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This article examines the extant literature on marriage and migration with reference to the South Asian populations in Britain (Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi). It will focus specifically on debates surrounding the practice of arranged marriages, their purpose, value and status in Britain. It will identify a gap in the literature when it comes to theorising and revealing the contemporary lived experience of arranged marriage among South Asians in Britain through lenses other than that of forced marriage. The article will begin by discussing the different ways in which arranged marriages have been defined. Central to this discussion will be an examination of how arranged marriages, as they are practised by the South Asian diaspora, are viewed as opposed to western notions of marriage. It will make a case for a renewed understanding of the institution of arranged marriage, one which gives due recognition to the affective register of such practices. It will conclude by calling for human geography research to attend to how contemporary British South Asians ‘do’ an arranged marriage, in order to see the ways in which this practice has been translated and reworked to suit individual aspiration and new (trans)national contexts.
“Strategic essentialism” is a term first coined by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, a postcolonial feminist philosopher and literary theorist. She employs the term in her deconstructive reading of the work of the Subaltern Studies Group. Strategic essentialism advocates provisionally accepting essentialist foundations for identity categories as a strategy for collective representation in order to pursue chosen political ends. The genesis of the term follows her central academic pursuit of exploring the role of representation in subject constitution. Within human geography, strategic essentialism has been relevant for debates in feminist geographies, for development and economic geographies, and among geographers studying “race” and representation.
We begin this article with a close look at some contemporary pictures of sexual life in the Muslim world that have been painted in certain sections of the Western media, asking how and why these pictures matter. Across a range of mainstream print media from the New York Times to the Daily Mail, and across reported events from several countries, can be found pictures of 'sexual misery'. These 'frame' Muslim men as tyrannical, Muslim women as downtrodden or exploited, and the wider world of Islam as culpable. Crucially, this is not the whole story. We then consider how these negative representations are being challenged and how they can be challenged further. In doing so, we will not simply set pictures of sexual misery against their binary opposites, namely pictures abounding in the promise of sexual happiness. Instead, we search for a more complex picture, one that unsettles stereotypes about the sexual lives of Muslims without simply idealising its subjects. This takes us to the journalism, life writing and creative non-fiction of Shelina Zahra Janmohamed and the fiction of Ayisha Malik and Amjeed Kabil. We read this long-form work critically, attending to manifest advances in depictions of the relationships of Muslim-identified individuals over the last decade or so, while also remaining alert to lacunae and limitations in the individual representations. More broadly, we hope to signal our intention to avoid both Islamophobia and Islamophilia in scrutinising literary texts.
Young Muslims in the UK are making space to gain greater control over their personal lives through the diction of ‘halal’ and ‘haram’ when reflecting on and negotiating personal relationships. This article explores the significance of ‘halal dating’ within the lived experiences and sexual relationships of young British Muslims. It draws upon 56 in-depth interviews conducted with young (16–30 years) British Muslims of Pakistani heritage. This research shows that, contrary to popular stereotype and widespread expectations, many young British Muslims do date, or have dated. By entertaining the idea that certain forms of dating may be halal, these young Muslims are finding and claiming agency to make relationship choices of their own.
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