Indigestible performances: Women, punk, and the limits of British multiculturalism in Nida Mazoor’s We Are Lady Parts

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the political potential and limits of Muslim punk feminism within the context of multicultural Britain through a reading of the first season of Channel 4’s 2021 dramedy We Are Lady Parts. The show explores how the religious and cultural beliefs of Muslim communities are represented as incompatible with contemporary British values. To situate the cultural politics of the text, the article considers the characters in relation to their exclusion from “legitimate” British society, as well as their original feminist strategies as a subversive and novel response to it. Muslim women are read through a nexus of social factors – international and national. These readings can be viewed as both productive and conflicting: at some times producing important rereadings of the submissive and oppressed orientalized Muslim female figure, while at others challenging the possibility of a stable Muslim female identity as positioned in normative models of British assimilationist multiculturalism.