Hybrid or in between cultures: traditions of marriage in a group of British Bangladeshi girls

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Pichler, Pia. 2011. Hybrid or in between cultures: traditions of marriage in a group of British Bangladeshi girls. In: Jennifer Coates and Pia Pichler, eds. Language and Gender: A Reader. 2nd Ed Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 236-249. ISBN 9781405191449 [Book Section]

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The chapter offers a discourse analytic exploration of the topic of arranged marriage, which continues to fuel popular discourses of culture clash in public/media debates on one hand, and academic celebrations of hybrid British Asian femininities in a range of (non-linguistic) research disciplines on the other. My own work with a group of adolescent British Bangladeshi girls seeks to provide a space in language and gender research for the voices of adolescent Asian girls. At the same time I aim to offer to existing cross-disciplinary scholarship on young British Asian identities a discourse analytic focus on the complex negotiations and contestations of ideas, discourses and subject positions that characterise the spontaneous talk of five Bangladeshi girls from London. Whereas my analysis of the spontaneous data highlights the hybrid nature of a modified discourse of arranged marriage which emerges from the girls’ negotiations, later interviews with my in-group informant contain a discourse which positions the girls as being torn between cultures. My paper will therefore take a critical and reflexive approach to perspectives of researcher and researched, different sources of data, and to discourses of hybridity and culture clash with regard to one of the girls’ favourite topics: marriage.

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Book Section