Bangladeshi New Women’s ‘Smart’ Dressing: Negotiating class, culture and religion

Hussein, Nazia (2018) Bangladeshi New Women’s ‘Smart’ Dressing: Negotiating class, culture and religion. In: Rethinking New Womanhood Practices of Gender, Class, Culture and Religion in South Asia. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 978-3-319-67899-3

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Abstract

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

Item Type:	Book Section
Dates:	Date Event 10 July 2017 Accepted 23 May 2018 Published
Uncontrolled Keywords:	new middle class, Bangladesh, women, neoliberalism, aesthetic labour, clothing practices, hybrid, Muslim women, new woman, cosmopolitan, distinction, cultural authorisation
Subjects:	CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-03 - politics > CAH15-03-01 - politics CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-02 - sociology CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-03 - social policy CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-04 - health and social care > CAH15-04-01 - social work CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-04 - anthropology CAH26 - geography, earth and environmental studies > CAH26-01 - geography, earth and environmental studies > CAH26-01-03 - human geography CAH15 - social sciences > CAH15-01 - sociology, social policy and anthropology > CAH15-01-01 - social sciences (non-specific) CAH17 - business and management > CAH17-01 - business and management > CAH17-01-09 - others in business and management CAH19 - language and area studies > CAH19-04 - languages and area studies > CAH19-04-06 - Asian studies
Divisions:	Faculty of Business, Law and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences > Dept. Criminology and Sociology
Depositing User:	Nazia Hussein
Date Deposited:	05 Apr 2018 08:26
Last Modified:	03 Mar 2022 15:55
URI:	https://www.open-access.bcu.ac.uk/id/eprint/5805

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