Model Citizens in Bangladesh

Abstract

Recently dubbed the new ‘Asian Tiger’, Bangladesh developed a post-independence citizen-centered economic strategy that included generating non-farm jobs and constituting a new type of model or ideal citizen: the independent, prosperous, and entrepreneurial woman. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka, in this article I document the model citizen campaigns by analyzing female ready-made garment factory workers’ lives. I also outline the form that egalitarianism assumed in this context. I argue that through investigating the emergence of joggo nari—women who challenge gendered norms and hierarchies, aspire toward forms of gender equality, and represent new women of a new Bangladesh—central paradoxes of egalitarian dynamics, such as contradictory and multi-layered gendered relationships and expressions of personhood, desire, and freedom, may come into view.

Ethical Endeavours

“…Bjørn Bertelsen uses the notion of 'predatory-protective security assemblage' (2022b: 104) to study the egalitarian potentials, as well as the dangers, of evolving forms of community policing in Mozambique. Mohammad Hasan (2022) analyses discourses on 'model citizens' and gender equality in Bangladesh, focusing in particular on the contradictory and multi-layered demands placed on 'new' (i.e. independent, prosperous and entrepreneurial) women.…”