Intersectionality in the Muslim South Asian-American Middle Class: Lifestyle Consumption beyond Halal and Hijab [Paperback]

This book uses everyday consumption as a lens to analyze how South Asian Muslim American women negotiate racial, religious, gendered, classed, and often political identities. In particular, Ternikar examines the use of food and clothing as well as social media accounts among this important immigrant population, offering new insight that goes beyond examining Muslim American women through the lens of hijab. This timely and nuanced interdisciplinary study draws on both sociology of consumption theory and intersectional feminism and will be valuable for courses in gender and womens studies, sociology of consumption, and women and religion.Farha Bano Ternikar is associate professor of sociology and gender and womens studies at Le Moyne College.

This book is a fascinating exploration of the interplay between identity formation and consumption patterns with special focus on food, dress, and social media. But its sophisticated and nuanced description of the mutual impacts of politics, capitalism, and identity formation among South Asian Muslim women goes far beyond debates over clothing and dietary habits. Based on case studies in Chicago, Ternikar reveals womens agency in both adapting to and maintaining distinct identities within dominant American cultures. Tamara Sonn, director of the Alwaleed Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Georgetown University

Using an intersectional analysis that incorporates gender, social class, race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and immigrant status, Ternikar complicates classical sociological accounts of consumption. She shows how middle-class, college educated, second-generation South Asian Muslim American women navigate the complex and often fraught dynamics of living in contemporary America, using consumption to form new identities, while maintaining ethno-religious traditions, and to create distinct bonds of friendship with other SAMA women. Ternikars account is a fascinating examination of their multi-faceted l³9