Bangladesh

Citation:

Rabiul Karim, K. M., Maria Emmelin, Bernadette P. Resurrección, and Sarah Wamala. 2012. “Water Development Projects and Marital Violence: Experiences From Rural Bangladesh.” Health Care for Women International 33 (3): 200–16.

Authors: K.M. Rabiul Karim, Maria Emmelin, Bernadette P. Resurreccion, Sarah Wamala

Abstract:

Topics: Development, Gender, Gender Roles, Gender Analysis, Gender-Based Violence, Households, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2012

Citation:

Sultana, Farhana. 2009. “Fluid Lives: Subjectivities, Gender and Water in Rural Bangladesh.” Gender, Place & Culture 16 (4): 427–44.

Author: Farhana Sultana

Abstract:

Keywords: gender, water, Bangladesh, Subjectivity, arsenic

Topics: Environment, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Masculinity/ies, Gender Analysis, Femininity/ies, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation, Political Economies Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2009

Citation:

Evertsen, Kathinka Fossum, and Kees van der Geest. 2019. "Gender, Environment and Migration in Bangladesh." Climate and Development, April, 1-11. https://doi.org/10.1080/17565529.2019.1596059.

Authors: Kathinka Fossum Evertsen, Kees van der Geest

Abstract:

This article addresses how gender norms impact the process of migration, and what this means for the use of migration as an adaptation strategy to cope with environmental stressors. Data was collected through qualitative fieldwork, taking the form of semi-structured and open-ended interviews and focus group discussions from a Dhaka slum and three villages in Southern Bangladesh's Bhola district. Our data revealed that women migrate when environmental stress threatens livelihoods and leave male household members unable to earn enough income for their families. Employing an analytical framework that focuses on the perceptions of individuals, this article shows how gender norms create social costs for women who migrate. Women thus have ambivalent feelings about migration. On the one hand, they do not wish to migrate, taking on a double work load, forsaking their purdah, and facing the stigma that follows. On the other hand, women see migration as a means to help their families, and live a better life. While social costs negatively affect the utilization and efficiency of female migration as an adaptation strategy to environmental stressors, it becomes clear that female migration is imperative to sustain livelihoods within the Bhola community.

Keywords: gender, environment, climate change, migration, adaptation

Topics: Displacement & Migration, Migration, Climate Displacement, Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Gender Roles, Livelihoods Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2019

Citation:

Hossain, Naomi. 2018. “Post-Conflict Ruptures and the Space for Women's Empowerment in Bangladesh.” Women's Studies International Forum 68: 104–12.

Author: Naomi Hossain

Abstract:

Bangladesh is widely deemed to have made rapid progress on gender equality and women's empowerment. How to understand the apparent advances of women in a poor, populous, Muslim-majority country in the belt of classic patriarchy? This paper locates the origins of these changes in the immediate aftermath of Bangladesh's struggle for independence in 1971, when a series of visible ruptures to the patriarchal bargain dramatized the ongoing crisis of social reproduction. This drew elite attention to the conditions of landless rural women, creating space for their programmatic inclusion in the political settlement, within a newly biopolitical project of national development. The paper argues that it is possible to make sense of the gains women have made as well as old and new obstacles to gender justice - including women's continuing responsibility for care - in this critical juncture in the political history of gender relations in Bangladesh.

Keywords: Bangladesh, women's empowerment, biopower, patriarchal bargains, post-conflict gender relations

Topics: Armed Conflict, National Liberation Wars, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Rights, Land Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2018

Citation:

Sultana, Farhana. 2011. "Suffering for Water, Suffering from Water: Emotional Geographies of Resource Access, Control and Conflict." Geoforum 42 (2): 163-72. 

Author: Farhana Sultana

Abstract:

This article argues that resource access, use, control, ownership and conflict are not only mediated through social relations of power, but also through emotional geographies where gendered subjectivities and embodied emotions constitute how nature–society relations are lived and experienced on a daily basis. By engaging the insights from feminist political ecology literatures and emotional geographies literatures, the article demonstrates that resource struggles and conflicts are not just material challenges but emotional ones, which are mediated through bodies, spaces and emotions. Such a focus fleshes out the complexities, entanglements and messy relations that constitute political ecologies of resources management, where practices and processes are negotiated through constructions of gender, embodiments, and emotions. Abstractions of ‘resource struggles’ and ‘resource conflicts’ are thereby grounded in embodied emotional geographies of places, peoples, and resources, enabling us to better understand the ways resources and emotions come to matter in everyday survival struggles. This framing can enrich feminist political ecology theorizations and texture our understandings of commonly used terms such as access, use, control, conflict and struggles vis-à-vis natural resources in any context. In other words, we are better able to conceptualize and explain how and why people access, use, and struggle over resources the ways they do. A case study of drinking water contamination from Bangladesh is used to develop the theoretical arguments in contributing to existing debates in (feminist) political ecologies.

Keywords: political ecology, emotional geography, resource access, conflict, gender, water, Bangladesh

Topics: Conflict, Environment, Feminisms, Feminist Political Ecology, Gender, Women, Gender Analysis, Gendered Discourses, Gendered Power Relations, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation, Political Economies Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2011

Citation:

Jordans, Eva, and Margreet Zwarteveen. 1997. A Well of One's Own: Gender Analysis of an Irrigation Program in Bangladesh. Colombo: International Irrigation Management Institute. 

Authors: Eva Jordans, Margreet Zwarteveen

Annotation:

Topics: Agriculture, Development, Economies, Poverty, Gender, Women, Gender Analysis, Gender Mainstreaming, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Hierarchies, Gender Equality/Inequality, Governance, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation, Livelihoods, Political Participation Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 1997

Citation:

Jordan, J. C. 2019. “Deconstructing Resilience: Why Gender and Power Matter in Responding to Climate Stress in Bangladesh.” Climate and Development 11 (2): 167–79. 

Author: J.C. Jordan

Abstract:

Resilience is increasingly becoming the new buzz word. This paper examines the utility of the concept of resilience for understanding the gendered experiences of women to climate stress, through case study research in South-west Bangladesh. It provides evidence that resilience, as commonly understood, is inadequate for understanding the intersecting vulnerabilities that women face because of embedded socio-cultural norms and practices. These vulnerabilities culminate in a gendered experience of climate stress, where some groups of women are more likely go without education, food and access to good quality water. Such circuits of control highlight the importance of a more radical, transformational, gendered and power sensitive frame for moving beyond coping mechanisms to strategies that deal with the fundamental root causes of vulnerability to climate stress. A failure to do so risks further reinforcing gender inequalities due to the reality of social difference and inequities within local power structures.

Keywords: resilience, vulnerability, gender, climate stress, Bangladesh

Topics: Education, Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2019

Citation:

Alston, Margaret, Kerri Whittenbury, Alex Haynes, and Naomi Godden. 2014. “Are Climate Challenges Reinforcing Child and Forced Marriage and Dowry as Adaptation Strategies in the Context of Bangladesh?” Women’s Studies International Forum 47 (November): 137–44.

Authors: Margaret Alston, Kerri Whittenbury, Alex Haynes, Naomi Godden

Annotation:

Topics: Economies, Environment, Climate Change, Gender, Rights, Human Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2014

Citation:

Alston, Margaret. 2015. Women and Climate Change in Bangladesh. London: Routledge.

Author: Margaret Alston

Annotation:

Topics: Economies, Poverty, Environment, Climate Change, Environmental Disasters, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Health, Livelihoods Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2015

Citation:

Authors: Sabina Faiz Rashid, Stephanie Michaud

Abstract:

This paper explores the experiences of female adolescents during the 1998 floods in Bangladesh, focusing on the implications of socio‐cultural norms related to notions of honour, shame, purity and pollution. These cultural notions are reinforced with greater emphasis as girls enter their adolescence, regulating their sexuality and gender relationships. In Bangladeshi society, adolescent girls are expected to maintain their virginity until marriage. Contact is limited to one's families and extended relations. Particularly among poorer families, adolescent girls tend to have limited mobility to safeguard their ‘purity’. This is to ensure that the girl's reputation does not suffer, thus making it difficult for the girl to get married. For female adolescents in Bangladesh, a disaster situation is a uniquely vulnerable time. Exposure to the unfamiliar environment of flood shelters and relief camps, and unable to maintain their ‘space’ and privacy from male strangers, a number of the girls were vulnerable to sexual and mental harassment. With the floods, it became difficult for most of the girls to be appropriately `secluded'. Many were unable to sleep, bathe or get access to latrines in privacy because so many houses and latrines were underwater. Some of the girls who had begun menstruation were distressed at not being able to keep themselves clean. Strong social taboos associated with menstruation and the dirty water that surrounded them made it difficult for the girls to wash their menstrual cloths or change them frequently enough. Many of them became separated from their social network of relations, which caused them a great deal of anxiety and stress. Their difficulty in trying to follow social norms have had far‐reaching implications on their health, identity, family and community relations.

Keywords: Bangladesh, 1998 floods, adolescence, sexuality, gender, women

Topics: Economies, Poverty, Environment, Environmental Disasters, Gender, Girls, Health, Mental Health, Infrastructure, Water & Sanitation, Sexuality Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: Bangladesh

Year: 2000