Victim or Defiant? A Critical Reading of Contemporary Female Social Media Celebrities in Postdigital Bangladesh

Kamal, Marzana (2025) Victim or Defiant? A Critical Reading of Contemporary Female Social Media Celebrities in Postdigital Bangladesh. Postdigital Science and Education. pp. 1-34. ISSN 2524-4868

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Abstract

This article explores how contemporary Bangladeshi Muslim female social media personalities challenge two dominant narratives: the Western-centric stereotype of Muslim women as passive victims and the local patriarchal expectations of middle-class respectability. Using a postdigital feminist framework, the study analyzes the online presence of three women: Barisha Haque, Rubiat Fatima Tony, and Laila Akhtar Farhad, who, through their entrepreneurial visibility and spousal choices, renegotiate gender roles, marital expectations, and public perceptions of Muslim womanhood. The analysis shows that these women demonstrate the agency and complexity of Muslim women from the Global South in ways that reject both Western-centric categories and local expectations. This work contributes to postdigital feminist scholarship by providing a grounded case study that highlights the nuanced, multimodal self-representations of non-Western women influencers.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	© The Author(s) 2025. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made.
Keywords:	Female entrepreneur, Muslim women, Marital norms, Digital Intimacies
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Education and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences
Depositing User:	Marzana Kamal
Date Deposited:	15 Oct 2025 11:32
Last Modified:	26 Nov 2025 14:42
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4776

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