‘Teasing-eve’: diverse perspectives on the sexual harassment of women in Dhaka city, Bangladesh

Abstract

This thesis primarily documents the sexual harassment of women by critically examining women’s narratives of sexual harassment, NGO interventions and women activists’ contemporary autonomous social media initiatives to address sexual harassment on public buses in the city of Dhaka. The study is based on 6 months’ fieldwork during which data was generated through eighteen life story interviews, seven netnographic Facebook conversations and sixteen in-depth interviews. My analysis illuminates three distinct aspects of the problem of sexual harassment in Dhaka. First, while exploring women’s narratives of sexual harassment, this study investigates the complex and heterogenous constructions of respectable femininity among Bangladeshi women. I argue that women’s class, age, and religion intersect with one another to create their unique understandings of respectability and their repetitive performances of respectable feminine values, norms, and behaviours in the patriarchal socio-cultural context in Bangladesh. The extent to which these women accept, challenge, and negotiate these practices of respectability further determines how they perceive the causes, perpetration, and victimization of sexual harassment, and protest during sexual harassment incidents. Secondly, drawing on Quijano’s (2000) concept of the coloniality of power, the study examines the rigid, donor controlled, corporatist and training-focused quantitative modes of NGO-led sexual harassment prevention interventions that mostly target middle-class women. Finally, this thesis explores women’s qualitative narrative-centred, less bureaucratically restrained forms of autonomous social media initiatives led by Bangladeshi women. I demonstrate how these initiatives offered women an opportunity to engage in a politics of visibility by offering a space to collectively narrate their stories of harassment. Overall, my thesis shifts the focus of violence against women (VAW) research in Bangladesh from the quantification of sexual harassment and straightforward praising of NGO initiatives to an exploration of the connection between respectability and sexual harassment and a critical examination of both NGO-led and women’s social media-based sexual harassment prevention initiatives. In this regard, the study contributes to scholarship on gendered space, gender-based violence, women’s movements, feminist theory and feminist research.

Date of Thesis submission	2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Alana Lentin (Supervisor) & George Morgan (Supervisor)