ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the politics of microfinance in Bangladesh as to how it led to rural women’s empowerment, as an invention of “bottom-up approach” in terms of economic and human development. It further situates the gender and empowering strategies to the very negotiation and contextualizing feminist movement in an Islamic state, and the rise of middle class—relating to a sense of sovereign cultural and political environment in the nation. This social interplay leads to the contemporary sexual rights especially the hijra empowerment and state-led initiative to its empowering strategies of political representation, citizenship claiming and the rights to health, education and well-being. Thus, the chapter weaves the political economy of gender and empowerment, as bringing into evidence the varied empowering strategies, and the change and subversion from regressive political agenda to democratic gender-based nation building.
