Women and a national imaginary

In the discourse of sex equality, the public-private dualism has a long-standing pedigree. Historically, the gendered premise of the state justified confining women to the private spheres and refused to protect them within it. ¹ The said refusal ended up securing the ends of “private patriarchy”; ² inasmuch as for women, the private became the distinctive sphere of intimate violation as opposed to one of autonomy and freedom. ³ The Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW, 1979) aimed at putting an end to that murky and false dichotomy, and obligated states to eliminate discrimination against women from all spheres of life. Bangladesh ratified the Convention but with certain Shari’a-based reservations that go against the core objective of the Convention. The reservations are underpinned by several overlapping politico-legal premises, including the country’s constrained constitutional commitment to sex equality, the perception of women’s rights as an unimportant goal in state formation, ⁴ and the characterisation of women’s rights within the limits of personal laws.