Rethinking New Womanhood: Practices of Gender, Class, Culture and Religion in South Asia [Hardcover]

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 womens 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, womens 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.

1. Introduction; Nazia Hussein; Part 1: New Woman: the real and the imagined.- 1. New Woman as a Flashpoint within the Nation: The Border as Method in Tales of Modernity; Nandita Ghosh.- 2. Understanding the 'New Woman' in the Intersectional Grid of Caste, Class, Gender and Religion through the Works of Women Writers in India; Sanchayita Paul Chakrobarty.- 3. The New Heroine: Gender Representations in Contemporary Pakistani Dramas; Virginie Dutoya.- 4. Mis(s)guided by Popular Feminisms: TV commercials in India and the New Woman; Del3n