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A Fine Balance: Negotiating fashion and respectable femininity in middle-class Hyderabad, India

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 July 2013

AMANDA GILBERTSON
AMANDA GILBERTSON*
Affiliation:
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK Email: [email protected]
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Abstract

Drawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex.

Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Asian Studies , Volume 48 , Issue 1 , January 2014 , pp. 120 - 158
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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