‘GENDER’ is always a thorny topic at times of mass uprising. Historically, leaders of countless mass uprisings around the world decided to put away the gender question for dealing with later. The ‘mass’ had been typically framed as a body that does not have any gender in the common imagination, only to eventually reveal that it mainly included bodies and experiences of cis-, middle- and upper-class, heterosexual men.
The July uprising was not an exception either. What the ‘chhatro-jonota’ achieved through this uprising was phenomenal. Whatever happened needed to happen, given the 16-year-long dictatorial regime of the then prime minister Sheikh Hasina and the damage it inflicted on everyday lives and socio-economic institutions in Bangladesh. Nevertheless, now is the time to look back, think critically, and do some soul-searching in terms of what constituted ‘chhatro-jonota,’ whose experiences and priorities got included, and who got excluded within this construction of ‘chhatro-jonota.’
Complexities of gendered bodies and binaries
BY GENDER, I mean historically-socially-culturally constructed norms, values, roles, and responsibilities assigned to us depending on our historically-socially-culturally constructed notion of biological sex. It is important to recognise that gender identities — the way someone makes sense of their gender — are not restricted between the binary of ‘women’ and ‘men’ and can be fluid and transform over time and space.
Historically, gendered bodies have been the ground against which communal, national, and transnational identities have been framed and re-framed. In both the Global North and the Global South, particular gendered bodies and performances have been considered markers of ‘tradition’ vs ‘modernity’ and have become battlegrounds for the ‘clash of civilizations’ rhetoric. A deep exploration of the construction of gendered bodies reveals that those artificial binaries painfully fail to capture the everyday complexities of gendered experiences.
The July uprising and its gendered bodies
IN A recent interview, student coordinators Nusrat Tabassum, Rafiat Rehnuma, and Umama Fatema elaborated on the experiences of female student organisers during the July uprising. It’s evident from their narratives that female students played a vital role in making this protest a successful one. Nusrat Tabassum had to go through the highly stressful experience of being abducted by the Dhaka Metropolitan Police’s Detective Branch in the name of ‘safety custody’ with other coordinators.
During the movement, we had seen the iconic video of a young female student who was pushing against a police van, which was carrying arrested male student protesters, with bare hands while screaming, ‘Amar prottekta bhai k chharte hobey’ [‘You gotta release each of my brothers’]. We have seen the viral video of a female university teacher eloquently unpacking the falsity of the binary of ‘rajakar’ vs ‘muktijoddha’ in a firm and steady voice while holding a microphone with a trembling hand, clearly indicating the height of complex emotions of being on the street at a critical and violent historical juncture.
Many images and videos of female students drawing graffiti on street walls, passionately holding protest signs and chanting slogans, and getting attacked, beaten, and harassed by the Bangladesh Chhatra League goons and the police circulated on social media. These artefacts demonstrate the active and frequent participation of women in the July uprising. We have seen members of the Hijra community volunteering at the Dhaka Medical College Hospital, providing care to wounded protestors, moving lifeless bodies to the morgue, and organising blood donation campaigns. Priya, one of the volunteers, said, ‘Those days, our bodies were drenched in blood. Even there were days when the smell of blood made it impossible to eat.’
We need to recognise and remember that the July uprising became a successful one through the sweat, blood, and labour of all kinds of gendered bodies.
Missing spots of the very framing of ‘anti-discrimination’
EVEN though the July uprising achieved its goal of overthrowing the Hasina regime, its gender question remains an unresolved one. I would argue that this situation was not unexpected, given some of the missing spots of the very anti-discrimination student movement. Although we have noticed the transformation of the framing of the movement from ‘quota reform movement’ to ‘anti-discrimination student movement’ over time, the ethos of the movement, I would argue, failed to address some of the discrimination woven within.
For example, a section of the movement, including some prominent female leaders, argued against reserving quota for women, ignoring the fact that there is a huge difference between the privileges urban, middle- and upper-class, university-attending female students enjoy and the struggles rural, working-class, marginalised women have to go through. The indigenous communities experienced a drastic reduction of the percentage of their quota from the initial 5 per cent to 1 per cent because of the decision of the Supreme Court’s Appellate Division. Some indigenous community members questioned this decision and raised concerns about the inequities the anti-discrimination student movement was perpetuating. These concerns never made it to the mainstream of the Bangali majority-led student protest narratives. The Supreme Court’s verdict also very problematically reserved a 1 per cent quota for ‘third gender’ and ‘physically challenged people.’ Clustering these two groups together inadvertently pathologised the so-called ‘third gender’ community and perpetuated the idea that being the third gender is a form of physical disability.
Porous binary between secularism vs religious fundamentalism
SINCE August, we have heard about a series of disturbing events that indicate that women and gender-minoritized communities are not feeling safe. There have been attacks on women in public spaces and attacks on sex workers, threatening their livelihoods. We have received disturbing news of the series of violent attacks against religiously minoritized communities across the country and against indigenous communities in the Chittagong Hill Tracks region. Gender non-conforming and queer communities have also faced verbal threats and physical attacks.
As the Islamic political parties in Bangladesh are claiming new public visibility, there has been a rising feminist tension about whether Bangladesh will be the next Afghanistan or Pakistan. I would argue that it’s critical — specifically at this time — to challenge harmful dichotomies between secularism and religious fundamentalism and examine the transnational political economy of various globalising forces that create, sustain, or challenge secularism, fundamentalism, and values in between.
Western and Indian media’s Islamophobia
IN THE Western and the Indian media, there has been a series of efforts to use gender-based discrimination and violence to claim that Bangladesh is now vulnerable to Islamist extremists and in need of some kind of saving by a greater imperial power. I am not questioning the facts they provided; rather, I am questioning the selection process through which the Western and the Indian media chose to highlight some sufferings over others to appeal to their readers and to legitimise their political interests.
For example, a recent Bloomberg coverage begins with the story of Tureen Afroz, the former chief prosecutor of the war crimes tribunal, who was attacked by ‘a group of boys’ who shaved her head for not wearing a hijab. The attackers also stabbed her with a pencil and lectured her about Islam. Afroz mentioned that she was worried that the attackers would rape her young daughter. Using Afroz’s case, Bloomberg makes the sweeping assumption that Israel attacking Hamas and Lebanon would provide a ripe environment for recruiting people from the ‘fourth-largest Muslim population’ in Bangladesh — a country that is situated in a ‘volatile part of the world’ where Islamic State had made advances.
Interestingly, the original report Bloomberg cites to make this claim mentions that the Islamic State has the most robust hubs in Afghanistan and Pakistan — and not in Bangladesh. The report also clarifies that Bangladesh can only be considered as what it calls a ‘periphery’ territory where the Islamic State struggles for relevance because of the competition from other already-existing rival militant religious groups and counterterrorism initiatives from the government.
The Bloomberg article sheds light on a variety of topics, such as the economic damage the Hasina government inflicted on the country, the decline in Bangladeshi garment exports due to the volatile political situation, and the challenges the Yunus-led interim government is currently facing. Nevertheless, the title of the article did not highlight any of these issues; rather, Bloomberg chose to emphasise ‘Chaos in Bangladesh Opens Door to Islamist Extremists’ in the title with an opening story of Islamists attacking women and threatening rape.
In the Bloomberg report, Sajeeb Wazed Joy, son of Sheikh Hasina, claimed that the Islamists have piggybacked off the student protests to grab the state’s power. Interestingly, Joy also piggybacks off Western, as well as Indian, Islamophobia. He has recently hired a Washington DC-based lobbying firm that has close ties with the right-wing presidential candidate Donald Trump. This move brings forward the point that the recently-ousted Awami league’s one of the punch cards to return to state power would be to utilise the narrative of Islamophobia and oppression of gendered bodies to garner local, regional, and Western support on its behalf.
I would argue that the Sheikh Hasina regime carefully curated the threat of the rise of the right-wing and extremist Islamic political parties to legitimise its own existence. Even though the regime has a long, contentious relationship with Jamaat and Shibir, it carefully maintained its ties with other Islamic political groups. In the 2018 election, 29 Islamic political parties directly or indirectly collaborated with the Awami League, and 32 political parties collaborated with the Jatiya Party that was meant to support the Awami League eventually. The BNP collaborated with only five Islamic parties. Therefore, Sheikh Hasina, or Awami League, being the guardian of secularism in Bangladesh, is a futile imagination of the Western and Indian states, which serves unique purposes for various local and international actors and institutions. The binary between secularism and religious fundamentalism is simply unequipped to capture the complexities of political alliances in Bangladesh.
The need for building grassroots movements
AS SCHOLARS and activists try to make sense of the new visibility of Islamic political parties, it is essential to utilise an intersectional lens to consider how this visibility affects various minoritized and marginalised communities. In a recent interview, Mahfuz Alam, coordinator of the liaison committee of the anti-discrimination student movement and special assistant to the chief adviser of the interim government, offers an in-depth analysis of the way the class divide, the rural-urban divide, and the lack of interest of the urban-elite to engage in dialogues with working-class and rural communities have resulted in sceptical, bereft, and reactionary Islamic political thoughts and practices. Alam’s arguments bring forward a much-needed class analysis that has, in fact, long contributed to creating and sustaining the binary between secularism and religious fundamentalism. Nevertheless, his analysis severely lacks a gender lens that is much needed to make sense of how gendered bodies become the battleground for establishing territories and exerting control as various Islamic political parties strive for self-representation in Bangladesh.
For example, Samina Luthfa, a well-known feminist educator, researcher, activist, and playwright-actor, along with another university professor, recently faced extreme backlash after being included in the National Curriculum Reform Commission. Some Islamic political parties, along with many trans- and homophobic netizens, accused Luthfa of being ‘dhormobiddeshi’ [hostile to religion] and for promoting trans-friendly values. Students and social justice activists pushed back and claimed that Luthfa did not issue any hateful speech against religion.
Interestingly, what’s missing in the entire discourse is a clear articulation of how this incident is not just about the person, Professor Luthfa, and her support for trans rights. This incident is a painful testament to how queer and trans bodies have become battlegrounds for exerting social and political authority and control, how the interim government, which is ironically led by a good number of liberal, progressive NGO professionals and coordinators of the anti-discrimination student movement, chose to ignore attacks on queer and trans identities and experiences and remain silent, and how cis-heteropatriarchal and mostly male religious leaderships failed to acknowledge that trans and queer identities are not merely Western export and also not foreign to Islamic beliefs and practices.
There have been numerous scholarly inquiries that recognised the historical existence of sexual and gender diversity in the Muslim world and that investigated Islamic legal jurisprudence and the scope of using ‘ijtihad’ for creating space for non-heteronormative and non-gender conforming bodies, relationships, and experiences. Organisations, such as Muslims for Progressive Values, have long been working to dismantle the dichotomy between secularism and religious fundamentalism and challenge the cis-heteropatriarchy of knowledge production within Muslim communities.
Lobbying the imperial powers, such as the United States or India, and asking for their support will not resolve the contentious relationship between secularism and religious fundamentalism or find a viable solution to the ‘gender’ problem in post-uprising Bangladesh. We need to take matters into our own hands and organise from within and at the grassroots. This means we need to start asking hard questions: Who is in control of Islamic knowledge production and circulation in Bangladesh? What is the political economy of this knowledge production? Who funds these knowledge-making practices? Who benefits from this knowledge production? Why does the neoliberal, capitalist state fail to provide basic social security and education to disenfranchised communities who are then rescued by missionary-style religious saviour institutions? How can we bring experiences of marginalised and minoritized bodies — including bodies of women, non-binary, and gender non-conforming communities—to the centre of these knowledge-making practices?
Nafisa Nipun Tanjeem is an educator, researcher, writer and activist. She is an associate professor in the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Worcester State University in Massachusetts, US.