ABSTRACT
Development initiatives that empower women in their struggle against gender inequality have been a central focus for feminist researchers and movements in Bangladesh. This concern is mirrored in a particular framing of gender politics and Bangladesh in scholarly discussions regarding the growth in the non-governmental sector. The concept of the nation as an imagined community, developed by Benedict Anderson, and Postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s work on nationalism as a product of imagination help to situate gender within this imagined community. Nationalism, rooted in the word nation, binds individuals to an imaginary homeland by the virtue of shared characteristics, ethnicity and landscape. Ethnicity, according to anthropologist Fredrik Barth, is a process of maintaining boundaries between the dominant group and the ‘other.’ A feminist reading of genocide demands a marriage of the two very different approaches – a way of looking at genocide that allows differences in history and experiences while also making room for sameness.
