SIDRA KAMRAN

SIDRA KAMRAN

RESEARCH

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  • Read Abstract

    Research on women’s social media practices in Muslim societies has primarily focused on middle-class or elite women, such as influencers, activists, and members of online communities. However, we know little about working-class women’s use of social media in Muslim contexts. Using ethnography and interviews, I analyze TikTok’s early popularity with working-class women in Pakistan and report three main findings. First, TikTok’s initial reception in Pakistan was fractured across class lines; whereas middle-class and elite women dismissed it, working-class women flocked to it, and TikTok became associated with a “low-class” femininity. Second, women engaged in a range of gender transgressions on TikTok. Third, women simultaneously crafted new practices of “digital purdah,” or veiling, on TikTok. I contribute to scholarship on digital purdah by, first, showing how women combine tools available on TikTok with other veiling strategies to conceal their identity while expressing their sexuality and second, arguing that “digital purdah” is compatible, rather than incongruous, with gender transgressions on TikTok. By showing how co-constituted class and gender dynamics shaped the simultaneous popularity and moral disapproval of TikTok in Pakistan, I argue for increased attention to class dynamics in studies of new social media platforms.

    Keywords: sexuality, working class, social media, Muslim women, South Asia

  • Read Abstract

    This chapter investigates how the otherwise “private” space of the workplace enables experiences associated with “public” life, especially for women in Karachi who have limited access to spaces besides the home and work. Drawing on observations in a bazaar and a department store in Karachi, in addition to interviews with beauty workers, retail workers, and managers, I explore how women workers experience the city through their workplaces. I find that women’s workplaces, despite being sites of managerial control and exploitative labor, allow women to experience a version of what public spaces are often assumed to provide: pleasure, freedom, and the opportunity to craft new identities. Drawing on theories of the multiplicity of space, I suggest that ideas of “publicness” vary across different subject positions and are shaped by complex inequalities. I ultimately make a case for more centrally including workplaces in our analyses of urban life.

    Keywords: urban life, workplace, public space, pleasure, gendered mobility

  • Read Abstract

    Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Further, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

    Keywords: hegemonic femininity, pariah femininity, class, labor, South Asia

My research has been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, Wenner-Gren Foundation, the New School for Social Research, the American Institute of Pakistan Studies, and the Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies at The New School.