Asian Muslim Women: Globalization and Local Realities

by Huma Ahmed-Ghosh (Editor)

Overview

This book resists the homogenization of Muslim women by detailing the diversity in their lives and by challenging the dominant paradigm of Arabized Islam as the sole interpreter of the faith. Though much has been written on the Middle East, there is a huge gap in research on Asia, which has two-thirds of the world's Muslim population. These essays reveal that the lives of Muslim women are impacted not only by Islam but also by local politics, class, religion, and ethnicity. Through ethnographic research and other methodologies, the contributors describe how economic globalization, construction of sexualities, and diasporic expectations shape women's lives. The book focuses on women's negotiations and resistances to global, national, and local patriarchies in an attempt to empower themselves.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781438457765
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	09/11/2015
Series:	SUNY series, Genders in the Global South
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	292
File size:	996 KB

About the Author

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh is Professor of Women's Studies at San Diego State University and the editor of Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Huma Ahmed-Ghosh

Part I. Globalization and Transnationalism: The Muslim Woman and Public Space

1. “Just 6P on a T-shirt, or 12P on a pair of jeans”: Bangladeshi Garment Workers Fight for a Livable Wage
Shelley Feldman

2. Dilemmas of Women’s Movements in Turkey: Labor, Charity, and Neoliberal Patriarchy
Damla Isik

3. Complicated Belonging: Gendered Empoerment and Anxieties about “Returning” among Internally Displaced Muslim Women in Puttalam, Sri Lanka
Sandya Hewamanne

4. Women in Post-Conflict Sweat, Pakistan: Notes on Agency, Resistance, and Survival
Lubna Nazir Chaudhry

Part II. Muslim Women: Lived Realities, Resistance, and the State

5. Maintenance for Divorced Muslim Women after the Muslim Women (Protection of Right on Divorce) Act 1986: A View from the Lower Courts
Sylvia Vatuk

6. Gender, Sharia, and the Politics of Punishment: A Contemporary Malaysian Case
Maila Stivens

7. At the Forefront of a Post-Patriarchal Islamic Education: Female Teachers in Indonesia
Ann Kull

8. Education, Gender, and Islam in China: The Place of Religious Education in Challenging and Sustaining “undisputed traditions” among Chinese Muslim Women
Maria Jaschok and Hsu Ming Vicky Chan

Part III. Women’s Voices and Agency: Challenging and Reclaiming Islam

9. Cosmetics, Fashion, and Moral Panics: The Politics and Ethics of Beauty in a Girls’ Dormitory in Kabul
Julie Billaud

10. Negotiating Polygamy: Islam, Gender, and Feminism in Indonesia
Sonja van Wichelen

11. South Asian Muslim American Girls: Resistance and Compliance in Public and Private Spaces
Marcia Hermansen and Mahruq F. Khan

Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"This book's greatest strength is the diversity of its scope, both geographically and thematically, without reducing Muslim women to particular roles and/or identities." — Bahar Davary, author of Women and the Qur'an: A Study in Islamic Hermeneutics

From the Publisher