ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the embodiment of gendered roles as envisaged in the feminization of the land, which enables the body of the woman as mother to be available for the aestheticzsing impulse of the project of nationalism in Bangladesh. Women provide legitimacy to the political projects of the nation within particular social and historical contexts. The emphasis on the role of the nurturing woman in Muktijuddho, as mothers or nurses, ennobles suffering. The mothering of the raped woman locates the birangona within the realm of respectability. The emphasis on the mother as nation has made motherhood the most significant construct within which the role of the woman has been envisaged in Bangladesh in the context of Mukti-juddho. The middle-class narrative and iconification of Jaha-nara Imam emphasizes the ways in which idealizations of womanhood carry within them notions of respectability, embodied and circumscribed in domesticity.
