, a Women and
Gender Studies major, approached me and expressed her discomfort with
a visual I had shared as part of my presentation—an image taken by
Bangladeshi activist Taslima Akhter of a man and a woman in a ‘death
embrace’ in the rubble of the garment factories of Rana Plaza.1 is stu-
dent felt the image might be perpetuating the overexposure of bodies of
colour in reference to suering and trauma in the Global South. In this
chapter, I want to reect upon the question of women’s liberation and
how it converges with the neoliberal discourses of ‘new woman’ yet
obscuring its violent subtext. Furthermore, I want to probe our ethical,
political, and pedagogical commitments to feminist advocacy in instances
where we speak of violence done to bodies of colour in contexts where
such bodies are unintelligible or expendable within the frequently cele-
brated new woman paradigm.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
50
is question is an ethical one in a context when visual images of trauma
of black and brown bodies are often casually reproduced and circulated,
resulting in a pedestrian consumption of violence. ese images are routin-
ised to the point that they are interpreted as the logical status quo of certain
communities and locales. Akhter’s photograph challenges this narrative of
gratuitous third-world suering and women’s victimisation at the hand of
patriarchal familial and cultural norms by drawing attention to the violent
subtext of ‘women’s agency and empowerment’ as it pertains to poor,
racialised, and gendered workers in the third world. Alongside the spec-
tacular, Death of a ousand Dreams also conveys the gendered corporatisa-
tion of violence in factory work while simultaneously invoking the dual
connectivity and struggle of male and female precarity in the contempo-
rary capitalist stage. In capturing a tenderness in the midst of devastating
circumstances, the image calcies Rana Plaza as an event of spectacular
suering while also illuminating the precarious daily struggle of popula-
tions living on the fringes of the myth of neoliberal progress.
is myth of the neoliberal emancipation of women, as evidenced by
the image on the Prothom Alo billboard poster to which I will turn later
in this chapter, suggests that women workers are the backbone of the
nation and its economy, and thus they are reciprocally empowered and
autonomous citizens, dependent of course to their willingness to enter
and participate in the labour force. e photograph, however, is a chal-
lenge to such a simplistic and instrumentalising narrative as it questions
corporate and global patriarchy alongside familial and kin relationships.
Indeed, it illuminates the composite ‘new woman’ through the paradox
of this celebration and suering and pushes us—viewers, readers, con-
sumers—to think about whom/what the highly selective narrative of the
‘new woman’ enables.
My intent in that presentation was to tease out the contradictions
embedded within the neoliberal framing of economic development and
to challenge the discourse of self-empowerment through waged labour.
In many ways, the so-called new woman is a paradox. She is both autono-
mous, self-reliant, and economically productive while simultaneously
oppressed, menial, and ‘third world.’ is externally imposed, bifurcated
identity was brought into sharp relief by the Rana Plaza industrial disas-
ter in Bangladesh. To disentangle the relationship between globalisation,
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
51
patriarchy, capitalist development, and human suering, I will engage
contemporary visual and literary sources including photographs, ad cam-
paigns, lm, and short stories inspired by the Rana Plaza tragedy.
In a recent article, feminist scholar Dina Siddiqi demonstrates how
dominant framings of violence in the third world simultaneously magnify
and obscure certain stories, obfuscating the complexities of gendered sub-
jugation and nonnormative expressions of agency and desire (Siddiqi
2015a). Siddiqi asks the questions: ‘What counts as a feminist injury, for
whom and under what conditions? Why do certain forms of violence
generate more outrage than others? Under what conditions is the feminist
gaze scandalised and what does this imply for the politics of seeing (and
not seeing)? In the process, and perhaps most critically, what is obscured
and what is magnied about the social and political worlds in which vio-
lence against women takes place?’ (2015a, p.509). Following the logic of
these important questions, the feminist student’s ethical question has
prompted me to unpack the ‘new woman’ discourse and its various occlu-
sions and magnications in transnational media and advocacy circuits.
The Death ofaThousand Dreams
No other image, has captured the gravity of the Rana Plaza disaster as
powerfully as Taslima Akhter’s photograph e Death of a ousand
Dreams,2 which was named the most haunting depiction of the tragedy by
the photo editors of TIME. e photograph shows a man and a woman in
an embrace in the last moment of their lives. We know neither who they
are nor whether the couple shared a relationship outside of their death
embrace. Perhaps they sought comfort in their last moments, feeling a
profound connection to each other, humanity, and the divine as the plas-
ter, steel, and concrete came crashing down on them like a deck of cards.
In depicting physical contact between a young man and a woman in
an ostensibly ‘public’ embrace, the image dees many social and cultural
norms. e enormity of what was about to happen perhaps made those
considerations for modesty, shame, and honour immaterial. e man is
seen to be covering the womans torso in a protective embrace even as his
own trauma is signied by blood—resembling a tear—trickling down
from the corner of his closed left eye. While not minimising the reality of
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
52
male violence against women, I’d like to propose that this photo poses a
visual challenge to Western feminist narratives of the ‘downtrodden
third-world female’ and her ‘violent and oppressive’ male counterpart. It
expands our understanding of women’s oppression beyond the lens of
‘male violence’ to one of structural violence and oers a visual schema
that encourages an analytic of connectivity, intersectional and relational
gender dynamics.
Laxmi Murthy (2014) likens visual media attention to ‘spectacular vio-
lence’ occurring in third-world contexts to those occurring historically in
the American South. e juxtaposition of these two contexts, one con-
temporary and in geographical regions outside of the United States, and
the other historical and concerning racialised minorities within the United
States, illuminates for us not only a continuity but also the propensity of
systemic racism in the media. Viewers of such images become accustomed
and anaesthetised to the complex and lasting implications that these
depictions of violence have on the subjects that they portray. is is espe-
cially true in the way that the mass media portrays violence against women
of colour. Reporting is frequently stylised and sensationalised, objectify-
ing the subject in a way that erases her humanity and individuality.
Courtney Baker has similarly commented on the more recent over-
circulation of images of black suering, particularly in relationship to
police killings of black youth and men in the United States, which are
frequently portrayed without explanation or empathy. e lack of con-
text and messaging is what dierentiates this type of violent imagery from
previous decades when African American activists would print explicit
images of lynching in order to illustrate the systematic oppression of
blacks in America. e circulation of gratuitous brutality was an advo-
cacy tool in the hands of the National Association of the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) because they used them to shake the con-
sciousness of the American people rather than sate a pornographic desire
to be shocked and titillated (Baker 2016). In taking ownership of these
images, black civil-rights activists took control away from the white per-
petrators of violence.
e repeated looping of acts of violence and their outcomes tends to
produce a numbing eect or a ‘normalisation’ of the most bizarre forms
of brutality. at is, the violence is seen as both exceptional—belonging
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
53
to the realm of the Other—and exotic, existing only and logically in the
realm of the Other. e lack of personal details, no face or name yet the
exquisite attention to personal details outlining the brutalities unleashed
on to the bodies of the Other help to strengthen insensitivity and alter-
nately create a pattern. I think the student’s question was motivated by
this dual tension where the violence is normalised and exoticised at the
same time.
Violence against women from poor and marginalised backgrounds
both enthrals and fascinates while simultaneously appearing to be in the
routinised distance of the ‘Other.’ Yet, can these horrifying images which
objectify the human body also have a transformative eect? Murthy and
Baker both point to how the professional photographs of each stage of
the lynching of Jesse Washington, a young African American farmhand,
in 1916, were printed and sold as postcards in Waco, Texas. While these
photos were rst sold as souvenirs, they were later used to bring attention
to the horric practice of lynching. In the hands of social justice activists,
these images served to jolt the American public out of their stupor and
awaken them to the violent racism of their country.
In this vein, Death of a ousand Dreams encourages us to see the
global oppression of racialised and gendered workers within capitalist
and neoliberal regimes where women are not categorically perceived as
‘empowered’ or abject victims, nor men as their intimate oppressors. e
dead bodies of male and female worker raise the question of racialised
and gendered labour in the context of neoliberal capitalist globalisation
of political economy. e Death of ousand Dreams draws our attention
to the structural inequality of globalisation, colonial relations between
supplier and buyer nations, corporate greed, corrupt state machinery, and
disregard for poor workers, both, male and female, in each tier. ese
various power structures contribute to the exposure of certain popula-
tions in the Global South to extreme violence and suering. e image
also illuminates kin, communal, and human connection in that moment
of nal embrace—that is at the base of all of our existence. At the very
least, it urges us to rethink some of the outdated, tired, and prejudicial
paradigms that continue to limit the scope of our understanding and
inspiration to practise more egalitarian, just, dignied, and humane
interactions with one another.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
54
Judith Butler’s conceptualisation of precarity is useful in illuminating
the complexity of the condition of vulnerabilities of garment workers: ‘As
a concept, precarity draws attention to the lived conditions, structured
nature, and relational aspects of systemic inequality. Focusing on diverse
forms of violence, inequality, and harm pervading contemporary life, pre-
carity names a ‘politically induced condition in which certain populations
suer from failing social and economic networks of support and become
dierentially exposed to injury, violence, and death’ (Butler 2009, 25).
Interrogating precarity as an embodied, political, aective, economic,
ideological, temporal, and structural condition can thus illuminate how
inequality is constructed and regulated. Akhter’s photograph and the con-
text in which it appeared—the immediate aftermath of the devastating
Rana Plaza factory collapse—illuminates the gendered precarity of male
and female workers, their complex struggles, and vulnerabilities.
Drawing from research conducted by the International Migrants
Alliance Research Foundation, Rubayat Ahsan puts the precarity of fac-
tory workers in the new global economy in stark relief. He notes that: 834
Bangladeshi labour migrants, including 32 women workers died in the
rst four months of 2009. e majority of Bangladeshi deaths occurred
in Saudi Arabia where 254 workers perished, followed by 157 deaths in
Malaysia, 100in Dubai, 55in Kuwait, 34in Oman, 24in Abu Dhabi,
and 21in Qatar. Cardiac failure is cited as the most common cause of
death, which is quite surprising given the young ages of the victims, usu-
ally ranging from 30 to 45years. A study from International Centre for
Diarrhoeal Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR, B), in association with
International Organisation for Migration (IOM) revealed that only 14
per cent of male Bangladeshi migrant workers get medical assistance from
their employers, although 70 per cent of them have health problems. A
majority of the migrants are between 28 and 47years of age, and almost
half of them suer from a variety of mental health problems, while about
60 per cent experience some form of workplace injury (Ahsan 2010).
In a parallel context within Bangladesh, 64 workers were killed in the
Spectrum Factory collapse in 2005, 29 killed in at’s It Sportswear fac-
tory re in 2010, Tazreen factory re killed 112in 2012, Aswad factory
re killed 10in 2013. Given the massive numbers of women workers in
the garment industry, most of these deaths were of female employees.
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
55
ese shocking statistics show the ways in which capitalist economies
continue to exploit newer forms of indentured labour. ese numbers tell
the story of the precarious conditions and vulnerabilities of male and
female workers and the consequent gender-dierentiated stories about
their struggles and deaths that circulate in transnational media and advo-
cacy circuits.
Under Construction
Bangladeshi feminist lm director Rubaiyat Hossain’s second lm, Under
Construction is a modern adaptation of Rabindranath Tagore’s play, Red
Oleander (Rokto Korobi). Written in the 1920s, Red Oleander oered a
trenchant critique of industrialisation, capitalism, and the isolation wrought
on human lives by such processes. Red Oleander has also been celebrated for
depicting its protagonist Nandini as a freedom-seeking woman who dees
the oppressive capitalist forces that turn human beings to robot-like con-
formists. Tagore’s depiction of wilful women in various novellas and plays
who negotiate constraints of patriarchy, colonialism, nationalism, and pov-
erty is well situated within the literature on new women.
Set in contemporary Bangladesh, Hossains lm traces a comparable
mechanisation and modernisation of social relations and the paradoxical
roles they inspire yet reify for women across class divides. e lm takes
place in a city in transition and under construction. ese themes parallel
the uctuating identities of the lm’s ‘new woman’ protagonists. Moyna,
a domestic worker, toils in the domestic space and later in the lm, when
she takes a job at the garment factory oor to create a life of dignity and
integrity for herself. Roya, Moyna’s employer, pushes against the con-
straints of patriarchal expectations of middle-class femininity that
threaten to stie her independent aspirations. Her mother, economically
self-sucient, pines for her husband who left her for an actress and nds
solace in religion. e protagonist Roya is at once critical of her mother’s
yearning for her husband and Moyna’s desire for her own shongshar
(household). She is the modern adaptation of Tagore’s wilful heroine
‘trapped’ within the expectations of marriage and motherhood and striv-
ing to dene a new and autonomous self.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
56
Filmmaker Rubaiyat Hossain portrays the construction-in-process of
the composite new woman, and the limits and possibilities of intimacy
and hierarchy between women of dierent classes in urban Bangladesh.
Roya is married to Sameer, a successful and exacting architect. While he
provides a comfortable life for Roya who is able to pursue her aspirations
for a writing, acting, and directing career without having to worry about
nancial comfort, she feels the intense judgement of her husband and
mother who would rather that she ‘settles down’ with a baby. Roya’s best
friend also juggles the dual pulls of career and motherhood and tells her
in no uncertain terms that ‘motherhood is the best.’ Lonely and unsup-
ported in her plight, Royas only and unwavering support and condant
is her maid, Moyna.
Moyna tends to Roya’s needs in the domestic and emotional realms,
where the latter provides her with a job and loving care. She wants Moyna
to focus on her studies and extricate herself from her ‘traditional’ desires
and beliefs around domesticity and romance. Moyna tells Roya a story
about a girl who is destined to take a snake as her husband because it has
tainted her with its bite. e girl had nurtured the snake in her own bed
and fed it her own breast milk. is snake story is an important metaphor
for the modern woman’s predicament. e snake of tradition and domes-
ticity that Roya suggests has wrapped Moyna in its coils—the snake that
she is bitten by, whose poison lls her veins, and who she is driven to
nurture as her adopted child. e idea that snakes drink milk is a com-
mon traditional belief in Bengali culture where proverbs such as ‘nurtur-
ing snakes with milk and bananas’ (dudh kola diye shap posha) are evoked
to attest to the deceptive nature of snakes and in this context of domestic-
ity, security, and patriarchy.
Moyna is seduced by the idea of love and shongshar as depicted in
Bollywood lms. When she becomes pregnant by Shobuj, the handyman
of the apartment complex, Roya is furious and uncompromisingly harsh
towards the couple. She slaps Shobuj across the face and asks Moyna how
can she expect to be cared for by someone who operates a lift and collects
trash? Moyna responds that she does not want to remain a servant for all
of her life and chooses to go with Shobuj to make her own home. ‘Your
dinner is in the fridge’ is her parting comment to Roya. Unlike Tagore’s
Rokto Korobi, where the oppressor is the evil patriarch King, Hossain’s
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
57
adaptation presents a more complex web of patriarchy: that of middle
class to working class, domestic to corporate, religious to cultural.
When Roya visits the couple in their one-room home in the slum bear-
ing gifts of gold jewellery, Moyna is appreciative but honest about the
impracticality of the gift. She cannot keep it in her home as her husband
might be displeased. Roya is distressed at Moyna’s living quarters when
she hears the screams of domestic abuse from the couple in the adjacent
rooms. She insists that Moyna ‘come back to her’ and the younger woman
replies, ‘I can never be like you.’ In the next visit, Roya takes silver anklets
for Moyna. Moyna’s life inspires Roya to stage the modern adaptation of
Tagore’s Red Oleander in the garment factory shop oor. e protagonist,
Nandini, is the pregnant worker who is distraught by the creation of the
globalised, automated workforce by capitalist development and wants a
dierent life possibility for her unborn child. e unborn child is
Ranjan—not Nandini’s love interest but her ospring—‘a life full of pos-
sibilities.’ It is the vision of humanity that drives Nandini. Out of the
rubble of Rana Plaza, the modern interpretation of Red Oleander
emerges, a story of human possibility and humanity—even as it is an
appropriation by Roya of her maid’s life story and choices. Perhaps, it is
the nal abstraction, which at once springs Roya to her autonomous self
(her husband leaves, and she chooses to not accompany her mother for
her medical treatment to London), and Moyna’s life in the factory is
given meaning.
In their 2009 study, Raka Ray and Seemin Qayum posit that Kolkatas
culture of servitude is based upon three suppositions: rstly that servants
are necessary to run a good household; secondly that servants are ‘part of
the family’ and attached to the family by aective bonds of loyalty, aec-
tion, and dependence; and thirdly servants make up a distinct category
with their own distinctive lifestyles, desires, and habits (2009, p.172).
ey argue that ‘these premises particularise and enact a culture of servi-
tude that we have dened as one in which domination/subordination,
dependency, and inequality are normalised and permeate both the public
and domestic spheres’ (2009, p.172). Domestic servitude here is seen in
conjunction to, and enabling of, its public integration of structural
inequalities and dierence of gender, class, and race/ethnicity in a global
context.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
58
Moyna and Roya share aective bonds and are co-dependent. e for-
mer reminds her employer that her dinner has been prepared even as she
is getting ready to walk out of her job with her lover. e latter talks about
her loneliness since Moynas departure from her life. Yet their relationship
is bound by a racialised, class-based, and gendered domination and sub-
ordination that leads Moyna from the space of the domestic to the factory,
from the community to that of national and global inequality. Roya is the
younger and more modern woman who tries to break away from a culture
of servitude rooted in a feudal past, while concurrently struggling with the
social demands of traditional womanhood (motherhood, domesticity).
Moyna makes claims of her own rights and desires to her own shongshar
(household) free of dependency and servitude to Roya. ese demands
are incommensurable with the grammar of neoliberalism, which thrives
on the binary of the autonomous versus the oppressed woman.
Garments
Yet another depiction of women garment workers inspired by the tragedy
at Rana Plaza is Tahmima Anam’s award-winning short story, ‘Garments
(2016). Anam notes, ‘Garments was born out of that terrible tragedy, but
when I went to write the story, it became centered on female friendship
among three factory workers and their attempt to nd security, love, and
humor amid the brutal realities of their lives’ (Diaz 2016, p.293). Unlike
cross-class bonding, Garments is the story of the alliance among three
factory workers as they negotiate poverty, patriarchy, and capitalism.
Mala, one of the characters in the story, is a ‘broken’ worker with an
injured leg from the Rana strike. ‘… Malas brother died in Rana. at
Mala had held up his photo for seven weeks, hoping he would come out
from under the cement. at she was at the strike, shouting her brother’s
name. at her mother kept writing from the village asking for money, so
Mala had to turn around and go back to the line’ (2016, p.25). Jesmin,
another worker, left her village in shame and dishonour when after having
been molested by her teacher, a married man, she was subsequently sent
to the punishing hut by the village elders. e irony here is noteworthy of
course where the woman is punished for a man’s transgression. She left
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
59
the village for Dhaka in search of work. Her mother told her in despera-
tion, ‘Go, go, she said. I don’t want to see you again. Jesmin left without
looking back, knowing that, once, her mother had another dream for her,
that she would marry and be treated like a queen, that all the village
would tell her what a good forehead she had. But that was before Amin,
before the punishing hut’ (2016, p.23). In South Asian culture, having a
good forehead alludes to having a good fortune or luck. e third charac-
ter Ruby has three younger sisters she provides for in her home village of
Northern Bangladesh. e three women hatch a plan to marry the same
man, Dulal, whom they see as providing a remedy to each in negotiating
their problems in the city.
Anam’s story is a powerful antidote to the progress narrative of wom-
en’s emancipation as seen through a neoliberal lens. Anam, in her power-
ful and nuanced prose, shines a light on the vulnerability of women, the
sacrices they make, and the impossible choices they face in light of
familial, kin, and social obligations. She also illustrates the social trans-
formations that are aorded, even if unwittingly and minimally, as
women negotiate the city, the streets, the factory, and the complex land-
scapes of subjugation and desire. Anam writes about the presence of gar-
ment workers ooding the city streets, ‘Walking home as she did every
evening with all the other factory workers, a line two girls thick and a
mile long, snaking out of Tongi and all the way to Uttara, she spots a new
girl. Sometimes Jesmin looks in front and behind her at that line, all the
ribbons apping and the song of sandals on the pavement, and she feels
a swell in her chest’ (2016, p.23). e sheer numbers of women on the
streets, their visibility among the city’s chaotic life, and their navigation
of its risks, attractions, and hardships become evident in Jesmin’s sweep-
ing front to back gaze, hinting at women’s claiming of agency, autonomy,
and new subjectivity—however small, embattled, and dangerous. at
small claiming of space too is a facet of the new womanhood even if
overly celebrated in neoliberal discourse and always as a linear progres-
sion from oppression to empowerment. Anams story on the other hand
is a nuanced rendition of women’s struggle and survival amidst the harsh
oppressive structures of city life, labour conditions, and patriarchy. e
author uses the protagonist’s claiming of the cityscape through both her
individual participation in the line on the street and the sweep of her
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
60
silent gaze over the snaking line of women on the street to encapsulate a
claim to a ‘new subjectivity’; but also this participation is a women’s
‘movement’ towards claims of agency and autonomy. e tension between
the individual participant and the community of women is key, even if
that claiming of city space is tentative, even if it is ultimately illusory.
In the story,
‘Jesmin sees marriage as a remedy. If you are a girl you have many prob-
lems, but all of them can be xed if you have a husband. In the factory, if
Jamal puts you in ironing, which is the easiest job, or if he says, take a few
extra minutes for lunch, you can nish after hours and get overtime, you
can say, but my husband is waiting, and then you won’t have to feel his
breath like a spider on your shoulder later that night when the current goes
out and you’re still in the factory nishing up a sleeve. Everything is better
if you’re married (2016, p.26).’
As a single woman, landlords will not rent to Jesmin, and Ruby had to
commute two to three hours every morning from her village to make it
to the factory, thus ‘Jesmin decides it won’t be so bad to share a husband.
She does not have dreams of a love marriage, and if they have to divide
the sex that’s ne with her, and if he wants something, like he wants his
rice the way his mother makes it, maybe one of them will know how to
do it (2016, p. 23).’ When the ruse behind the arrangement comes
undone, and it is revealed that in fact Mala paid Dulal to marry her and
hatched the plot for him to marry three women, and she had to arrange
for two more girls for him as a ‘solution’ for his impotence, Jesmin comes
to the realisation, ‘…there’s nothing to be done now but try and x
Dulal’s problem, because now that they were married to him, his bad was
their bad (2016, p.30).’
e three women share their impotent husband and form a tight alli-
ance as they encounter the harsh realities of the factory and the city. ey
share a laugh about the garments they stitch for the foreign ladies, keep
each other warm under the blanket during the cold winter nights, and
share the melted chocolate ice cream bar that they had used as an ice pack
for Jesmin after Dulal had hit her. e illusion of security that comes from
their marriage to Dulal gives them the legitimacy to be in the city and
working in a factory. Jesmin is ‘no longer the girl from the punishing hut,
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
61
but a garments girl with a room and a closed-up body that belongs only to
herself’ (2016, p.33). is is preferable because Jesmin understands from
Mala’s plight (of losing her brother at Rana), ‘that once you die like that, on
the street or in the factory, your life isn’t your life anymore’ (2016, p.24).
e elusive security provided by the familial patriarchy enables women to
occupy—but not own—the public spaces of the city and the factory.
Since the proliferation of garment factories in Savar and Tongi, the
steady stream of women workers ooding the cities of Dhaka has inspired
and rearmed the stories of female autonomy and empowerment.
Garment workers are referred to as the ‘golden girls’ replacing the ‘golden
bre,’ jute, from earlier decades, as the premier foreign currency earner
for the nation (Siddiqi 2015b). ‘Sometimes Jesmin looks in front and
behind her at that line, all the ribbons apping and the song of sandals
on the pavement, and she feels a swell in her chest.’ is euphoric
sentiment is also expressed in the nationalistic campaign by the Bengali
language national daily newspaper, Prothom Alo, which inscribes ideas of
national progress onto the body of the woman. One such poster features
a young woman in a white shalwar kameez and a green and red orna sig-
nifying the colours of the Bangladeshi ag. e woman is wearing an
expression of bold condence and holding a tin box, giving the impres-
sion of a person on their way to work. e backdrop shows what could
be construed a shop oor. e poster bears the following message: ‘As
long as the country is in your hands, Bangladesh will not lose its way.’
is image puts the burden of the nation’s progress on the hands of the
new woman who in this image is self-content and emblematic of national
pride but who bears little resemblance to those in Anam’s ction or
Akhter’s photograph (Fig.1).
Made inBangladesh3
In a recent article titled ‘South Asian Women Caught Between Tradition
and Modernity,’ Aida Akl (2011) points to the immense contradictions
in the region in regard to womens ‘development.’ While on the one hand
statistics tell a dismal story about women’s literacy, workforce participa-
tion, reproductive rights, and physical violence, on the other they also
paint a picture of triumph and the so-called achievements of women in
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
62
political leadership. In Bangladesh, women have come to symbolise tra-
ditional culture and the fear of losing it to modernisation. Although
women are seen as the vanguards of modernisation and are encouraged to
work and go to school, these activities are only encouraged as long as
women subsequently settle into marriage, reproduction, and domesticity.
While neoliberal development initiatives such as micronance schemes
and wage labour paint the picture of women’s empowerment through
income generation, social and cultural mobility remain elusive for most
Bangladeshi women. Furthermore, factories, which are championed as
vehicles to women’s emancipation, are simultaneously spaces of structural
inequality perpetuating violence and inequality. But this form of violence
is often unintelligible as at once structural and gender based. At the root
of this misrecognition, I argue, is an inability to see poor women as fully
human. As a group, they are valuable and represent the vanguard of the
neoliberal conception of development but as individuals they are
expendable.
Fig. 1 Prothom Alo poster (Photo credit: Nafisa Tanjeem)
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
63
e progress narrative of womens liberation obviously has transna-
tional circulations and implications. A few months after the Rana Plaza
disaster, clothing line American Apparel came out with a controversial ad
campaign featuring Bangladeshi-born American model Maks. e ad
features a topless Maks, with the words ‘MADE IN BANGLADESH’
boldly printed across her naked chest. e following account of her back-
ground is posted below her image:
[Maks] is a merchandiser who has been with American Apparel since 2010.
Born in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, Maks vividly remembers attend-
ing mosque as a child alongside her conservative Muslim parents. At age
four, her family made a life changing move to Marina Del Rey, California.
Although she suddenly found herself a world away from Dhaka, she con-
tinued following her parent’s religious traditions and sustained her Islamic
faith throughout her childhood. Upon entering high school, Maks began
to feel the need to forge her own identity and ultimately distanced herself
from Islamic traditions. A woman continuously in search of new creative
outlets, Maks unreservedly embraced this photo shoot.
She has found some elements of Southern California culture to be
immediately appealing, but is striving to explore what lies beyond the city’s
supercial pleasures. She doesn’t feel the need to identify herself as an
American or a Bengali and is not content to t her life into anyone else’s
conventional narrative. at’s what makes her essential to the mosaic that
is Los Angeles, and unequivocally, a distinct gure in the ever expanding
American Apparel family. Maks was photographed in the High Waist Jean,
a garment manufactured by 23 skilled American workers in Downtown
Los Angeles, all of whom are paid a fair wage and have access to basic ben-
ets such as healthcare. (Sherman 2014)
e script of the advertisement is a familiar one and depicts the ‘brave
journey’ of a supposedly oppressed ‘Muslim’ woman on her path to self-
empowerment on the sunny shores of California. Maks is meant to rep-
resent the Bangladesh of poor working conditions and stiing Islamic
patriarchy and her arrival in the West symbolises her liberation. Her new-
found freedom and supposed self-empowerment is underscored by her
bold and deant stare and shirtless stance on the advertisement.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
64
Bangladesh’s shift from a developing nation to that of Muslim develop-
ing nation, as alluded to in the American Apparel advertisement, is criti-
cal. At the same time, garments as the road to neoliberal development
and emancipation on the one hand and the source of Muslim women’s
oppression on the other is a telling conict between national and global
discourses of the new woman. Two questions are pertinent here to illumi-
nate the lesser told narrative of national and global exploitation of women
workers: In what ways do social forces ranging from poverty, racism,
patriarchy, and globalisation become embodied as individual experience
of extreme violence and suering? What are the implications of the use of
hegemonic narrative framings that culturalise violence as opposed to illu-
minating the social forces that enable violence especially when the bodies
in question are (read as) Brown/ird World/Muslim?
Following the Rana Plaza tragedy, Erin Cunningham chronicled
American Apparel CEO, Dov Charney’s reaction to international sweat-
shops in an article for the Daily Beast. He states: ‘In Bangladesh, the
problem with these factories is that they’re only given contracts on a sea-
sonal or order-by-order basis,’ Cunningham quoted Charney telling the
LA Times. ‘ere’s so much pressure to perform, some of the working
conditions are outrageous, almost unbelievable. It has completely stripped
the human element from the brands… It’s such a blind, de-sensitised way
of making clothing.’
Cunningham further notes that in 2002 American Apparel declared
itself ‘sweatshop-free,’ priding itself on producing pieces in Downtown
LA, rather than outsourcing overseas like many other fast-fashion compa-
nies. e brand also cites on its website that its ‘garment workers are paid
up to 50 times more than the competition’ (i.e. Bangladesh sweatshops).
‘I think these retailers need their asses handed to them,’ Charney is quoted
to have said about the companies who outsource to unsafe factories
(Cunningham 2014).
It is pertinent to juxtapose the two images from the Prothom Alo bill-
board and the American Apparel ad campaign. e rst image portrays
the modern self-reliant woman who serves and uplifts the nation. e
second one ironically brings attention to the oppression of women in
sweatshops and locates the US state and corporation as their rescuer. Maks,
a free Muslim woman, has been extricated from her conservative Muslim
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
65
background, and she celebrates that freedom by displaying her body for
public consumption. Ironically, a commercial for clothing features a
woman with hardly any on her body. Furthermore, she conjures up the
dangerous sweatshops producing garments for Western consumption and
attests to American Apparel’s so-called clean labour practices. Her body
laid bare for public consumption is put to use to signify the cleanliness and
freedom of America. Her deant stance and look is both a symbol of cher-
ished freedom and the underlying threat of immigrant labour. Particularly
in the context of California, where Asians are noted for their immense
contributions to the tech industry while simultaneously representing the
‘threat’ of American job loss to foreigners. Maks is the symbol of the suc-
cessful immigrant who has redened herself as free from her backwards
culture. However, at the same time, she is perceived as a threat to the
nation (the deant look) which must be mitigated by literally exposing her
female Muslim body to the imperial gaze, manipulating her immigrant
body to comply to the demands of neoliberal capital and consumption. In
both ad campaigns, the women signal the ‘new’ but dened by the state,
the corporation, and the transnational media. It is imperative to ask here
who gets to dene the new and whether it unsettles or perpetuates gen-
dered and racialised systems of inequality. One arms the neoliberal nar-
rative of women’s empowerment absent its violent subtext while the other
panders to the global morality market. us, it is prudent to consider the
question, whom does the narrative empower?
In considering this question in relationship to the student’s question, I
evoke the work of African American feminist scholar Saidiya Hartman
who writes about the historical suering of African Americans and its
continuing legacy in America. In her essay, ‘Venus in Two Acts,’ she dis-
cusses both the possibility and impossibility of recuperating African nar-
ratives of female captivity and enslavement and questions the intent
behind such attempts of recuperation. She suggests that these recovery
attempts may be a way to create a way of living in the world in the after-
math of catastrophe and devastation, a place in the world for the muti-
lated and violated self. However, the creation of the way of living or that
space may not be as critically benecial to the subject of the violence as it
is to the consumer/narrativiser. e intent of such narration is not to give
voice to the slave, but is intended to imagine what cannot be veried, a
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
66
realm of experience which is situated between two zones of death—social
and corporeal death—and to reckon with the precarious lives which are
visible only in the moment of their disappearance.
Hartman’s observation on the abject suering of African Americans is
particular to the North American context where she argues the legacy of
slavery still shapes blacks as property and not fully human. While the
specicities of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its consequences to con-
temporary black condition in America is unique, what does carry over to
the condition of the wage labourers in Bangladesh is the notion of value
and expendability of lives that are never quite considered fully human.
e factory system in South Asia depends upon the mass availability of
disposable labour made up of poor women (and men). ey are valuable
in the sense that they make transnational capitalism possible, but as indi-
viduals they are invisible and expendable. Hartman’s analysis helps us to
interrogate who is calling for the ‘new’ in womanhood and how it relates
to the social and corporeal death of the expendable third-world citizen in
a globalised world. While it is the corporeal death of workers that may
turn the gaze of the world towards their plight, socially they never
acquired the status of human to begin with. eir liberation was only
ever legible within, and tied to the logic of, the market.
Iyko Day’s work is instructive in underscoring the market-driven instru-
mentality of Asian labour in North America. In this racialised landscape,
the image of the exploited bodies of female third-world workers in
Bangladesh can be replaced and neutralised by the image of Maks, who is
(re)made in America. Nevertheless, she is still part of that racialised labour
force, extricated from her conservative Muslim past yet not fully American
due to her ethnic and religious heritage (Day 2016, p.6). e deance in
her eyes speaks to the not quite/not white positionality of Asians even as
they are at once contributing to the American economy while simultane-
ously seen as taking away jobs from white Americans. In this context, the
‘new’ is a continuum of, rather than a break from, past oppression. Maks
represents a ‘romantic anti-capitalism’ whereby American Apparel can por-
tray its labour practices as free from sweatshop exploitation and position
themselves as the heroic rescuer of immigrant women like Maks (Day 2016,
p.26). Whether the labour is forced (as in the context of African Americans)
or racialised labour (as in the context of Asians) is secondary to their subor-
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
67
dination to the overarching logic of capitalism (2016, p.26). ey are het-
erogeneously racialised. Asians in particular are not to be eliminated as such
but to increase value or prot within the evolving economic landscape of
racialisation in the global economy (2016, p.33). Asian labour in this con-
text is no longer bonded, however nor is it personally free.
Iyko Day points out that the typication of Asians as the model minor-
ity—educated, disciplined, obedient—emphasises their economic over
human characteristics, reies them as the ideal neoliberal subject who
manifests ‘human capital’ (Helen Jun quoted in Iyko Day). is term,
originally coined by Economist Gary Becker, stresses the role education
plays in adding value to labour. Asians are thus regarded as an ‘enterprise
valuable as they are for their capacity for self-development with the prom-
ise of high rates of return to society. Maks represents precisely that Asian
subject adding value and labour to United States, clean prot to American
Apparel and neutralising the backward sweatshop worker in Bangladesh.
Speaking to the visibility/invisibility of women garment industry
workers, Sushmita Preetha (2016) points out in a recent essay that they
are not invisible as such—they are integral to the national imagination
as the bearers of the country’s progress and economic growth. Collectively,
they are visible and valuable even though there is a ne line to expend-
ability. Yet individually their lives are disposable. Preetha writes about
Sumayah Khatun, a 16-year survivor of the Tazreen Fire who later per-
ished of an untreatable brain tumour—which might have been the con-
sequence of working in toxic factory conditions. Preetha elaborates how
well-meaning NGOs processed Sumayah’s death certicate even before
her actual physical demise—no doubt to seek compensation for the
bereaved family. On the other hand, local government ocials refused
to issue a death certicate after Sumayahs corporeal death—in fear of
litigation from the family and human rights community. As an individ-
ual worker, Sumayah was deemed replaceable and expendable by the
garment owner, even the state. As a symbol of the garment girls—the
collective—she was symbolically and materially valuable. Corporeal
death is desired by the human rights community to seek compensation.
Socially she had been dead already.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
68
Conclusion
e photograph e Death of a ousand Dreams is one of the most star-
tling and publicised examples of the visibility-in-death, the value and
expendability of workers in the garment industry in Bangladesh. Its
inherent disregard for human life is evident in the series of deaths from
factory mishaps but also in the forcing of workers into unsafe premises
even while sta of other businesses like shops and banks were asked to
not report to work in the same. Workers in this story matter most when
they are either exploited labour or when their suering is given weight in
the initial outcry after a monumental disaster.
e image is also instrumental in opening a conversation about the
necessity of an ‘ethical engagement’ with human catastrophe such as
Rana Plaza. Such a reckoning cannot recuperate the catastrophic past, in
fact in itself an impossible endeavour; nevertheless, it can strive for a
political agency emerging from that paradoxical condition where recov-
ery is impossible. It also forces us to reect upon artistic abstractions of
social abjections as a political project. If we accept that the catastrophic
loss might negate full representation and that the harm exceeds language
(Butler 2002). In that vein, we can strive for an ethical engagement that
elicits a deeper appreciation of dierentiated agency, suering, and
humanity. Saidiya Hartman, in an interview with Frank Wilderson
(2003), talks about the pedagogy of suering. In explicating, recuperat-
ing, reconstructing the African American subject position in America,
she calls not for empathy per se, which she sees more of a self- aggrandising
process, rather a visual schema of looking. e visual schema, Hartman
(2008) suggests, is a classicatory system through which racialisation
operates. In this system, racialised bodies are disposed of, appropriated,
and xed within a visual grid (1997, p. 191). Alongside empathy,
Hartman calls for a seeing of this schema, which I believe is judicious in
the case of the visual and literary works discussed in this chapter. An
engagement with the contemporary visual and literary works as articu-
lated in this chapter is a step towards that looking/seeing such that the
condition and emergence of the ‘new’ woman does not occur absent its
violent subtext. e new woman is a dutiful worker dependent on wages
who is not ultimately self-sucient nor autonomous, bound as she is
within the logic of autonomy through capitalist advancement.
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
69
Notes
1. e April 2013 collapse of the Rana Plaza factory building in Bangladesh
came as a powerful blow to the image of the ‘self-reliant’ third-world
woman worker—the backbone of the national economy and the transna-
tional supply chain. e factory collapse killed upward of 1100 workers in
the ready-made garments industry. Garment products constitute 75 per
cent of the country’s foreign exports. Ready-made garments are the big-
gest source of foreign exchange next only to remittances. Currently four
million people are employed in this industry, 90 per cent of whom are
women.
2. Image available at: http://time.com/3387526/a-nal-embrace-the-most-
haunting-photograph-from-bangladesh/
3. American apparel advertisement available at: https://alalodulal.
org/2014/03/13/sexuality-as-liberation/
References
Ahsan, R. 2010. e Death of Migrant Workers. e-Bangladesh (online) Available
at: http://www.ebangladesh.com/2663. Accessed 10 July 2017.
Akl, A. 2011. South Asian Women Caught Between Tradition and Modernity.
VOA News (online). Available at: https://www.voanews.com/a/south-asian-
women--between-tradition-modernity-119185479/167284.html. Accessed
29 June 2017.
Anam, T. 2016. Garments. In e Best American Short Stories, ed. J.Diaz, 1st
ed., 22–33. Boston: Mariner Books.
Baker, C. 2016. e E-Snu of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile. Avidly: A
Channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books (online). Available at: http://avidly.
lareviewofbooks.org/2016/07/08/the-e-snuff-of-alton-sterling-and-phi-
lando-castile/. Accessed 29 June 2017.
Butler, J. 2002. Afterword: After Loss, What en? In Loss: e Politics of
Mourning, ed. D. Eng and D. Kazanjian, 1st ed., 467–473. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
———. 2009. Frames of War: When Life Is Grievable? London: New Loft Books.
Chatterjee, P. 1989. Nationalist Resolution of the Woman’s Question. In
Recasting Women, ed. K.Sangari and S.Vaid, 1st ed., 233–253. New Delhi:
Kali for Women.
Made inBangladesh: TheRomance oftheNew Woman
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
70
Cunningham, E. 2014. American Apparel Stirs Up Controversy…Again. e
Daily Beast. Available at: http://www.thedailybeast.com/american-apparel-
stirs-up-controversyagain. Accessed on 29 June 2017.
Day, I. 2016. e New Jews: Settler Colonialism and the Personication of
Capitalism. In Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler
Colonial Capitalism, ed. I. Day, 1st ed., 1–40. Durham: Duke University
Press.
Diaz, J., ed. 2016. e Best American Short Stories. NewYork: Mariner Books.
Hartman, S. 1997. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in
Nineteenth-Century America. NewYork: Oxford University Press.
———. 2008. Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 12 (2): 1–14.
Hartman, S., and F.Wilderson. 2003. e Position of the Unthought. Qui Parle
13 (2): 183–201.
Murthy, L. 2014. Violence, Voices and Visibility. Himal Southasian (online).
Available at: http://himalmag.com/violence-voices-visibility/. Accessed 11
Nov 2017.
Nishat, S.A. 1994. e New Woman in Literature and the Novels of Nojibur
Rahman and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein. In Innite Variety: Women in Society
and Literature, ed. F. Azim and N. Zaman, 1st ed., 119–141. Dhaka:
University Press Ltd.
Preetha, S. 2016. Mourning the Violence of Capitalism. e Daily Star (online).
Available at: http://www.thedailystar.net/op-ed/mourning-the-violence-capi-
talism-73178. Accessed on 11 Nov 2016.
Ray, R., and S.Qayum. 2009. Cultures of Servitude: Modernity, Domesticity and
Class in India. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press.
Sherman, L. 2014. American Apparel’s Creative Director Explains the ‘Made in
Bangladesh’ Campaign. Fashionista (online). Available at: https://fashionista.
com/2014/03/american-apparel-made-in-bangladesh-campaign. Accessed
on 29 June 2017.
Siddiqi, D.M. 2015a. Scandals of Seduction and the Seductions of Scandal.
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 35 (3): 508–524.
———. 2015b. Starving for Justice: Bangladeshi Garment Workers in a ‘Post-
Rana Plaza’ World. International Labor and Working-Class History 87:
165–173.
E. H. Chowdhury
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
71
© e Author(s) 2018
N. Hussein (ed.), Rethinking New Womanhood,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_4
The New Heroine? Gender
Representations inContemporary
Pakistani Dramas
VirginieDutoya
Urdu dramas, which are relatively short (about 25 episodes) TV serials,
have been an important part of Pakistani television broadcasting, rst on
public television and, since the liberalization of television broadcasting in
2002, on cable and satellite television (C&S TV) (Désoulières 1999;
Kothari 2005).1 As most of the Urdu dramas revolve around love stories
and family issues in a heterosexual context, it is no surprise that women
are often central in the narratives of these serials. But some recent dramas
go further, explicitly addressing ‘women’s issues’ such as child marriage,
polygamy, violence, right to education, or preference for boys. ese dra-
mas champion women’s rights, and their ‘pro-women’ stance has been
largely recognized and celebrated by the English-speaking media in
Pakistan and in India (Haider 2015; Dutt 2015), as well as on blogs and
social networks (S.Haider 2013b; B.Haider 2013a; First Post 2014).
Yet, while these dramas defend women’s rights, they also propose specic
representations of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ womanhood. e objective of this
chapter is to analyse those representations.
V. Dutoya (*)
Centre national de la recherche scientique, Bordeaux, France
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
72
ough it is dicult to assess the audience of Urdu dramas, they are
undoubtedly popular and widely discussed. My analysis rests on the pos-
tulate that TV serials are ‘telling about society’ (Becker 2007) and that
they constitute a vantage point to analyse the elaboration and diusion of
‘a dominant position with respect to the way in which social relations and
political problems were dened and the production and transformation
of popular ideologies’ (Hall 1980b, p. 117). In particular, television is
both constitutive of and constituted by gender relations (Biscarrat 2014,
p.37), and dramas participate in the construction of gender, as a ‘technol-
ogy of gender’, in the sense that they impact ‘the eld of social meaning
and thus produce, promote, and “implant” representations of gender’ (De
Lauretis 1987, p.18). Moreover, as it has been shown by various research-
ers in the contexts of India, Bangladesh, Egypt, or France, women are not
‘encoded’ (Hall 1980a) only in terms of gender but also in terms of class,
religion, localization (urban/rural), and so on (Abu-Lughod 2011;
Chatterjee 2016; Chowdhury 2010; Lécossais 2016; Mankekar 1999).
e objective of this chapter is thus to highlight the production of
gender norms looking at four dramas aired on cable television between
2012 and 2015: Zindagi Gulzar hai (Life is a bed of roses), Rehaai
(Deliverance), Kankar (Pebble), and Chup Raho (Hush).2 ese four dra-
mas have in common to be presented by those involved in their fabrica-
tion (authors, directors, producers, or actresses) as well as by commentators,
as ghting social stereotypes and practices that harm women.3 By focus-
ing on those dramas, my objective is thus not to uncover one hegemonic
model of ‘Pakistani womanhood’ within the genre of Urdu drama but to
look at the articulation of the notions of ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ in the
construction of female role models, using the singularity of the dramas of
my corpus as magnifying lenses. Indeed, because they make a specic
claim of ‘modernity’, they constitute privileged sites to observe the dis-
cursive formation of the Pakistani ‘new woman’. Using the concept coined
by Partha Chatterjee to reect on the encounter between the ‘women’s
question’ and nationalism (1987), I will analyse the framing of heroines
in Urdu dramas, particularly looking at gender and class dynamics.
Methodologically speaking, while it would also be useful to look at the
context of production and reception of these dramas (Abu-Lughod 2011;
Mankekar 1999), this chapter is limited to the analysis of the ‘text’
(Chambers 2009) of the serials. To do so, as advised by Lila Abu-Lughod
V. Dutoya
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
73
(2011, p.20), I have taken seriously the plots, characters, and dialogues of
the dramas, and the representation of the social they propose. Urdu dra-
mas are particularly adequate for such an analysis, as they are nite serials,
constituted of a limited number of episodes. us, these dramas present a
complete storyline, intended from the beginning by a single author.
I will rst discuss the concept of the ‘new woman’ and how it can be
used to analyse gender representations in TV serials before briey coming
back on the history of Urdu dramas, the place they have given to women
and ‘women’s issues’, as well as the recent transformations of the media
landscape in Pakistan. I will then move the argument to the representa-
tion of the women in the four dramas of my corpus, analysing the fram-
ing of a ‘new woman’ in terms of gender norms and class.
Tracking theNew Woman inPopular Culture
Paradoxically, there is nothing new about the concept of the ‘new woman’.
While the term was already used in the Victorian period (Hussein 2017),
in the South Asian context, it was coined as an academic concept by
Partha Chatterjee (1987) in the mid-1980s. According to him, the ‘new
woman’ was the one able to balance ‘modernity’ and ‘tradition’ within
nationalist discourses; she was educated, urban, aware of social and politi-
cal issues, yet able to retain an authentic Indian spirit and infuse it into
her home. It is thus worth questioning how this concept can be used to
decode contemporary Urdu dramas. First, though it was initially devel-
oped in a Hindu context, the concept of the ‘new woman’ also makes
sense when it comes to analyse the South Asian Muslim communities and
societies. Several authors have shown the major role played by women
and gender representations in the redenition of social and political
Muslim identities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
(Devji 2008; Metcalf 2004; Minault 1997). Muslim women were
expected to participate in the uplift of their community, while ensuring
the maintenance of its perceived religious, social, and cultural boundaries;
they had to be educated and modern homemakers, pious (but not super-
stitious), and socially aware. is gure of a new Muslim woman played
an important role in the debates that agitated Muslim communities on
the issue of purdah (roughly the veiling and seclusion of women), as well
The New Heroine? Gender Representations…
nazia.hussein@bcu.ac.uk
74
as on women’s education, inheritance, or polygamy. Popular culture in
the form of books and short stories in women’s magazines was an impor-
tant arena for these debates and for the construction and diusion of
renewed gender roles and norms (Bagchi 2010; Hasan 2013; Mankekar
1999; Minault 1997).
Popular culture, let it be television, advertisement, or cinema, remained
central to the discussions on the new woman in South Asia (Chatterjee
2016; Chowdhury 2010; Hussein 2017; Mankekar 2009; Mehta 2004;
Sunder Rajan 1993). e review of this literature highlights signicant
changes in the construction of the new woman since the early twentieth