Respectable Femininity Research Articles

Doing style for Saraswati Puja: Girlhood, Class, and Community Identity among Muslim girls in Assam

Saraswati Puja, a celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning, is organised by youth clubs and educational institutions in eastern India. We draw on debates on girlhood, codes of respectable femininity in a neoliberal world, and how these play out for Muslim girls in the school context. These ideas frame our analysis of the dressing up practice among Muslim girls in a government school. We argue that the middle-class and ethnicised ideals of girlhood are amplified and reconfigured by the popular discourses on Saraswati Puja and add to the tensions over the appropriate code of dressing within the context of Puja at school. While the reality of girls’ lives is being shaped in novel ways, the Muslim girls engagement with the ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ through varied modes of ‘doing style’ put them under contrary pressures in public places like school. In such a scenario, their accounts of dressing up and participating in this event serve as a vantage point to understand how girlhood is being construed and experienced from varied positions of class, caste, age, and community. These accounts highlight Muslim girls’ engagement with the codes of femininity in the majoritarian cultural universe of a school.

The cultural logics of mothering practices: agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong

PurposeThis study aims to reveal and compare the cultural logics of university-educated Chinese mothers in Singapore and Hong Kong in their mothering practices to improvise their femininities in constituting their work–family interactions.Design/methodology/approachThis qualitative research, with the ethnographic elements, has included 32 Chinese mothers to share about their mothering experiences through semi-structured interviews. This methodological design with feminist lens embraces women’s own narratives as sources of knowledge and learns their voices to reinvent their role and bodily engagement in shaping their family dynamics.FindingsThis discussion basically reaffirms the argument where the mother’s involvement in their children’s schoolwork becomes one of the core elements in their actual everyday mothering practices. It has further reflected the dynamics of family quality time in the light of mothers’ cultural logics as much as their attentive agency capacity to present their respectable femininity in the form of mothering.Research limitations/implicationsThis research process has revealed the actual experiences of the participants from their own narratives. For future research development, data collection can be extended to include the husbands’ profiles and their narratives in understanding their wives’ mothering experiences.Originality/valueThis discussion enriches the work-family literature by extending it to the Asian Chinese context. While the concepts of cultural capital and habitus have been addressed in previous studies, this discussion highlights the agency capacity of the university-educated Chinese mothers in their cultural logics to deliver their respective mothering practices. This filtering process to transmit cultural capital to their children is as much as they involve in reproducing status boundaries for the family.

“Becoming Head-gear Is of the Utmost Importance”: Gender Performance, Social Differentiation, and the Codes of Hat Etiquette in Dombey and Son

“Becoming Head-gear Is of the Utmost Importance”: Gender Performance, Social Differentiation, and the Codes of Hat Etiquette in Dombey and Son Chen Houliang (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “Profound Cogitation of Captain Cuttle,” by Hablot K. Browne (“Phiz”), frontispiece to Dombey and Son, London, The Caxton Publishing Co., 1910. [End Page 138] In Everyday Etiquette: A Practical Manual of Social Usages (1905), Marion Harland and Virginia Van De Water spill much ink on hat etiquette. Although the heyday of hat wearing was waning to a close when the book was published, the authors still admonish their readers: “Becoming head-gear is of the utmost importance” (168). Indeed, hat wearing is so central to the nineteenth-century British schemas of identity performance and social differentiation that, as Michael Paterson notices, “[n]o man or woman during the whole of the nineteenth century would have dreamed of going out with their head deliberately uncovered if they could afford not to–indeed to be seen hatless in the street would be considered a sign of eccentricity if not downright madness” (190). For the Victorians, hat wearing was anything but a trifling matter, and one could never be too careful about hat etiquette. Knowing what type and style of hat one should wear, as well as where, when, and how it should be worn, constitute key points of Victorian propriety. If the significance of hat wearing in the Victorian era is difficult for us to appreciate today because we no longer deem hats an essential part of dress, Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848–49) provides for us a window into Victorian people’s everyday practices of hat etiquette, and more importantly, their function in the Victorian codes of gender performance and social differentiation. References to hats and other headgear abound in the novel: from Captain Cuttle’s hard glazed hat to the Welsh wig worn by Sol Gills, Mr. Toodle’s oilskin cap, and Mrs. Skewton’s peach-colored velvet bonnet. Sometimes they are depicted in detail, sometimes only mentioned briefly, but always they are imbued with gender and class implications. As Clair Hughes argues, these “significant trifles” can be used as “a key to the ‘whole,’ [End Page 139] a way into the life of the past” (119). In her essay “‘It Is the Hat that Matters the Most’: Hats, Propriety and Fashion in British Fiction, 1890–1930” (2017), Charlotte Nicklas “examines the ways in which British novelists used references to women’s hats to explore issues of etiquette, character and social change” (90). While Nicklas’s work is inspiring, it does not cover fictions that predate 1890, among which Dombey and Son deserves special attention, not only because of the ubiquity of references to hats in the novel, but also because of the centrality of hat performance in Dickens’s representation of the gender and class schemas of Victorian society. In “Dickens’s Immaterial Culture of Hats and The Pickwick Papers” (2011), Mark M. Hennelly has made a comprehensive study of hats in Dickens’s novels, including Dombey and Son, particularly hat moments related to Florence and Captain Cuttle, but still there remain a lot of issues regarding hats in the novel untouched by Hennelly and deserving further exploration. While Hennelly provides an overview of “a ‘diffusion of hats [and] bonnets’ that perform proverbial, idiomatic and slang, class, gender, moral, psychological, and popular-culture roles” in the Dickensian world (77), I will focus on details in Dombey and Son that are related to hat etiquette, so as to explore how the Victorian cults of bourgeois masculinity, feminine respectability, as well as class identity are exposed by Dickens through his realistic, though sometimes melodramatic, dramatization of everyday practices of hat wearing. I argue that, while hat etiquette is generally performed to regulate gender and class division, and hence works to reinforce the Victorian cults of bourgeois masculinity and feminine respectability, it also creates emotional and cross-class links between people. Particularly, I commend Mr. Toots, whose performance of bourgeois hat etiquette, though outwardly clumsy, actually indicates more democratic codes of dress. Captain Cuttle’s Glazed Hat and the Victorian Ideal of Bourgeois Masculinity The Victorian era...

Memoir and Respectable Femininity: Shirani A. Bandaranayake's Hold Me in Contempt

ABSTRACT This paper is an exploration of Hold Me in Contempt: A Memoir by Shirani A. Bandaranayake, the first and only woman so far to have held the position of Chief justice in Sri Lanka, who was impeached from her position. It argues that while the memoir acts as testimony and enables female political activism and agency, revealing the liberatory possibilities of female memoir, it simultaneously reanimates gender stereotypes which it attempts to resist through a discourse of respectable femininity. Yet, the paper contends that while Hold Me in Contempt unravels the relationship between memoir, gender, and power, it offers spaces for investigating the nexus between respectable femininity and subversive feminism.

Metaphorical Machines or Mindless Consumers: Young Working-Class Femininity in Early Postwar Turkey

AbstractThe simultaneous processes of secular state-building and state-led industrialisation resulted in a new ideology of women's labor in Turkey in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. As the country moved away from protectionist, state-led industrialisation in the post-war period, female industrial labor received increasing and contradictory attention from policy makers, employers, the new trade union movement, and middle-class feminists. On the one hand, there emerged an idealized image of factory women that emphasized their productive potential by metaphorically linking them with technology and mass production. However, this proud, progressive message was counterbalanced by an anxious, conservative view of young women's work—one that criticized factory girls’ consumption choices as posing a threat to respectable femininity. Weaving together lines of inquiry such as the change in industrialisation policy, women's access to technology, the sexual division of labor, and the emergent consumption patterns, I unpack the tropes of working-class productivity and femininity against the backdrop of the post-war expansion of capitalism in Turkey.

Wise Mothers and Wise Buyers: Marketing Tea and Home Improvement in 1930s South Africa

AbstractHistories of advertising in Africa focus on the postwar and postcolonial periods. This essay examines an innovative marketing campaign in South Africa's eastern Cape in the 1930s. The campaign reveals congruence and conflict between increased marketing of consumer goods to African households and the contemporaneous growth of women's home improvement societies. The newspaper Umlindi we Nyanga used testimonials and written competitions to sell its Ambrosia brand of tea to rural women. Advertisers and consumers drew on local meanings of tea consumption and debates about feminine respectability to present tea-drinking women as ‘intelligent’ and ‘wise mothers’. The emphasis on intelligence linked tea to literacy, in part because text-based consumer culture offered rural women a way to visibly consume socially respectable goods. The essay concludes with a close examination of two testimonials written by leaders of home improvement societies, which hint at the contradictions implicit in the commercialization of the ‘wise mother’.

Gender, Veiling, and Class: Symbolic Boundaries and Veiling in Bengali Muslim Families

In Bangladesh, due to economic growth and greater access to education, more girls and women are veiling, even as they are also more likely to be in school or employed. Some scholars identify this trend of women appearing both “more modern” and “more religious” as paradoxical. On the basis of 114 in-depth interviews with Bangladeshi migrant workers ( n = 57) in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Singapore, and South Korea and their wives ( n = 57) in rural Bangladesh, I claim that Muslim women in middle-class Bengali families who veil are cultivating symbolic boundaries guided by an accountability structure of middle-class religiosity and gender conservatism. The increasing tendency of middle-class Muslim women to appear both “more modern” and “more religious” can be explained by examining the role that veiling plays in signaling class status through conspicuous consumption, moral superiority, and respectable femininity, differentiating them from lower class women. I conclude that “doing gender” through veiling must be understood as also “doing middle-class difference” in Bengali Muslim families in rural Bangladesh.

Daughters, devices and doorkeeping: how gender and class shape adolescent mobile phone access in Mumbai, India

ABSTRACT How do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls’ unequal access to mobile phones within the family in Mumbai, India? What are the everyday practices and cultural logics upon which these inequalities are built? This paper addresses these questions by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 268 surveys with adolescents aged 13–15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together create varying standards of ‘respectable femininity’ and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of low-income/high-income or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of ‘respectable femininity’ create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life.

Labors of Love: Sex, Work, and Good Mothering in the Globalizing City

While feminist scholarship has worked to expand theorizations of sex work as reproductive labor, fewer scholars elaborate on sex workers’ role in caring work as mothers. This article draws on interviews with fifty-two cisgender women sex workers in Bangalore to argue that, for them, sex work is central to being a good mother, in a context of increasing economic precarity combined with intensified demands on mothers to provide children with middle-class consumer goods. Tracing interviewees’ paths through sex work reveals how sex workers provide necessary social and economic resources within the family while sex work allows them to attain forms of respectable femininity that other livelihood possibilities might foreclose. These navigations, for these sex workers, puncture patriarchal ideals of masculine protection as well as the neoliberal promise of upward mobility. Further, their accounts help complicate accounts of sex workers’ reproductive labor, showing how they navigate multiple gendered economic arrangements to carve out spaces of autonomy, dignity, and pride.

“Women of ill repute”: Pariah femininities, retaliatory violence, and the negotiation of rebel identities among women bartenders

AbstractIn the United States, work is a central institution that reflects and reproduces gender hierarchies that organize social institutions, interactions, and ideologies across social life. Through an ethnographic study of New Orleans‐area bartenders, this paper analyzes the everyday/every‐night experiences of women bartenders to understand how gender relations map onto women’s identity construction projects through their occupational role. I argue that women’s identity negotiation is constructed in relationship to gender hegemonies that produce female bartenders as pariah femininities outside the protections of respectable femininity. Sexual harassment, fetishization, and double standards are systematic forms of heteronormative punishment that ensure women bartenders remain feminized workers in masculinized workplaces. While women actively refashion retaliatory punishment into an affirmative self‐identity: the rebel barmaid, this study finds that through gender essentialist and individualist frames, the rebel barmaid falls short of revolutionary potential.

The ‘feminisation’ of psychiatric discourse: A Marxist analysis of women’s roles in neoliberal society

In analysing the increasing rates of female ‘mental illness’ in neoliberal society, this article draws on Marxist and feminist theory to conceptualise psychiatry as an institution of patriarchal and capitalist power, responsible for reinforcing traditional gender roles. Through outlining the changing circumstances of women, including the recent ‘feminisation’ of the labour force, we argue that there has been a more acute need for patriarchal capitalism to curtail the emancipatory potential of women through the heightened enforcement of sex-role ideology. This is demonstrated through a profile of ‘feminised’ mental disorders which have appeared in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ( DSM) since 1980 – including premenstrual dysphoric disorder and female sexual interest/arousal disorder – which we argue purposely reproduce a discourse which restricts women’s advancements in paid employment while reinforcing the cliché of ‘respectable femininity’ as still primarily associated with the family and the home. We conclude the article by suggesting that, under the conditions of neoliberalism, the mental health system is becoming an increasingly powerful institution for the social control of gender.

GIRLS, GADGETS AND GATEKEEPERS: HOW GENDER AND CLASS ASPIRATIONS SHAPE ADOLESCENT ACCESS TO MOBILE PHONES IN MUMBAI, INDIA

Within a patriarchal, caste-based and restrictive family setup, how do gender and class work together to shape adolescent girls’ access to mobile phones in Mumbai, India? How do adolescent girls mediate their own independent aspirations and desires to variously fit within or subvert these frameworks of class stability and social morality? This paper addresses these question by using a mixed-methods study of 59 group interviews and 278 surveys with adolescents aged 13-15 in Mumbai. Taking an intersectional analytical framework, the findings show how gender and class together, create varying standards of respectable femininity and class distinction that families aspire to and cultivate in adolescent girls. The mobile phone can be seen as both a threat and a necessity to the maintenance of these standards of respectability, resulting in families variously enabling or constraining access to mobile phones by girls. Rather than interpreting the findings through binaries of lower-class/upper-class or empowered/constrained, I instead consider how classed ideals of respectable femininity create different aspirational conditions for girls belonging to each class group, and form the cultural frames of everyday life. I explore what implications this might have for adolescents girls’ understandings and enactments of independence, and how they use the site of the mobile phone to make these enactments.

Attitude towards female circumcision among women in Ethiopia

Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) is a global phenomenon mostly practiced in Africa, Asia, and the middle east. It involves the removal of the external female genitalia for non-medical reasons. The practice cuts across different ethnic and religious groups in Africa and is associated with several health complications. The following study assessed attitude towards the practice among Ethiopian women aged 15–49. Using the Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey from 2016 as a data source, we analyzed a sample of 6984 women. We used the respectable femininity discourse to inform our variable selection. The main outcome variable assessed whether women supported or rejected the continuation of the practice. In the bivariate analysis, all the sociodemographic variables including women’s circumcision experience were strongly associated with the outcome variable. In the multiple logistic regression, only education, wealth, religion, and circumcision status were independently associated with women’s attitude towards FGM/C. For instance, compared to women with no education, women with at least a secondary education were more than 4 times (AOR 4.2, 95% CI 2.53–7.04, P-Value < 0.001) more likely to agree with the termination of the practice. Our findings suggest that changing attitudes towards FGM/C may require uplifting the social and economic status of women, working with those who have experienced FGM/C and collaborating with religious leaders.

The ‘Good Indian Queer Woman’ and the Family: Politics of Normativity and Travails of (Queer) Representation

ABSTRACT Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga (dir. Shelly Chopra Dhar, 2019) is touted as the mainstream commercial venture that cemented Bollywood’s journey from creating queer homosocial and homoerotic moments on screen to representing a queer relationship between two women for the first time. This paper tries to understand how the film’s liberal messaging about queer acceptance and anti-discrimination, through the coming out narrative of its queer protagonist, is made possible through the embodiment of sanitized class and caste markers, how Indian queer femininity is encoded in the film and what its relationship with the heteronormative biological family reveals about the film’s messaging. It also tries to explore the figuration of Sweety, an upper-class feminine queer woman in small town Moga (in the North Indian state of Punjab), who is portrayed as the quintessentially ‘good’ queer woman. Even though Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga offers a queer visual and imaginative landscape, it limits itself by constructing discursive, narrative, and visual terrains where Sweety’s dissidence is deemed acceptable on grounds of her class privilege, her reverence for her family, her respectable femininity, and the embeddedness of her queer subjectivity in the family and culture. This paper interrogates the nature of queer representation in the film, how it tackles anxieties around acculturation, queer opposition to the nation-state and the visual and narrative means by which it domesticates queerness by sanitizing and inviting it into culture, family, nationalism and the nation-state.

Breaking the Rules: Zodwa Wabantu and Postfeminism in South Africa

Zodwa Wabantu, a South African celebrity recently made popular by the &lt;em&gt;Daily Sun&lt;/em&gt;, a local tabloid newspaper, is notorious as an older working-class woman who fearlessly challenges social norms of feminine respectability and beauty. Her assertion of sexual autonomy and her forays into self-surveillance and body-modification, mediated by the &lt;em&gt;Daily Sun&lt;/em&gt; and other tabloid and social media platforms, could be read as a local iteration of a global postfeminist subjectivity. However, the widespread social opprobrium she faces must be accounted for: Using Connell’s model of the gender order together with a coloniality frame, I argue that northern critiques of postfeminism omit to consider the forms of patriarchy established by colonialism in southern locales such as South Africa. The local patriarchal gender order, made visible within the tabloid reportage, provides the context within which the meaning of Zodwa Wabanu’s contemporary postfeminist identity is constructed. I examine a range of Zodwa Wabantu’s (self)representations in &lt;em&gt;Daily Sun&lt;/em&gt; and other digital media in the light of this context, and conclude that a close examination of the local gender order assists in understanding the limits of postfeminism’s hegemony.

Shit talk in shitty terrain: Flushing Indian feminism through YouTube’s comedic conduits

ABSTRACT This article examines the ways in which YouTube’s comedy-driven drama, Ladies Room, set in six women-only toilet sanctuaries across Mumbai, mines the semiotics of unruliness to push against the boundaries of upper-caste Indian feminine respectability. Drawing upon comedy studies and feminist theory, we deconstruct the two millennial protagonists Dingo & Khanna’s transgressive behaviors, body politics, and charged conversations about the sexist and cutthroat environments of corporate and new media branding careers. In conclusion, while Ladies Room’s cultural politics disrupt the agendas of conservative Hindu nationalism and Bollywood’s neoliberal feminism, we also point to the show’s collusion with caste and class hierarchies.

Bhal Suwali, Bhal Ghor: Muslim families pursuing cultural authorization in contemporary Assam

ABSTRACT There appears to be a globally unifying discourse that suggests Muslim communities are not supportive of girls’ education 1 2 . This paper aims to destabilize such a discourse by inserting the narratives of Muslim parents pursuing girls’ education in Assam’s Nagaon district. By paying attention to the concepts of bhal suwali (good girlhood) and bhal ghor (good family) articulated by parents in my study, this paper connects the performances of certain types of gender practices with the pursuit of class aspirations. It shows that good girlhood works as symbolic capital that helps Muslim parents to culturally authorize their daughters as legitimate actors in the field of education, while legitimizing themselves as good family. This paper draws attention to three practices of respectable femininity through which good girlhoods are enacted in the field of education, namely: negotiating poverty respectably, prioritizing gendered discipline, and merging career aspirations with marital prospects.

Where do good girls have sex? Space, risk and respectability in Chennai

This paper examines discourses about sexual risk and respectability in the South Indian city of Chennai, through an ethnographic study of young women’s participation in practices of public sex. Focusing on middle-class women located at the heart of neoliberal and national fantasies of the ‘good life’, it makes two arguments. First: the paper unpacks the ways in which urban publics have been stigmatised as ‘unsafe’ for respectable women. It demonstrates that in practices of publicly-located sex, young women subvert this. They instead see private and commercial spaces – which have been celebrated as the locus of their liberation – as places of surveillance and discipline. Second: the paper interrogates how spatial governmentalities produce regimes of legitimacy that accrue to particular sexual acts. It argues that what ‘counts’ as sex is also determined geographically: by where the sex act occurs and what geographies of discipline and imaginaries of risk and respectability it evokes in its location. Both arguments draw attention to the ways in which contemporary discourses about the ‘risk’ of urban publics evoke the logics of development within which the construct of respectable femininity is located.

The Sister Arts: Textile Crafts between Paint, Print and Practice

AbstractThis article explores intersections between portraiture, printed genre images and conduct literature in late eighteenth‐ and early nineteenth‐century Britain, focusing on representations of textile crafts and their accoutrements. In extant scholarship needlework has been characterised as an important site of debate, a discursive locus wherein the qualities of appropriate femininity were sketched out and redefined. Centring on the very mechanisms by which this discourse operated, this article argues that visual and literary images of textile‐work were central to the creation of a grammar of respectable femininity, a symbolic language that variously advocated maternal instruction, domestic industry and marital eligibility.

TEENAGE GIRLS, FEMALE FRIENDSHIP AND THE MAKING OF THE SEXUAL REVOLUTION IN ENGLAND, 1950–1980

AbstractHow can we explain rising levels of pre-marital sex in post-war Britain? Focusing on the experiences of young women growing up in Britain between 1950 and 1980, this article argues that changes in sexual practice were brought about by shifts in the social value of sexual knowledge and experience. While the figure of the ‘nice girl’ was still central to understandings of respectable femininity, across this period social status and reputation became linked to demonstrations of attractiveness and sexual knowing. For girls of the post-war generation, discussions of sex were central to how they related to those around them, and the decisions that teenagers made about their own sexual practice were informed by their perceptions of what their friends and peers would think of them. The article argues that, by considering the history of sexuality at a ‘local’ scale between the macro-level of culture and the micro-level of individual sexual selfhood, we not only gain an important new perspective on the everyday sexual experience but also uncover new processes of socio-sexual change.