This thesis explores Muslim women’s religious identities and the processes through which they construct and narrate these identities by comparing Bosnian and UK Muslim women. Disproportionate political and media attention on Muslim women in Europe has in turn prompted an increase in academic interest. However, most academic research neglects the experiences of the indigenous European Muslim women thereby maintaining the image of the foreign ‘other’. This research forges a more inclusive approach by considering the views of indigenous European Muslim women. The study is based on interviews with 20 Muslim women, four focus groups and observation of the activities of three Muslim women’s organisations. I subscribe to a feminist perspective where participants’ voices are privileged and, since I belong to both communities, the complexities of my positionality were constantly reflected upon during the course of the research. My analysis is organised around three main themes that emerged from my participants’ accounts of religious identity: family life, hijab and women’s organisations. Family was identified as an important factor in these women’s early perceptions of Islam. However, violent events – the war in Bosnia and the effects of 9/11 and 7/7 in the UK – affected women’s reflections on what it means to be a Muslim woman in Europe, initiating independent re-evaluation of religious identity. This process was transformative, often resulting in a decision to wear the hijab and/or to seek out spaces that encourage a positive sense of Muslim identity such as women’s organisations. During the process of constructing their religious identities, women, in both countries, faced challenges from the societies they live in and also from their families. Their agency is constantly questioned. I argue that two contrasting socio-cultural and historical contexts affect the diversity of lived experiences of the Muslim women and the way they organise, while the similarities, inspired by their faith, lie in skilful negotiation of their religious identities in face of many challenges.

This thesis examines education within a transnational capital movement framework, investigating the experiences of first-generation educated Bangladeshi immigrant women arriving in Britain between 1999 and 2007. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of education (1973, 1990 [1977]), his notions of forms of capital (1986), and a feminist perspective on these theories are utilized to explain the interplay of class and gender in educating middle-class Bangladeshi women, the economic and social value of these academic qualifications in migration, and the gendered dimension of social reproduction in their diaspora. In the discussion of Bangladeshi women in Britain, this thesis for the first time deals with educated women from that background (as opposed to the majority Sylheti community that has been the subject of much research). Its primary data are in-depth interviews with twenty-eight highly-educated Bangladeshi women across England. In my methodology chapter I discuss, inter alia, the problematic of researching social equals, and the possibilities and limitations of ‘partial knowledge’ within that context. My in-depth analysis of the narratives around the participants’ family, upbringing, education and gender structure establishes the theoretical relevance of Bourdieu’s concept of education as cultural capital in post-colonial, resource-poor Bangladeshi society. In discussing gender and the internationalization of higher education in this context, I revise Bourdieu’s definition of ‘academic capital’, proposing three main categories that operate in my participants’ lives: namely ‘elite’, ‘standard’ and ‘general’ academic capital. This thesis challenges the argument that human movement and capital movement are similar and equal by analysing the differentiated values of academic qualifications and academic capital in the advanced, neoliberal labour market of Britain where the host country’s specific ‘cultural capital’ is at play. Finally, my thesis extends knowledge about immigrant women’s involvement in the developing diasporic ‘middle class’ with an investigation of these educated Bangladeshi women’s social lives and ‘mother work’ in the framework of social reproduction. This thesis develops an original and new dialogue between skilled migration, the Bangladeshi community in Britain, and the dynamic of gender and social class across borders, inviting further debates within and beyond feminist thoughts around educated middle-class women’s migration and its far-reaching consequences in the contemporary transnational world. Key Words: Education, Capital, Bangladeshi Women, Migration, Gender and Britain.

In contemporary western culture, cohabitation is not a major issue – it has become a normal practice in everyday life. This is not at all the case in Korea where the institution of marriage is still considered the pivotal relation that authorises ‘adult citizenship’ (Josephson 2005: 272). Non-marital cohabitation is therefore something of a taboo. At the same time, homosexuality, though neither legal nor illegal, is also taboo and hence same-sex couples’ cohabitation has hardly been discussed in Korean academe because first, it is expected to be hidden and, second, given that homosexuality is not generally accepted in Korean culture, the issue of same-sex couples’ cohabitation is constructed as outside of public interest. Hence, overall, little attention has been paid to the question of how Korean cohabiting couples live their cohabitation and what the similarities/differences in experience might be among same-sex and different-sex couples. This thesis centres on couples’ reported experiences of living cohabitation, that is the dailiness of their lives together and its meaning as they articulate it in terms of particular practices. I draw on interviews carried out between April and September 2012 with twelve heterosexuals, nine gays and fourteen lesbians, all of whom were cohabiting. In my research I focus on: 1) how and why couples come to consider cohabiting and decide to do so; 2) the extent to which couples disclose the nature of their cohabitation to others (i.e. mothers, fathers, siblings, friends, work colleagues and neighbours), which remains a big issue in Korea; 3) the ways in which cohabitation is discussed by my participants as emulating and/or rejecting traditional Korean family norms. I argue that cohabiting couples do cohabitation differently, in line with their sexual identity.

The primary aim of my study is to examine how readers’ real-life narratives in selected women’s magazines from the UK and Thailand construct women in these two different cultural contexts. My research provides an understanding of the social construction of women’s gendered identity in women’s personal stories in particular women’s magazines. This study is based on 84 issues of four magazines covering the period November 2010 – November 2011. Two of the magazines are from the UK and two are from Thailand: Woman; Woman and Home (the UK and Thai editions); and Poo Ying. These magazines were selected because they aim at a similar readership, women in their 30s and over. My analysis shows that the readers’ narratives in these four magazines centre predominantly on the following four topics, presented in terms of how prevalent they were: 1) confidence-building, 2) employment, 3) romantic relationships and marriage, and 4) family. These topics form the core of my analysis chapters. Altogether they reveal that women are constructed somewhat differently in the Thai and UK magazines in question. In the UK magazines, women were constructed as imperfect but improvable. Readers’ narratives had the function to suggest to actual readers of these narratives how they themselves might deal with similar issues. By contrast, women in the Thai magazines were normally constructed as ‘ideal’ in terms of already having achieved success. The readers were thus meant to admire the women whose stories were narrated since the women’s stories were presented as examples of an already achieved ‘ideal’ life. But there was no indication how this ideal was achieved. It thus represented a state rather than a process. The magazines provided testimony to the difference between Thai and British public culture in terms of what could and could not be talked about.

This thesis investigates female cultures of body modification in contemporary Britain. I begin from the premise that women in current UK society are concerned about their appearance and subjected to significant media pressures to engage in body modification. By body modification I mean the methods which women use in order to alter their physical body and appearance. All methods (invasive or non-invasive; self-administered or other-administered; permanent or temporary) are considered, provided the intention of their use is primarily to alter the user’s physical appearance. Based on qualitative life-history interviews with thirty university-educated British women aged between eighteen and twenty-five my research investigates the choices of, motives for, influences on and relationships of women to their practices of body modification. The analysis chapters of this thesis deal with three key stages in my participants’ development during which body modification emerged as important. These are the point when my participants went to school, their years at university and their entry into the world of work. The analysis chapters focus on these three stages. The first one explores participants’ initial engagement with and experience of body modification during the school years. The second centres on their use of body modification while at university, and the final analysis chapter explores their engagement with these practices in the world of work. I also discuss my participants’ expectation of their future engagement with body modification. Unlike third-wave feminist discourse, which frequently refers to body modification in terms of freedom and choice, my findings offer a completely different understanding of women’s engagement in these practices. In the life stages I focus on, sociality and taking cue from others emerged as the most important aspects of women’s body modification decisions.

China has experienced rapid economic and social change since the beginning of the 'Open Door' policy in 1978. Yet at the same time, the legacy of the Mao era remains and elements of Confucianism have been revived and circulate in the reform period (Hershatter, 1996; Rofel, 2007). As a result, traditional views concerning gender roles and sexual attitudes and practices persist within this environment of social and economic change. This thesis examines the ways young women in China consider sex, sexuality and intimate relationships in this context. Based on semi-structured interviews with forty-three young women in Shanghai, I investigate the theme of continuity and change in a period of economic and social transformation. Despite the Party-State rhetoric of equality, I consider how essentialist notions of femininity and masculinity are present in the reform period and contribute to the definition of womanhood. I also explore how sex continues to remain a sensitive topic, with young women positioned as sexual gatekeepers, responsible for negotiating and reconciling individual desires against wider societal sanctions. I examine the limited discourse of desire and sexual autonomy available to women and how this translates into a pragmatic approach in partner selection. My findings also reveal how marriage remains an expectation of all women (and men) and is the only legitimate context for sexual expression for women in the reform period. I contend that the norm of marriage is further reinforced through the stigmatization of unmarried women as shengnü. As a result of this changing economic and social environment and the pull of tradition, I argue that reform China offers young women a series of contradictory expectations when it comes to sex, sexuality and intimate relationships.

This thesis is situated at the intersection of feminist political theory, identity politics and moral philosophy. Its broader aim is to show the positive consequences of returning the self and its inner activity to the ethical domain for feminist identity politics. To this end, it brings feminist identity politics into dialogue with contemporary developments in virtue ethics, in particular Christine Swanton’s pluralistic virtue ethics. As its starting point, it takes issue with the tendency to reduce the complexity of identity to issues of category. The first part of the thesis problematises this tendency and argues for a reconsideration of the question of identity politics by shifting the focus away from identity per se and towards a more complex picture of the self that is reflective of the constitutive relation between the self and identifications, commitments and values. The work of the post-modern feminists Wendy Brown and Judith Butlers are read as proposing just such a shift away from the identitarian engagement of identity politics of ‘who am I?’ towards a more ethically imbued engagement that centres a complex self with inner depths. Part Two of the thesis extends this reconceptualisation of the problematic of identity politics and elaborates on what it could mean to undertake such a shift and how such a project could be conceived. Drawing on both Michael Sandel’s and Michel Foucault’s formulations of the self, identity and its relation to the good, the thesis develops the argument that the problematic of identity politics, articulated in ethical language, enables the formulation of an argument for giving an account of the good life and that this entails developing a subject imbued with a full inner life. Part Three of the thesis argues that contemporary work in virtue ethics offers the best way to take this project forward, suggesting that it represents a positive development in conceptions of the self and that a complex picture of the person emerges that provides the basis for a richer approach to the ethical concerns raised in identity politics. The thesis concludes by illustrating the potential value of taking those feminist insights into the constructed nature of identity into dialogue with a pluralistic virtue ethical account of the self and suggests that this approach provides new opportunities for understanding and discussing the collective dimension of identity politics in situations of diversity and inequality.

Roller derby is an emergent women’s sport; self-organized on a not-for-profit, do-it-yourself model it initially developed outside existing sports institutions and remains un-professionalized. Roller derby thus occupies an ambivalent position of gendered alterity in relation to a broader cultural field of sport, where women’s struggles for sporting legitimacy are well rehearsed in the literature. Existing research interprets roller derby as a unique context, particularly conducive to re-configurations of both gender and sport. Despite such uniqueness, research participants increasingly claim roller derby’s similarity to other sports practices, become concerned with its recognition as a ‘real, legitimate sport’ and orientate their practice towards getting taken seriously. I develop an ‘insider’ ethnographic account from analysis of five years of participant observation with one roller derby league of approximately 100 members, including 26 in-depth interviews and a collaborative film-making project. The thesis responds to a broad question, ‘how is getting taken seriously negotiated in practice?’ and analyses shifts in participants’ gendered self-representations, the bureaucratization of a 'by the skaters, for the skaters' organizational ethos, and the institution of competition. As participants work to diminish distinctions between roller derby and ‘sport’, they enact a set of related distinctions between; what the league used to be like and what it became; who roller derby is and is not by and for; and practices that are and are not condusive to serious recognition. As participants’ definitions of roller derby move away from ‘a sport for women who don’t like sport’ towards ‘a sport for people who really, really like sport’ a second over-arching question arises; in seeking serious recognition did the league eventually become what it once defined itself in opposition to? Concentrating on moments when participants’ claims for serious recognition refuse and rework the gendered terms of such intelligibility, I argue that a sociological analysis of seriousness is crucial to understanding such fateful dilemmas. Enactments of non-/seriousness enable skaters to create new organizational and representational praxis, identities, meanings and relations, as they negotiate the possibilities and limits of working together to make something relatively new. Non-/seriousness is how participants move between roller derby, sport and gender as inevitable, singular, certain and beyond their influence and yet malleable, contingent, multiple, ambivalent and created in their own actions. Four interludes, between chapters, reflect on non-/seriousness in ‘insider’ research. The interludes interrupt and expand upon the thesis’ central analytical contentions; that analyzing non-/seriousness both enhances and unsettles our understanding of familiar sociological preoccupations with gender, organization and mid-ranges of agency between dichotomies of voluntarism and determinism.

De nos jours, la discrimination dont sont victimes les femmes a changé, mais elle n’a pas disparu. Si elle est devenue plus subtile, plus ambiguë, si elle ne s’expose plus aussi ouvertement qu’autrefois, cette discrimination n’en reste pas moins un problème d’actualité majeur. Un moyen significatif pour les femmes d’améliorer leur position désavantagée au sein de la société est de lutter contre cette discrimination et de la dénoncer. Pourtant, de nombreuses recherches ont mis en évidence que les femmes sont très peu susceptibles de dénoncer la discrimination dont elles sont victimes. L’explication majoritairement avancée dans la littérature est le jugement négatif auquel s’exposent les victimes qui osent dénoncer la discrimination qu’elles ont subi.Cette thèse vise à démontrer que la peur d’être jugées négativement, bien qu’elle puisse motiver les femmes discriminées à taire la discrimination qui les touche, n’est pas pour autant un obstacle inébranlable à la dénonciation de la discrimination. Dans ce but, nous étudierons principalement l’impact du sort commun intragroupe du point de vue de la victime de discrimination et de l’observatrice sur le jugement de la victime et les facteurs susceptibles de favoriser la dénonciation de la discrimination.Dans un premier chapitre, nous abordons les principaux obstacles à la dénonciation de la discrimination rencontrés par les victimes et notamment le jugement négatif émis par les individus sur ces victimes, y compris lorsque ces victimes sont membres de l’endogroupe. La peur de ce jugement négatif motiverait les femmes à minimiser publiquement la discrimination qu’elles ont subie, même en présence d’un membre de leur groupe. Dans un deuxième chapitre, nous nous attachons à démontrer qu’une femme ose tout de même dénoncer la discrimination dont elle est victime à une autre femme en situation d’observatrice, mais uniquement lorsque le contexte rend saillant un sort commun intragroupe avec cette observatrice, et à condition que la discrimination soit flagrante. Dans un troisième chapitre,nos résultats indiquent que ce contexte de sort commun révèle des motivations à la protection de soi chez l’observatrice, motivations qui se traduisent par une minimisation de la discrimination subie par la victime, mais aussi par un jugement particulièrement négatif de la victime si cette dernière dénonce la discrimination à l’observatrice. Dans un quatrième chapitre, nous démontrons que si la victime se plaint de la discrimination directement au perpétrateur de cette discrimination, cela favorise un jugement positif de la part des observatrices, d’autant plus si cette plainte a pour objectif de contrer la discrimination. Enfin, un bilan de ce travail et de nouvelles perspectives de recherche sont proposés. / Nowadays, discrimination against women has changed but has not disappeared. If it has become more subtle, more ambiguous, and is displayed less blatantly than before, discrimination is still a current and major problem. A significant way for women to improve their disadvantaged position in society is to combat and to claim this discrimination. However, many studies showed that women are not very likely to claim discrimination against them. In the literature, the explanation that is mostly propounded is the negative judgment toward victims who dare to claim the discrimination they faced.The aim of this dissertation thesis is to demonstrate that although the fear to be negatively judged may motivate discriminated women to remain silent, this obstacle to discrimination claim is not immutable. In order to achieve this aim, we mainly investigate the impact of within-group common fate on the points of view of both female victims and observers on the judgment of the victim. Factors likely to favor discrimination claim are also assessed.In a first chapter, we address the main obstacles to discrimination claim faced by the victims, such as the negative judgment of victims, including when victims are ingroup members. The fear of this negative judgment would motivate women to publicly minimize the discrimination they faced, even in the presence of an ingroup member. In a second chapter, we demonstrate that a woman nevertheless dares to report the discrimination she faced to a female observer, but only when the within-group common fate with this female observer is salient, provided that discrimination is blatant. In a third chapter, our results indicate that the common fate context makes self-protection motives of the observer salient, causing a minimization of the discrimination faced by the victim, but also a particularly negative judgment of the victim if she reports the discrimination to the female observer. In a fourth chapter, we demonstrate that a victim who complains about the discrimination directly to the perpetrator, is positively judged by female observers, all the more if the complain is aimed to counter this discrimination. Finally, an assessment report of this work and new perspectives of research are proposed.

My research explores the tension between being and becoming modern and moral for British-born Muslim Pakistani women in Sheffield through an investigation into the judgements that surround beauty, beautification, and beauty work. Through ethnography I unpack the raced and classed regimes in which my interlocutors are embedded, arguing that global Islam and Asian are affiliations that are realised in relation to the English (White British) community. Through comparisons to White British women (referred to as ‘English’ amongst my informants), the young Pakistani women I met negotiate an understanding of themselves and others within a schema of British multiculturalism, in which English are the standard for which to aim. Over the last 10 years, the number of young, British-born Pakistani women in Sheffield who are establishing Ladies Only beauty salons and training as Asian Bridal Make-Up Artists has increased rapidly. These specialised services, catering for Muslim and Asian women respectively, appear at first glance to be conflictual with the notion of piety. In my thesis, I demonstrate how these two narratives overlap and are brought together by the idiom of ‘good intention’, a trope which centres on a discussion of self-esteem and female empowerment. In the everyday, beauty and beautification are judged through perceptions of ‘naturalness’ and ‘balance’, a narrative that gives way to one of beauty-as-effort during celebratory occasions. Whereas everyday beautification is directly linked to the superior beauty and beautification of White English women through discussions of ‘natural’ fair skin and good taste, I suggest that the perception of Asian beauty-as-effort is also compared to perceptions of White English beauty. Although Asian beauty-as-effort and transformation are considered superior to the mere improvement undertaken by White English women during celebratory occasions, forms of beautification thought of as Asian, are used as a measure of the ‘progression’ of the Pakistani community as a whole along a continuum on which the White English community is thought of as the furthest progressed. The popularity of beauty work amongst my informants is due to the perception that such work has high earning potential as well as offering job flexibility and the possibility of being one’s own boss. These positive attributes are troubled, however, by a perception of beauty work as being specifically related to Pakistani women, low-skilled, and potentially immoral. In my thesis, I explore how beauty workers negotiate the negative connotations of beauty work through contemplation of their Islamic faith, kinship relations, and the notion that beauty work is just a hobby or a stepping stone to ‘proper’ work within a graduate profession.