Transnationalism Reversed

Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh

Elora Halim Chowdhury

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781438437521, 9781438437514
• eBook ISBN: 9781438437538
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Social Sciences

Winner of the 2012 Gloria E. Anzaldua Book Prize presented by the National Women's Studies Association Acid attacks against women and girls have captured the attention of the global media, with several high-profile reports ranging from the BBC to The Oprah Winfrey Show. In Bangladesh, reasons for the attacks include women's rejection of sexual advances from men, refusal of marriage proposals, family or land disputes, and unmet dowry demands. The consequences are multiple: permanent marks on the body, disfiguration, and potential blindness. In Transnationalism Reversed, Elora Halim Chowdhury explores the complicated terrain of women's transnational antiviolence organizing by focusing on the work done in Bangladesh around acid attacks—and the ways in which the state, international agencies, local expatriates, US media, Bangladeshi immigrants in the United States, survivor-activists, and local women's organizations engage the pragmatics and the transnational rhetoric of empowerment, rescue, and rehabilitation. Grounded in careful ethnographic work, oral history, and theoretical and filmic analysis, Transnationalism Reversed makes a significant contribution to conversations around gendered violence, transnational feminist praxis, and the politics of organizing—particularly around NGOs—in the global South.

Chapter One

Feminist Negotiations

Contesting Narratives of the Campaign against Acid Violence in Bangladesh

The campaign against acid violence in Bangladesh in the 1990s developed across three broad phases. Initially, in the first phase, the campaign arose through national and international publicity generated by Bangladeshi activists of Naripokkho, a Dhaka-based feminist advocacy organization. The spread and growth of the campaign in the second phase marked significant victories and produced divergent and competing investments in the campaign. The third phase culminated in the campaign's co-optation by international development aid-driven intervention. By addressing the tensions between competing visions of social transformation and women's empowerment articulated by local women activists, on the one hand, and international donor agencies, on the other hand, this chapter examines the consequences of international aid and NGOs in rearticulating the relationship between women, gendered violence, and the state.¹ It studies the growth and development of a contemporary campaign around gendered violence by historicizing the discourse of acid violence and interventions challenging it. In so doing, I shed light on the multiple interests, agendas, and constraints governing the response to violence against women in the global South. The chapter provides an opportunity to analyze and explore these complicated transactions between victims, feminist organizers, the state, and international donor organizations.

Incidents of acid attacks against both men and women have a long history in Bangladesh, its surrounding region, and other parts of the world. However, the use of acid attacks against women as a form of gendered violence, specifically in recent decades, needs to be understood in the larger context of socioeconomic, political, and cultural transitions in Bangladesh. Following the War for Independence in 1971, which left the country socially and economically devastated, Bangladesh has witnessed a decline in agriculture-based economy, a growth of landlessness, an increase in landless laborers, and amplified unemployment. Naila Kabeer (2000) has pointed to the intrusion of market relations into the employment of labor, setting in motion the gradual dissolution of older forms of family organization and the erosion of traditional systems of support among landless peasants. The intensified competition in the rural economy has produced a diversification of livelihoods as well as migration to urban areas. Combined effects of population growth and declining farm size set in motion a shift from an older agricultural peasant economy to a more monetized one. Not all social groups, however, were affected equally. Wealthy farmers and the rural elite were able to invest in accordance with new opportunities while the urban educated and the middle-class sections had access to secure employment. These changing socioeconomic dynamics have affected the rural and urban poor (women in particular) and have been met with governmental and nongovernmental aid interventions.

Like many developing nations, Bangladesh opened up to economic liberalization programs with the support of the World Bank and the IMF in the early 1980s, leading to the promotion of export-oriented manufacturing. Together with the impetus generated by the United Nations Decade of Women and Development (1975–85) these new initiatives aimed to integrate women into some of their projects. Over the last two decades, an increasing number of women from poor and lower-middle-class backgrounds, have participated in “income-generating” activities of the development sector as well as sought employment in garment factories in metropolitan areas (Kabeer, 2000, p. 60). These factories rely predominantly on female labor because it is cheapened and seemingly easier to control.² A vast majority of the women in these factories come from rural areas, but a significant proportion also come from urban areas, many of whom were previously employed as domestic workers. While there has been economic gain involved, the increased physical mobility entailed by these new activities has also adversely affected women's and their family's honor and status. In other words, the liberatory aspects made possible by the new socioeconomic developments were negotiated within patriarchal bargains.³

There were inevitable gendered implications for the changes in economy and society following the War of Independence.⁴ Norms of female seclusion permeated the shift to a cash economy, making women's participation in the labor market a site of contestation. The transition from subsistence to a monetized economy accounts for a key change in gender relations: namely, the replacement of marriage payments to the bride and her family with the “demand dowry” that favored the groom and his family (Rozario, 1998, p.269). The rise of dowries contributed to the fragility of marriage relations with increases in divorce, frequent remarriage, abandonment, and separation. Within the context of asymmetrical gender relations and changing socioeconomic dynamics, the growing practice of dowry only intensified women's economic devaluation, whereby girls were viewed as liabilities and boys as assets. According to Naila Kabeer (2000), these various changes indicated the deterioration of both women's status as women and the “patriarchal contract” (men's obligations toward women).

Evidence suggests that the diversification of women's livelihoods met with responses such as the active mobilization of powerful interest groups (family, local communities and networks, religious functionaries, and the state machinery) in defense of their privileged position in the social order (Kabeer, 2000, p. 60). Nonetheless, market forces, the advent of export-oriented manufacturing such as the garments industry, and the emergence of the NGO movements working toward the empowerment of women on the grassroots level, contributed to a visible and sizable female labor force. This led to a significant shift from long-established norms of female seclusion in Bangladesh. Known as the “silent revolution,” in the changing social landscape of Bangladesh, it was not unusual to see rural women bicycling to work or large numbers of young and “unaccompanied” women on the streets of Dhaka on their way to and from work (Amir, n.d.). While, on the one hand, women experienced greater integration into the economy, on the other hand, their participation and mobility disrupted existing social and political structures. Women's increasing participation in the labor force in some cases compromised the terms of the obligations men had toward women in their families. It was commonly perceived that women were taking away jobs from men and thus the natural role of primary breadwinner. Religious groups in particular, joining forces with elite male social structures, denounced the women by organizing public forums and even circulating audio recordings vilifying women who were transgressing social norms (Kabeer, 2000, p. 83).

Feminist researchers have posited that hostile attitudes and reactions toward women's emerging visibility and participation in new roles, particularly in the context of increasing socioeconomic disempowerment of men, often manifests in male-initiated abuses against women, including physical violence, and degradation of women. Anthropologist Dina Siddiqi (1991) has noted that the so-called “invasion” by women into previously male-dominated public spheres may have broken the norms of female seclusion but has at the same time redefined those norms to take on new significance in the context of globalization and wage labor. Strict disciplinary measures and surveillance continue to govern female behavior both in and outside of work spaces. This emergent new order in Bangladesh has been accompanied by systematic violence against women as exemplified by the steady increase in fatwas, rapes, acid attacks, murders, battery, and trafficking (Ain O Salish Kendro, 2001).⁵ While reported incidents of acid attacks have only ranged from 150 to 450 cases per year, other forms of reported violence, with the exception of fatwas, have been consistently higher in number (Ain O Salish Kendro, 2003). According to the yearly reports by Ain O Salish Kendro, recent decades have seen an escalation of not only acid attacks but also in gendered violence against women across the board (Ain O Salish Kendro, 2001). In such a context, acid throwing against women and girls has to be seen within the larger trend of women's oppression.

Reportedly, acid victims have been until recently predominantly women and girls. The reasons for attacks have been overwhelmingly cited as marital, family, and land disputes, refusal to pay dowry, or the rejection of romantic advances and marriage proposals (Islam, 2004). At the same time, the rise of auto mechanic, leather, and garment industries has facilitated the widespread and unregulated availability of sulfuric and nitric acid, and has made acid throwing an easy and “expedient” form of violence.⁶ A bottle of sulfuric acid currently can be bought for Tk 15 (approximately U.S.$0.25). The ease and frequency with which acid violence is committed reaffirm societal views that women are property, and their appearance an asset toward securing marriage. A study conducted by Women for Women, a Dhaka-based feminist research group, revealed that acid victims are often characterized as women who are “wayward and disobedient” (“udhyoto meye”) by their community (Akhter & Nahar, 2003). Another study on the rising feminization of labor in Bangladesh showed that women workers were increasingly victims of three-dimensional violence: (1) in the workspace, (2) on the way to work, and (3) in the domestic space (Halim & Haq, 2004). In summary, changing forces of globalization and attendant gendered social order contributed to a climate leading to the precipitation of gendered violence in the national context of Bangladesh.

Organizing against Acid Violence

Naripokkho developed their anti–acid violence campaign between the years of 1995 and 2003.⁷ It was also during these years that strategic negotiations were carried out by Naripokkho activists with key institutions in order to create a public discourse on acid violence against women in Bangladesh, with the purpose of developing a “socially recognized campaign” (N. Huq, personal communication, April 11, 2003). Its founders and members see Naripokkho as collectively working for the advancement of women's rights and entitlements, while also building broad-based resistance against violence, discrimination, and injustice. Their activities have included advocacy campaigns, research, discussions, workshops, seminars, training programs, national-level conferences, cultural events, and lobbying on issues of gender justice. Mobilizing against acid violence in particular was part of the organization's broader mandate of resisting gender violence.

Scholars of transnational organizing efforts have drawn attention to the complex and contradictory relationships within networks that involve actors as divergent as local women's groups, international donor agencies, and the state. Many of these transnational networks, while constituting an asymmetrical terrain of transnational solidarity and differences, may be held together by a perceived shared commitment. At the same time, however, participants are often sharply at odds over fundamental issues of agenda and strategy (Nelson, 2002; Riker, 2002). While international aid helps to institutionalize women's political struggles, the flipside of this institutionalization is that feminists must frame their struggles in terms of developmentalist aid frameworks in order to receive the funding. These frameworks often generate schisms and unintended effects on the movement dynamics, such as a deradicalization of movement agendas, as described in the works of Amitra Basu (2000), Amy Lind and Jessica Share (2003), and James Ferguson (1994).

This was clearly true in the case of Naripokkho. The envelopment of Naripokkho's anti-acid campaign by donor-driven interventions transformed its radical vision of structural change and women's communal empowerment into a neoliberal one of incremental change and individual transformation. The latter vision did not adequately recognize the distinction between policies and programs that addressed the practical needs of individual women survivors of violence and those who sought to transform women's positions within a structurally unequal set of social relations (Kabeer, 1994).

In order to fully illuminate the complex dynamics of the acid campaign, I organize my observations into three stages: from 1995 to 1998, when members and staff of Naripokkho began systematically devising a social campaign to transform incidences of acid attacks into a public issue; from 1998 to 1999, when Naripokkho's success led to a diversification and proliferation of actors engaged with the campaign, thereby expanding and changing its scope; and from 1999 to 2003, when the Acid Survivors Foundation gradually took over the role of the consolidated service providing agency to assist acid violence survivors. The third stage concurrently witnessed the gradual dissolution of Naripokkho's involvement with the campaign, as well as the articulation of a strategy for providing services to acid victims that is centered on Women in Development (WID). This strategy stressed income-generation and skills training as the means to empower socially marginalized women, thereby integrating them into the productive machinery of the state (Bhavnani, Foran, & Kurian, 2003). However, this was in contrast to Naripokkho's initial strategy of pursuing women's empowerment through awareness raising, emphasis on promoting women's individual and collective rights, as well as broader societal change. Tracing these shifting strategies tells us that within the climate of neoliberal development aid intervention, women victims are often integrated into productive schemes that ultimately do not challenge wider hierarchical structures in either Bangladeshi society or international development regimes.

Naripokkho members originally generated attention and funding to inquire into the severity and growing proliferation of acid attacks by focusing on the issue as part and parcel of a broader campaign challenging violence against women. The organization made the visibility of the survivors a key element of the campaign. However, a growing intervention of international donors in the 1990s, facilitated by a global shift from feminist collective organizing to the discursive weight of human rights discourses, led to a concomitant supplanting of the indigenous movement by transnational agendas. Transnationalization and availability of more resources, among other things, led to the medicalization of the campaign arguably compromising its social dimensions.⁸ Transnational networks established a model of providing short-term services like reconstructive surgeries to survivors, over and rather than investing a greater amount of time and energy in empowering survivors of violence, as the Naripokkho activists had initially done. (In the early days of Naripokkho organizing, survivors of acid violence were often trained to be activists and organizers themselves.)

Finally, during the third stage of the anti-acid campaign, the Acid Survivors Foundation, established through the funding and support of the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) and the United Nations Children's Fund, UNICEF-Bangladesh, began to focus on the reintegration of survivors into society by returning them to a “condition as near as possible” to one prior to the attacks (Acid Survivor's Foundation, “Introduction”). This strategy reflected a neoliberal model of economic empowerment for the survivors that avoided questioning the social order by which gendered violence continued to be sanctioned. Nonetheless, ASF, backed by multilateral and bilateral donors as well as a strong civil society constituency, did exert pressure on the national government, lobbying for the development and implementation of effective medicolegal provisions for survivors of acid violence, and therefore ASF's impact has been a mixed one.

Naripokkho Launches Anti–Acid Violence Campaign

Naripokkho, literally meaning “pro-women,” is a membership-based women's advocacy organization founded in 1983 (Naripokkho, 2002). The organization, which includes women with a wide variety of skills and expertise, is supported by its membership through their voluntary contributions of professional time and funds. Most of Naripokkho's membership includes women with professional occupations, but the organization also has a number of paid staff to run its day-to-day operations. The use of members' professional time and skills enables Naripokkho to take on earning activities such as research consultancies and gender analysis training, as well as grant-funded projects.

In 1995, when Naripokkho activists embarked on their work on acid violence, no systematic study or records provided comprehensive documentation of incidents of acid throwing on women and girls in Bangladesh. Bristi Chowdhury, then an intern at Naripokkho, commented that, “Acid violence was not yet a buzzword [in the mid-1990s]” (B. Chowdhury, personal communication, March 7, 2003). No serious or systematic attention had been drawn to the issue, and no discourse had been created to put acid violence in the landscape of the national and international gendered human rights violations.

Naripokkho's involvement began when one of its members, Nasreen Huq (who eventually became the coordinator of the acid campaign), came across two male relatives of acid survivor Nurun Nahar in the office of a daily newspaper. Nahar was a teenage girl who had had acid thrown at her by Jashim Sikdar, a rejected suitor, and his associates. (Her story is told more fully in chapter 2.) At the time, Nahar's male relatives were trying to persuade reporters of the newspaper to do a story on the incident. Failing to do so, they approached Nasreen Huq, who happened to be present at the newspaper office with some business of her own and whom they correctly assumed to be an activist who would be sympathetic to their plight. This accidental 1995 meeting stirred Huq and other Naripokkho activists' interest in doing work in this area, given the organization's long-standing broader focus on gender violence.

Bristi Chowdhury has described the initial phase of campaign building as consisting of researching and collecting data from various newspapers, libraries, medical facilities, and police stations to create a “violence logbook”; meeting with and providing support to victims of acid attacks and their families; and developing a network of allies with local and foreign journalists, activists, philanthropists, medical and legal professionals, and international donors who could potentially assist in the creation of a public discourse on acid violence (B. Chowdhury, personal communication, March 7, 2003). The emergent loose network mobilized itself around the goal of launching an international campaign that would simultaneously reinforce the voices of local women activists and affect national policy development priorities.

Nasreen Huq, the coordinator of the acid campaign, explained how she and her coworkers mapped acid attacks as a distinctive form of a larger, “global feminist”–conceptualized issue of Violence Against Women (N. Huq, personal communication, October 10, 1996). Feminist scholar Chandra Mohanty (2003) has written about the globalization of women's movements worldwide in the 1990s, as a result of transnational organizing following a series of U.N. conferences on women culminating in the Fourth World Conference on Women Beijing in 1995. This shifted the direction of global feminism to a rights-based approach otherwise known as the mainstreaming of the feminist movement, which placed issues of violence against women successfully onto the world stage (Mohanty, 2003, p. ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter One: Feminist Negotiations: Contesting Narratives of the Campaign against Acid Violence in Bangladesh
• Chapter Two: Local Realities of Acid Violence in Bangladesh
• Chapter Three: From Dhaka to Cincinnati: Charting Transnational Narratives of Trauma, Victimization, and Survival
• Chapter Four: Feminism and Its Other: Representing the “New Woman” of Bangladesh
• Chapter Five: Transnational Challenges: Engaging Religion, Development, and Women's Organizing in Bangladesh
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography