THROUGHOUT the July uprising and the authoritarian Awami League regime, women acted not as mere representatives but as agents of rupture; yet political parties and the practices of statecraft denied them substantive presence in the new parliament. Women’s active participation in the resistance was central — they organised, documented, and sustained political life, transforming risk into collective action under an authoritarian regime. These were not symbolic acts but claims to political authority rooted in care, loss, love, and rage, enacted without permission to speak or waiting for quotas or nominations. Women forced the state to confront its violence through their refusal to disappear. In these moments, they were not asking to be included in politics; they were redefining what politics is.
However, during the transition, political parties and the interim government pushed women away from the spaces where decisions are made. Key questions arise: What has changed since the uprising? Why has women’s visibility in public spaces become subject to suspicion and policing? And how does this relate to their proportional presence in the new parliament?
Since the July uprising, women have become a central site on which Jamaat-e-Islami and similar Islamist political parties advance projects of reform, control, and subjugation through the active mobilisation of misogynistic discourses, while the interim government has enabled this process by refraining from decisive action. Sexual harassment in public spaces, policing of women’s appearance and attire, and coordinated online campaigns of abuse intensified during the transition. From the rupture of July to the post-uprising period, the patriarchal political landscape pushed women further out of formal politics, resulting in a strikingly minimal presence in Bangladesh’s parliament.
Women hoped for a new architecture of power through the July mass uprising where their voices would matter. A familiar syntax emerged during the transition instead, where women are welcomed as symbols, warned as bodies, rationed as representatives, and governed as unruly subjects.
International Women’s Day is often softened into celebration; yet celebration without political confrontation is empty. This International Women’s Day, Bangladeshi women do not merely ask to count how many occupy seats in parliament—they ask much harder questions. Are women allowed to be political subjects, or only political symbols? Are women permitted to govern, or only to legitimise governance conducted by others? Are women’s bodies sites of authority, or merely objects of policing?
During the transition, the vocabulary of ‘order,’ ‘stability’, and ‘culture’ returned, bringing with it a familiar moral economy centred on regulating women’s everyday lives. Many women active in public and political spaces reported harassment, intimidation, and character assassination both online and offline. Women’s bodies, once the moral centre of the uprising, were again rendered sites of regulation. Harassment, intimidation, and moral policing followed women back into political spaces after the ouster of the authoritarian regime.
Suddenly, women’s street presence became subject to political scrutiny in this period of transition. Women who protest, speak publicly, or refuse obedience to social, sexual, or political expectations are often disciplined through a harsh vernacular of abuse. Misogynistic groups flooded online with derogatory slurs such as ‘khanki’, ‘magi’, ‘besshya’, ‘rater rani’, ‘shahbagi’, etc., implying dissenting women are ‘prostitutes’. Also phrases such as ‘gosol kore na’ (they do not shower) or ‘gaye gondho’ (they stink) are used. The use of these terms to delegitimise women who protest or speak publicly is rooted in the maligning suggestion that a woman who is visible or vocal must be sexually deviant. When women speak out against this harassment, they encounter further layers of abuse, both online and offline, and their anger is dismissed as non-political. These are not merely insults but are deliberate political tools of gendered social control. The intention behind sexualising gendered dissent is to collapse political speech into allegations of sexual availability or moral corruption, putting women in a defensive situation so that the political speech remains unfinished. By associating disobedient women with dirt, impurity, and smell, patriarchal logic renders that if someone is dirty or stinky, their opinion does not matter. The neoliberal governance of cleanliness is at work here. Such language converts misogyny into common sense, enforcing patriarchal order by making women’s participation in public life emotionally and socially costly.
Is this a mechanism of catechising the women? To answer this question, Laurie Penny’s work Bitch Doctrine (2017) and her concept of the ‘bitch’ are analytically useful terms. Penny uses the term not as an insult but as an analytical political category. Her ‘bitch’ is the woman who refuses to be docile and silent, who creates social discomfort, and who is punished not for being wrong, but for being unmanageable. She refuses to perform gratitude to power and insists that anger itself is a form of political knowledge. Here, the ‘bitch’ is not a social failure but a democratic threat.
In post-uprising Bangladesh, the figure of the ‘bitch’ is immediately recognisable: women who protested, organised, crossed spatial boundaries, or refused to remain silent were treated as problems that needed to be managed and catechised to obey patriarchal demands. Yet the women of July did not wait or stay quiet; they resisted, stood in front of police vehicles, carried the dead, shouted, and faced bullets. In those moments, women’s anger unsettled the state. Through these actions, they were not asking to be integrated into politics; they were redefining it. Today, these women are being catechised for what has transformed the whole of Bangladesh.
Sexualised slurs and moral regulation thus function as disciplining technologies, aiming to stall women’s political speech through attacks on reputation. Penny’s “bitch” meets Bangladesh’s “khanki,” “magi,” or “shahbagi” not as a metaphor but as part of a shared mechanism through which patriarchal institutions silence women who speak beyond permission. The “bitch” is not the enemy of social or political order; she is the conscience of democracy.
Women were hopeful for change, but the election resulted in an institutional settlement that kept them largely excluded from formal power and parliamentary representation, revealing what the new political order is willing to sacrifice in gender justice as its first bargaining chips. Women had led and remained highly visible in the uprising and resistance for years, yet they were not integrated into parliament with proportional institutional power during the transition. What the Islamic parties advocated was subtly reflected across all political parties, and the low number of women in the new parliament speaks for itself.
Only 85 women contested the election for 300 parliamentary seats, of whom 66 were party-nominated and 19 were independent candidates nationwide, despite women comprising more than half of the electorate. Only seven women were directly elected to general seats, representing less than 3 per cent of parliament. All elected women MPs also come from elite backgrounds, leaving the voices of marginalised women absent. The 50 reserved seats for women brought the total number of women MPs to 57, or 16 per cent of the legislature — well below the 35 per cent critical mass considered necessary for women to exercise substantive influence over policymaking. Bangladesh’s parliamentary inclusion remains largely quota-dependent and symbolic, raising fundamental questions about gendered governance and democratic renewal. Moreover, reserved-seat MPs were often treated as ‘second-class’, a point echoed by former MP Nilufa Chowdhury at a conference.
For women to enter parliament, party nomination remains the principal gatekeeping mechanism. Under the July Charter, all signatory parties are obliged to nominate at least 5 per cent of seats to women. The Bangladesh Socialist Party led with 34.48 per cent women candidates, while the Bangladesh Nationalist Party fielded only ten. Of 51 parties, only 20 nominated women, and Jamaat-e-Islami nominated none to contest over 200 seats, despite the Representation of the People Order 1972 requiring 33 per cent women in party committees by 2020. The 2026 cabinet includes only one woman minister, with none in core ministries such as finance, home affairs, law, or defence, portraying inclusion as legitimation rather than transformation. This situation goes beyond statistics: gendered governance functions as statecraft in Bangladesh, making women’s political engagement expensive, dangerous, taxing, and structurally limited, particularly for those without social capital or party protection.
The transition in Bangladesh has again shown that political rupture does not automatically yield gender justice without structural change. Women have always played a prominent role in resistance, yet their presence in parliament has been reduced to mere symbolism through the power of executive dismissal. If democracy is to mean more than electoral rotation, women’s political agency must shift from a tolerated presence to substantive policy-making power.
Rozyna Begum is a socio-legal researcher and human rights activist.
