Dreams, Questions, Struggles: South Asian Women in Britain

This book testifies to a multiplicity of struggles, individual and collective, through which South Asian women, across divisions of class, community, age and religion, are seeking to take control of their lives. It looks at the role of the British State, of relentless pressures of the market, and of the politics of South Asia on shaping gender relations over the last thirty years; and discusses how South Asian masculinities have been reconfigured by multicultural policies and by politicised religion. It explores the interaction of institutionalised racism and South Asian patriarchy in the context of immigration policy, state interventions such as forced marriage initiative, and psychiatry. It analyses the experiences of low-paid Asian women workers in the global market; deconstructs contemporary British South Asian weddings; and looks at how dominant representations of South Asian women have and have not changed.