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Mapping the Body-Politic of the Raped Woman and the Nation in Bangladesh

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Mapping the Body-Politic of the Raped Woman and the Nation in Bangladesh gendered embodiments: mapping the body-politic of the raped woman and the nation in Bangladesh Mookherjee, Nayanika . Feminist Review, suppl. War 88 (Apr 2008): 36-53. Turn on hit highlighting for speaking browsers Turn off hit highlighting Other formats: Citation/Abstract Full text - PDF (206 KB) Abstract (summary) Translate There has been much academic work outlining the complex links between women and the nation. Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation in particular social and historical contexts. This article focuses on the gendered symbolization of the nation through the rhetoric of the 'motherland' and the manipulation of this rhetoric in the context of national struggle in Bangladesh. I show the ways in which the visual representation of this 'motherland' as fertile countryside, and its idealization primarily through rural landscapes has enabled a crystallization of essentialist gender roles for women. This article is particularly interested in how these images had to be reconciled with the subjectivities of women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War (Muktijuddho) and the role of the aestheticizing sensibilities of Bangladesh's middle class in that process. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT] Show less Full Text Translate Turn on search term navigation introduction There has been much academic work outlining the complex links between women and the nation (Yuval-Davis and Anthias, 1989; Yuval-Davis, 1997; Yuval-Davis and Werbner, 1999). Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation in particular social and historical contexts (Kandiyoti, 1991; Chatterjee, 1994). This article focuses on the gendered symbolization of the nation through the rhetoric of the 'motherland' and the manipulation of this rhetoric in the context of national struggle in Bangladesh. I show the ways in which the visual representation of this 'motherland' as fertile countryside, and its idealization primarily through rural landscapes has enabled a crystallization of essentialist gender roles for women. 1 gender and middle-class aesthetics The ideology of woman as mother is a dominant symbolic imagery through which the position of the woman becomes visible in national projects. It becomes crucial for national mobilization processes. Pnina Werbner (1999: 221) argues that the overt space occupied by 'political motherhood' in the public domain enables a breaking down of public/private dichotomies in which women are stereotypically situated. It creates conditions for the 'feminisation (rather than essentialist definitions of male and female qualities) of citizenship which show that women are not victims but active agents of their destiny with a strong sense of concern for family and community' (1999: 231). Motherhood as a space of public agency for women is not, however, unproblematic. What for instance are the implications of using motherhood as the dominant image through which women are symbolized in the nationalist project for the imagery and subjectivities of women who are not part of that maternal mould? Does the nationalist project make its public, symbolic space available only to women with certain specific subjectivities? These questions may be best answered by analysing the processes of gendering that are drawn upon to secure 'political motherhood'. Focusing not just on manhood and womanhood but on the processes through which gender roles are embodied enables us to understand the contradictions inherent in the fraught relationship between gender and nation. Furthermore, 'political motherhood' must be located in class aesthetics in order to understand its influence on the construction of race and nation.2 Explorations of the role of gender within colonialism have shown how gender constitutes a trope for race and sexuality through the feminization of the colonized (Nandy, 1983; Sinha, 1995). However, examining gendered subjectivity without its intertwinings with class and race does not allow the dynamic nature of the link between national interests and hegemonic masculinities to be explored. Moreover, a focus on class aesthetics/sensibilities rather than class per se allows us to move to reading class not as a pre-constituted group but as an ongoing process of articulation. In this article, I explore the embodiment3 of gendered roles as envisaged in the feminization of the land that enables the body of the woman as mother to be available for the aestheticizing impulse of the project of nationalism in Bangladesh. I argue that processes of gendering in Bangladesh operate as a trope for hegemonic middle- class (both female and male) sensibilities (discourses and practices). It makes available women's bodies as representative icons of nationhood within debates on nationalism through the use of the rhetoric and imagery of 'mother nation', a symbol that was used extensively by the emancipatory and socially progressive anti-colonial and democratic movements in Bangladesh. What especially interests me is the ways in which these images then had to be reconciled with the subjectivities of women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War ( Muktijuddho ). I argue that this was achieved through the aestheticizing sensibilities of Bangladesh's middle class. I use middle-class aesthetics/sensibilities in multiple ways here. The very notion of aesthetics involves, according to Daniel (1997: 309), the need to bring order out of disorder, mould form from that in which form is absent. But even though this order may be posited only as a future hope - something to be achieved - it is drenched in nostalgia, in musings on the imagined glory that once was. In Bangladesh, this nostalgia is rooted in the Bengali identity epitomized in the literary tradition, the main readership of which constitute the middle classes. The romanticism that emerges from this also finds its fruition in the 'glamour and sorrow' of liberation struggle, the Muktijuddho , in which middle classes were important players. Within the constructs of this essentialized Bengali identity that emerged in the context of the progressive liberation struggle, the role of women comes to be framed and legitimized only within the domestic paradigm. In the folds of this paradigm exist middle-class contradictions of morality. Various literary accounts in Bangladesh explore these varied ambiguities of the middle class. It is this double helix of posturings of modernity of the progressive middle class's resistive politics along with hypocritical value judgements and moral positions that places the raped woman in a place of taboo and transgression. Hence, her necessary appropriation is made possible only within their romantic, literary and domestic paradigms. This article draws on research on the public memories of sexual violence of Muktijuddho. It is based on 14 months of fieldwork in Bangladesh from 1997 to 1998. In the first section, I refer to the historical context of sexual violence during Muktijuddho . In the second section, I examine the ways in which the imagery of nature is used to idealize the nation both during and after Muktijuddho and also to represent sexual violence perpetrated during the war. The next section focuses on the ways in which the articulations of gender and nation present and privilege a middle-class notion of gender. This is followed by a discussion of the continued significance of class aesthetics in articulations of gender and nationalism in independent Bangladesh. In the final section, I expose some of the ambiguities in the ways in which the body-politic of the raped woman is employed in nation-building and how middle class sensibilities again influence this process. sexual violence and the Bangladesh liberation war of 1971 In 1947, India's independence from British colonial rule resulted in the creation of a new homeland for the Muslims of India. Using Islam as the principle of nationhood, the eastern and north-western corners of the country came together, as a single nation. The two parts, East and West Pakistan, were however culturally and linguistically distinct. West Pakistan, the centre of political authority, attempted to transpose that authority to secure cultural dominance on the basis that the East Pakistani practice of Islam was too Bengali (hence too Hinduized/Indianized). Resistance to the imposition of administrative, economic, military, linguistic (Urdu in place of the prevalent Bengali) and political control crystallized in the nine-month long Muktijuddho in 1971. East Pakistan became independent from West Pakistan and Bangladesh was formed on 16 December 1971. The new nation of Bangladesh was faced with the staggering statistics of three million dead and two hundred thousand women raped in a span of nine months. These crimes were perpetrated both by the Pakistani army and their local Bengali collaborators. One of the main reasons cited by the middle class and cultural elites in Bangladesh for the prevalence of rapes during Muktijuddho was that since Bengali Muslims were considered as 'Indianized/Hinduized' and only as 'nominal Muslims' by the Pakistani authorities, rape was seen as a means to 'improve the genes of the Bengali Muslims' and to populate Bangladesh with a new breed of 'pure' Pakistanis. 4 Violence in the form of rape has been variedly argued to be 'the depersonalisation of women' (Winkler, 1991), 'a conscious process of intimidation by which all men keep all women in a state of fear' (Brownmiller, 1975), 'a method of taming a woman who gets out of line' (Ortner and Whitehead, 1981) and as 'terror warfare' (Nordstorm
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