Challenging Landlord Masculinity: Undoing Gender; Class, and Patriarchal Islam

• In Event: Sociology of Religion Section Open Call Paper Session

Abstract

Hierarchies of gender, class, and religion structure the hegemonic Muslim landlord masculinity in rural Bangladesh. It is a formidable obstacle to sharecropper women’s empowerment; however, few studies reveal how this masculinity can be dismantled. Findings of a longitudinal ethnography (2001-2026) of 73 male and female sharecroppers reveal that Muslim women leaders challenge it to empower themselves and sharecropper men. This process required a simultaneous three-pronged strategy of undoing gender, class, and patriarchal Islam. 1.) Women undid gender by defying purdah to join the Grameen Bank. They redefined purdah as having a pure heart versus physical confinement. 2.) They undid class by using their Grameen Bank loan to pay off the land mortgage that their husbands had given to landlords. thereby disrupting the hegemony of landlord over sharecropper masculinity. 3.) When Islamicists stated that they would consequently be denied a Muslim burial, women utilized Quranic hermeneutics to illustrate how Islam encourages women’s employment. They undid patriarchal Islam by creating buddhi, their own feminist grassroots Muslim spirituality, which enables both sharecropper women's and men’s empowerment. Drawing on village oral traditions, women leaders undermined rich men through witty retorts and matchless logic. By ensuring that these debates were conducted in public, they raised awareness in the community as a whole. They created women’s unity through feminist proverbs as a form of protest. This study draws on the “lived religion” approach, which explores how individuals construct their own meanings of religion as distinct from institutional definitions. It illustrates how low-income Muslim femininities function as vectors of socio-religious and class evolution to continue the Islamic discursive tradition―thereby succeeding against Islamicist patriarchy in Bangladesh.

Author

• Fauzia Erfan Ahmed, Miami University-Ohio