Pious capital: fashionable femininity and the predicament of financial freedom

Abstract

I take up the figure of the new Pakistani working woman as constructed in the advertising campaign of the fashion brand Working Woman to think about transnational frames of class, womanhood, piety, femininity, and empowerment. I introduce pious capital as a concept that illuminates how this figure embodies the intersections of borders where borders mean the binaries that this figure appears to transcend: she is the best of the East and worthy of the West both. Situated at the apparent intersection of the East and the West, this new Pakistani working woman represents Islam as modern (read compatible with capital), Pakistan as productive, and certain forms of piety as empowerment. This is not about the customers who frequent Working Woman or class simply as purchasing power, rather it is about the story this ad campaign by Working Woman is trying to tell and sell about Pakistani womanhood on a global stage. Part fantasy, part aspiration, part control, this new feminist story still upholds discourses of cultural and religious authenticity and heteronormative femininity – with a new fashion-forward twist. The mobility of this figure signals transnational discourses of value, and the movement of bodies, capital, affect, and aesthetics across borders.

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