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Cover -- Hlaf Title -- Series -- Title -- Copyright. -- Table of Contents -- 1 Introduction: Framing -- 2 Conceptualizing the Boundaries of Respectable Femininity and New Womenness: The Proposed Framework -- 3 Reading the New Woman Through Mobile Phone Advertisements: Capitals, Distinction and Respectability -- 4 (Re)doing Respectability in the Workplace: Smart Dressing and Aesthetic Labour -- 5 (Re)doing Respectability in the Family: Achieving to a 50-50 Work-Home Life Balance -- 6 (Re)doing Womanhood: Pushing the Boundaries of Respectability . . . The Potential of Transgression -- 7 Reflections -- Bibliography -- Index.

"This book reveals how categories of gender, class, culture and religion are modes of power which inform hierarchies of social locations and people's sense of belonging within these spaces and temporalities. It offers an alternative and innovative theoretical framework - new womanhood - for studying middle-class, urban, educated, professional women in South Asia. The book places respectable femininity at the centre of the construction and performance of new womanhood in Bangladesh: a complex and heterogeneous construction of womanhood in relation to women's negotiations with public and private sphere roles and cultural norms of female propriety. It establishes new women as part of the neoliberal middle class as they construct their class identity as a status group, claiming inter-class and intra-class distinction from other women. It also explains how new womanhood is legitimized by alternative and multiple practices of respectability, varying according to women's age, stage of life, profession, household setting and experience of living in western countries. Finally, as new women forge alternative forms of respectability theirs is not a straightforward abandonment of old structures of respectability; rather they, substitute, conceal, or legitimize particular practices of respectability in particular fields. While these new women's gains are vested in the self, rather than a wider feminist politics, they have the potential to positively influence the terrain of possibilities for other women. Finally, through a study of cosmopolitan third world women who are part of a new and potentially powerful social group who occupy a privileged position in the society they live in, the book critiques Western feminist writing and challenges binary social construction of the 'Muslim woman' either as victims of patriarchal culture and religion or as a danger to Western liberalism, developing an understanding of cosmopolitan Muslim women's classed gender identity as a struggle against classifications in the neo-liberal times. It is the first book length project of its kind to provide an understanding of the concept of new women in the Global South, which will be of interest to academics in the fields of sociology, gender studies, feminist theory, postcolonialism, inequality studies, cultural theory, development studies and South Asian Studies"--

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

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'.

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

Through a discourse analysis of four commercially successful Bollywood films between 2012-2013, this paper investigates Bollywood's role in creation of hierarchical identities in the Indian society wherein Muslims occupy the position of the inferior 'other' to the superior Hindu 'self'. Focusing on Muslim heroines, the paper demonstrates that the selected narratives attempt to move away from the older binary identity narratives of Muslim women such as nation vs. religion and hyper-sexualised courtesan vs. subservient veiled women, towards identity narratives borne out of Muslim women's choice of education, career and life partner, political participation, and embodied practices. However, in comparison to signs of change the sites of continuity are strongly embedded in the religious-nationalistic meta-narrative that drives the paradigms of Indian femininity/ womanhood. To conclude, the nature of the recent deployment of Muslim heroines in Bollywood reinforce the hierarchy between the genders (male-female), between the communities (Hindu-Muslim) and between nations (India- Pakistan).