A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

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. Furthermore, 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.

When Stories Turn Institutional: How TikTok Users Legitimate the Algorithmic Sensemaking

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“…However, this restricted scope can be advantageous as it validates the institutional elements unique to Romania. Further studies could investigate the complex interplay between the algorithmic stories and the institutional values in other cultural contexts, given the fact that research has been carried out on TikTok activity in Costa Rica (Siles et al, 2022), Pakistan (Kamran, 2023), and so on. Another limitation arises from the relatively short distance between the stages of this study.…”

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“…Nation-building requires valorizing a specific vision of womanhood and regulating any threats to this vision (Jamal, 2006). In Pakistan, ideal womanhood is predicated on gender seclusion, sexual modesty, respectability, middle-classness, domesticity, and distance from the public sphere (Kamran, 2021;Khoja-Moolji, 2018). Bans on TikTok in Pakistan are thus a continuation of a long history of state formation through repression of women's agency and sexuality (Toor, 2007) and other non-normative displays of gender and sexuality.…”

‘It Matters How They See You’: ‘Maternal Activation’ As a Strategy to Navigate Contradictory Discourses of Motherhood and Neoliberal Activism in the Welsh Homelessness System

“…Embodied performances of daily life are forms of discourse enabling resistance to manifest (Butler, 2002). Women are not passive embodiments of femininity or motherhood, but rather involved in active, strategic production of alternative approaches, piecing together different performances of both femininity and maternity to enable survival for themselves and their children (Cruikshank, 1999;Skeggs, 2004;McCormack, 2005;Kamran, 2021). Laws, policy, and media discourse are strategies through which ontological legitimacy is gained, and which then generate logical and reasonable courses of action (Foucault, 1980).…”