'Muslim Woman'/Muslim women: Lived Experiences beyond Religion and Gender in South Asia and Its Diasporas

This book addresses South Asian Muslim women’s lived experiences, whilst questioning dominant concepts of agency. Negative, homogenising constructions of the ‘Muslim Woman’ are not the result of a knowledge deficit, but constitutive of Euro-American and Hindu nationalist forms of civilizational self-assurance.Portraying the richness and diversity of Muslim women’s voices and agency cannot, therefore, rectify discourses casting Muslim women as invisible or silent, so long as the vision of agency is shackled to dominant feminist precepts.Mindful of this problem, the book examines Muslim women’s legal agency with respect to the family, their claims-making upon the state, livelihoods, and the impact of male outmigration on ‘left-behind’ wives.Working across these domains of everyday life, contributors highlight how women’s vulnerabilities within their families dovetail with oppressions experienced in the local state, the labour market, and in the streets.Women’s economic locations continue