Suchergebnisse

Intro -- Transnationalism Reversed -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Introduction -- 1. Feminist Negotiations: Contesting Narratives of the Campaign against Acid Violence in Bangladesh -- 2. Local Realities of Acid Violence in Bangladesh -- 3. From Dhaka to Cincinnati: Charting Transnational Narratives of Trauma, Victimization, and Survival -- 4. Feminism and Its Other: Representing the "New Woman" of Bangladesh -- 5. Transnational Challenges: Engaging Religion, Development, and Women's Organizing in Bangladesh -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y.

Abstract
Fashion and consumption are culturally coded ways through which systems of class reinscribe and reproduce legitimacy by articulating, regulating and monitoring hierarchies of culture, class and consumption. Fashion and clothing are not only about presentation, they are also the means by which identities and power relations are produced and contested in local-translocal-global spaces. In this article based on ethnographic research, I discuss how fashion entrepreneurs in Dhaka, Bangladesh, are engaged in (re)articulating social and class relations through fashion. They do this by claiming a local and authentic fashion against a hybridized transnational trend. At the same time, dominant modes of fashion are challenged and reappropriated, giving way to negotiations in power dynamics. In this site of cultural production fashion is a fluid system where agency and subjectivity are actively negotiated.

In this paper, I argue that to truly understand the complexity and "high prevalence" of acid violence against women in Bangladesh, we must pay attention to the confluence of political, economic and historical forces that make certain social groups more vulnerable to such extreme violence and suffering. By tracing the life history narratives of survivors of gender-based violence, I hope to shed light that acid throwing—a form of gendered violence—has to be understood beyond a "culturalist" framework, which explains this phenomenon as a product of harmful patriarchal cultural practices, seemingly more prevalent in certain South Asian cultures. Rather, I argue, acid violence has to be understood within a broader "structural inequality" framework, which maps the vulnerability of the victims onto their life trajectory shaped by complex forces of globalization, neoliberal development, patriarchy and poverty. Focusing on the systemic oppressions faced by vulnerable social groups whether embedded in family, kin and community structures or the global capitalist system, I argue that mapping a trajectory of suffering can aid in imagining a more nuanced and humane transnational analytic and response with regards to violence against women.

In official and unofficial histories, and in cultural memorializations of the 1971 war for Bangladeshi independence, the treatment of women's experiences—more specifically the unresolved question of acknowledgment of and accountability to birangonas, "war heroines" (or rape survivors)—has met with stunning silence or erasure, on the one hand, or with narratives of abject victimhood, on the other. By contrast, the film Meherjaan (2011) revolves around the stories of four women during and after the war, and most centrally the relationship between a Bengali woman and a Pakistani soldier. In this article, I investigate the anxieties underlying the responses to Meherjaan, particularly in association with themes of trauma—its absence or omnipresence—to nonnormative gender frames of national sexuality, and the notion of loving the Other. Drawing from feminist theories of vulnerability, ethics, and love, I want to explore these themes at two levels: the political message the film transmits, and its aesthetic choices and affects. Finally, I want to comment on the potential of this film, as feminist art, in furthering a dialogue around healing and ethical memorialization in relation to 1971 in Bangladesh.