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Bangladeshi New Women’s ‘Smart’ Dressing: Negotiating Class, Culture, and Religion

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Rethinking New Womanhood

Abstract

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’.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I have identified this same class as ‘new affluent middle class’ elsewhere (see Hussein 2017a, b).

  2. 2.

    Colonial Bengal was split into two segments during the partition of India. Part of it (known as Kolkata) remained within India, and the other part constituted post-colonial East Pakistan and contemporary Bangladesh.

  3. 3.

    An enveloping outer garment worn by women in some Islamic traditions. Often black in colour, it covers a woman’s whole body and has a separate headscarf.

  4. 4.

    A spot on the forehead, between the eyebrows, traditionally worn by Hindu women as a symbol of their marital status but later adapted by Muslim and Hindu women as a cosmetic feature.

  5. 5.

    I use the term aesthetic to mean clothing or dressing practices in this chapter and use the terms aesthetic, clothing, and sartorial practices interchangeably.

  6. 6.

    A salwar kameez is a three-part dress consisting of a long loose fitting trouser and a long tunic top paired with a scarf which can be worn in various different ways.

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  1. Department of Sociology, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, UK

    Nazia Hussein

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  1. Department of Sociology, Birmingham City University, Birmingham, United Kingdom

    Nazia Hussein

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Hussein, N. (2018). Bangladeshi New Women’s ‘Smart’ Dressing: Negotiating Class, Culture, and Religion. In: Hussein, N. (eds) Rethinking New Womanhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_5

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