Abstract
My PhD thesis is driven by the contradictions inherent in contemporary European society, where the discourses on women’s empowerment and agency advocated by postfeminism coexist with the widening of social inequalities on multiple levels. While literature on postfeminism has largely focused on white, middle-class subjects, little research has been done on how diasporic women, notably those of South Asian and Muslim cultural backgrounds, experience its effects. The thesis therefore investigates feminine subjectivities through the mediated self-representations and self-narratives of a group of European young women belonging to the Muslim Bangladeshi minority in Italy and the United Kingdom. In particular, I focus on online practices as representational and performative acts situated in the broader context of the young women’s everyday lives and, through an intersectional investigation across borders, I take into account the diverse and changing positionings and constitutive social categories (gender, ethnicity, race, nationality, class, and religion) of their subjectivity formation.The thesis asks the following research questions: How do Italian-Bangladeshi Muslim young women use social networking sites (SNSs) to articulate their female subjectivities? How do they engage with, appropriate and/or contest, dominant gendered discourses? How does gender intersect with other social categories in the process of subjectivity formation? By critically engaging with contemporary postfeminist and neoliberal paradigms in relation to the question of diversity, I seek to bring to light the nuances and contradictions of emerging feminine subjectivities, which are generated by the multiple and competing positions these young women move across both in the sociocultural contexts they inhabit and the dominant discourses they consume and produce.
The thesis draws on a mixed methods research design that was adapted in response to the challenges posed by COVID-19. Online ethnography was the primary method employed, incorporating online questionnaires (n=70), the analysis of Social Networking Profiles (SNPs) (n=71 profiles; n=45 participants), and written interviews (n=37). Grounded theory was applied to generate themes from within the data itself. This led to the generation of nine inter-related codes: selfies and personal portrayals, fashion and beauty, everyday narratives and social time, girl power and success, South Asian gender norms, Bangladeshi culture, Italian culture, online advocacy, and Islam.
The findings reveal that European women belonging to the Bangladeshi-Muslim minority simultaneously do and undo postfeminism by adopting and repudiating dominant discourses through their mediated self-representations. One the one hand, they represent themselves as the new entrepreneurial subjects, capable of navigating not only individual but also structural constraints to re-write their individual biographies. On the other hand, in the process of appropriating and reproducing postfeminism, second-generation young women reformulate its pillars by disrupting some of the binary logics and fixed categories on which it is built. The analysis ultimately suggests that axes of categorisation and layers of discrimination (gender, race, ethnicity, class, and religion) offer insights into how young women negotiate postfeminist and neoliberal demands as well as systemic inequities in their process of subjectivity formation.
| Date of Award | 1 Jul 2023 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Wing Fai Leung (Supervisor) & Jeanette Steemers (Supervisor) |