This article revisits the figure of the ‘third world sweatshop worker’, long iconic of the excesses of the global expansion of flexible accumulation in late twentieth-century capitalism. I am interested in how feminist activists concerned with the uneven impact of neo-liberal policies can engage in progressive political interventions without participating in the ‘culture of global moralism’ that continues to surround conventional representations of third world workers. I situate my analysis in the national space of Bangladesh, where the economy is heavily dependent on the labour of women factory workers in the garment industry and where local feminist understandings of the ‘sweatshop economy’ have not always converged with global feminist/left concerns about the exploitation inherent in the (now not so new) New International Division of Labor. The tensions or disjunctures between ‘global’ and ‘local’ feminist viewpoints animate the concerns of this article. I argue that de-contextualized critiques derived from abstract notions of individual rights, and corresponding calls for change from above — calls on the conscience of the feminist and the consumer, for instance — can entail troubling analytical simplifications. They highlight some relations of power while erasing others, thereby enacting a different kind of violence and at times undermining mobilizations on the ground. I draw attention to the multiple fields of power through which much of the activism across borders continues to be produced and reproduced discursively. This kind of framing fits all too easily into existing cultural scripts about gender and race elsewhere, and produces ethical obligations to ‘save’ women workers.

On the afternoon of August 2, 2014, I walked into Hossain Market, one of the many nondescript multistoried buildings lining the commercial thoroughfare in Uttor Badda, Dhaka. I had gone to show solidarity with hunger-striking garment workers of the Toba Group, three of whose units were housed in the building. Since July 28, several hundred workers had occupied the upper floors, demanding payment of three months back wages, overtime, and a festival bonus. The market entrance looked deserted, not exactly the hotbed of industrial action I'd expected. “Is this where the strike is?” I asked no one in particular. A couple of young women immediately escorted me up several flights of stairs – past the inevitable collapsible gates and oversized padlocks adorning each floor. On the seventh floor landing, young student volunteers were buzzing around a media and communications desk they had set up. Inside, I found half a dozen workers sprawled across cutting tables and makeshift beds, being administered saline by a medical team provided by a well-known health rights NGO. Hundreds of others, mostly women but also some men, milled across the room. Before I could speak to the workers, Shahidul Islam Shabuj, a labor organizer and sometime acquaintance, spied me from a distance and whisked me away to the top floor for an audience with Moshrefa Mishu, president of the Garment Workers Unity Forum and the prime mover behind the “fast unto death.” For Shabuj, my presence was fortuitous—an opportunity to get the workers’ formal message out.

BackgroundThis article discusses what happens when normative ‘global’ discourses of rights and individuated sexual identity confront the messiness of ‘local’ realities. It considers the tensions that emerge when the relationship between sexual and social identities is not obvious and the implications of such tensions for public health and sexual rights activism. These questions are addressed through debates over the naming of male-to-male sexualities and desires in the context of globalization and the growth of a large NGO (non-governmental organization) sector in urban Bangladesh.MethodsThe material in the paper draws on a research project undertaken in 2008-9 in Dhaka, Bangladesh. A fundamental objective was to produce a contextualized understanding of sexuality in Dhaka city. Methods used included structured interviews, focus group discussions and informal conversations with a range of participants (students, factory workers, public health professionals and sexual minorities). The aim was to generate a conceptual and analytical framework around sexuality and rights rather than to undertake an empirical survey of any one population.ResultsAs descriptors, globalized identity categories such as Men who have Sex with Men (MSM), used by public health providers, the state and donors; and gay/lesbian, invoked by human rights activists and transnational NGOs, are too narrow to capture the fluid and highly context-specific ways in which gender and sexually nonconforming persons understand themselves in Bangladesh. Further, class position mediates to a significant degree the reception, appropriation or rejection of transnational categories such as MSM and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT). The tension is reflected in the sometimes fraught relations between service providers to MSM, the people they serve and an emerging group who identify as LGBT.ConclusionA simple politics of recognition will be inadequate to the task of promoting health and human rights for all; such a strategy would effectively exclude individuals who do not necessarily connect their sexual practices with a specific sexual or social identity.

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This paper draws on the figure of the 'stranded Pakistani' or 'Bihari' to interrogate the peculiar silence around the partition of British India in 1947 in the nationalist historiography of Bangladesh. The striking inability of nationalist accounts to accommodate partition, I contend, can be traced to the (apparent) incongruity of East Bengal's active embrace of the idea of Pakistan in 1947. As the paper makes evident, there cannot be a single narrative of the partition of 1947. Its many contentious histories continue to shape community and nation making practices in South Asia. Tracking the trajectories of 'stranded Pakistanis' (a category that was meaningful only after 1971) allows us to map the ways older meanings of partition, and so of Pakistan, were disrupted, displaced or reconstituted by the 1971 war. Bangladesh's sovereignty ruptured the identity of Urdu-speaking migrants to the former East Pakistan. Those who had previously mediated belonging and citizenship through the idiom of sacrifice for Pakistan found themselves excluded by the terms through which the new nation was redefined in 1971. If the singularity of Bengali nationalism cannot but disavow the moment of partition it is also the case that the histories of 1947 and 1971 cannot be understood apart, as separate and contradictory events. Indeed, I argue that 1947 remains critically important for understanding the cultural politics of citizenship, belonging and national identity in Bangladesh today. The consul banged on the table and said: 'If you've got no passport, you're officially dead': But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive. W.H.Auden1 'We never left Pakistan, Pakistan has gone and left us. ' Geneva Camp Resident