POLITICAL transitions are often framed as moments of democratic possibility, new rules, new actors, new beginnings. In Bangladesh, as in many post-authoritarian or transitional contexts, the language of reform, neutrality, and renewal has dominated public discourse. Yet beneath this rhetoric lies a familiar contradiction: women are highly visible in political conversations but largely excluded from political power. Gender equality becomes something to be spoken about, debated, even moralised, while women themselves remain peripheral to decision-making processes.
This contradiction is not accidental. Feminist political theory has long warned that transitional moments tend to privilege stability, order, and national unity, concepts historically coded as masculine and frequently mobilised to sideline feminist demands as ‘secondary’ or ‘divisive’ (Phillips, 1995; Fraser, 2013). In Bangladesh’s current political transition, we see this logic clearly. Women are invited to symbolise democracy but rarely trusted to shape it.
Empirically, this exclusion is visible in the architecture of power. Interim political arrangements, advisory bodies, negotiation spaces, and security-related decision-making remain overwhelmingly male-dominated. Women appear far more often in press statements, commemorative events, or moral narratives than in rooms where electoral frameworks, law enforcement priorities, or economic recovery plans are decided. As UN Women’s global research consistently shows, transitional governance structures rarely prioritise women’s representation unless it is explicitly mandated, and Bangladesh is no exception (UN Women, 2018).
Where women do appear, their presence is often symbolic rather than substantive. This reflects what Anne Phillips describes as the persistent gap between ‘presence’ and ‘power’ (Phillips, 1995). The woman on the panel does not necessarily shape the agenda. The woman in the photograph does not control the budget. Visibility becomes a substitute for redistribution.
At the same time, women’s political participation in Bangladesh is increasingly mediated through sexual and moral scrutiny. Female political actors, whether elected representatives, activists, or family members of politicians, are routinely judged not by policy positions or organisational competence but by dress, lifestyle, sexuality, and perceived respectability. This is not incidental sexism; it is a form of sexual politics that functions as political discipline.
Recent years offer multiple examples. Women associated with major political families have been publicly shamed for clothing choices, religious identity, or lifestyle, often through digitally circulated images and commentary framed as concern for ‘culture’ or ‘national values.’ These attacks rarely target men with the same intensity. Male politicians’ corruption, violence, or misuse of power seldom becomes a moral crisis; women’s bodies do. Feminist scholars describe this as gendered political violence, acts that aim not to defeat women politically, but to silence them socially (Krook, 2020; UN Women, 2021).
This pattern is deeply rooted in South Asian political culture, where women’s bodies have long served as symbolic terrain for debates about nationalism, morality, and modernity. From critiques of Sheikh Hasina’s family members to past scrutiny of Khaleda Zia’s appearance, or earlier regional examples involving Benazir Bhutto and Indira Gandhi, the mechanism is strikingly consistent. Women’s personal lives are politicised to delegitimise their public presence. This is not party-specific; it is patriarchal.
In Bangladesh’s transitional moment, this moral policing has intensified rather than diminished. As political authority becomes uncertain, control over women’s visibility becomes a way of reasserting order. Religion and culture are frequently mobilised not as lived ethical systems, but as performative tools. Who covers their head, when, and in which context becomes a proxy for political legitimacy. Feminist theorists describe this as religion-as-performance, where women’s bodies function as visual certificates of moral purity rather than sites of personal belief.
This logic denies women what feminist scholars call contextual agency, the ability to navigate different social spaces with intelligence and autonomy (Kabeer, 2011). In Bangladeshi politics, a woman may be expected to perform religious respectability in one space and be condemned for social freedom in another. The same flexibility that earns men praise as ‘strategic’ or ‘balanced’ is framed as duplicity when exercised by women.
Meanwhile, women’s substantive political labour remains undervalued. During periods of unrest and transition, Bangladeshi women have played critical roles, organising community support, documenting abuses, sustaining protest infrastructures, and mediating local conflicts. Yet this labour rarely translates into leadership positions. Feminist political economists argue that this reflects a deeper pattern: women’s work is treated as social glue rather than political capital (Federici, 2012; Fraser, 2016).
When women fail to convert activism into formal power, feminism itself is blamed. Feminist movements are accused of elitism, detachment, or ineffectiveness. This framing is profoundly misleading. Feminist organisations in Bangladesh do not control party nominations, campaign financing, media ownership, or law enforcement, factors that research identifies as decisive for women’s political success (UN Women, 2018). Holding feminists responsible for women’s exclusion is a way of deflecting accountability from male-dominated institutions.
The digital sphere has intensified these dynamics. Online platforms in Bangladesh have become sites of rapid moral policing, where women’s images are extracted, reframed, and weaponised. Studies on digital misogyny show that such harassment is amplified by algorithmic systems that reward outrage and sexualised content (UN Women, 2021). Women near political power become particularly vulnerable, as digital shaming functions as a warning: visibility comes at a cost.
This environment produces a profound chilling effect. Political participation no longer appears as a civic right guaranteed by citizenship, but as an endurance test—one that measures how much surveillance, humiliation, and violence a woman can withstand before she is deemed ‘unfit’ for public life. The threshold for participation is no longer competence or commitment, but resilience to abuse. Women are not asked what policies they support or what visions they hold for governance; they are asked, implicitly and repeatedly, whether they can survive the consequences of visibility.
This transforms democracy itself. Participation becomes conditional, uneven, and deeply gendered. Men enter political space with the presumption of legitimacy; women enter knowing that every gesture, photograph, relationship, and moment of leisure may be repurposed against them. The message is unmistakable: power is accessible, but only to those willing to sacrifice privacy, dignity, and bodily autonomy. Many women respond rationally by withdrawing, self-censoring, or limiting their public presence, not because they lack political capacity, but because the cost of participation has been made deliberately prohibitive.
This is not exclusion through formal prohibition; it is exclusion through exhaustion. Feminist theorists have long argued that power often operates most effectively not by banning participation outright, but by making it unbearable (Brown, 2015; Ahmed, 2017). In such conditions, withdrawal is misread as apathy, when in fact it is a political outcome engineered through sustained hostility.
As Wendy Brown (2015) warns, when democracy is stripped of substantive inclusion, it is reduced to performance, rituals of participation without the redistribution of power. Women may be invited to speak, appear, and symbolise democratic values, yet remain structurally barred from shaping outcomes. The spectacle of inclusion masks the reality of exclusion. Participation becomes something to be displayed rather than exercised, and democracy itself becomes hollowed out-retaining its form while losing its emancipatory content.
In this sense, the silencing of women is not a side effect of political transition; it is one of its governing techniques.
International Women’s Day in Bangladesh is routinely marked by polished statements celebrating women’s resilience, sacrifice, and contribution to nation-building. Women are praised as ‘strong,’ ‘patient,’ ‘hard-working,’ and ‘inspirational.’ None of this is untrue. Yet these narratives are profoundly inadequate. When resilience is endlessly applauded without a corresponding redistribution of power, it ceases to be a virtue and becomes a mechanism of normalisation, one that makes inequality appear natural, even admirable.
In this framing, women are valued for enduring injustice rather than dismantling it. Their worth lies in how much political failure, economic insecurity, and social violence they can absorb with dignity, not in their right to shape policy, control resources, or determine political priorities. Resilience becomes a moral compliment that quietly absolves institutions of responsibility. The state congratulates itself for recognising women symbolically, while leaving intact the very structures that exhaust them.
Visibility operates in much the same way. Bangladesh does not lack visible women—women in campaigns, women in commemorative posters, women seated at consultation tables, women repeatedly invoked in speeches. But visibility without authority is not empowerment; it is performance. A woman who is seen but not heard, consulted but not empowered to decide, present but not influential remains structurally marginal. Feminist political theory has long warned that representation without institutional power risks turning women into decorative proof of progress rather than agents of political change.
This is why the language of ‘progress’ during political transitions demands careful scrutiny. Transitional periods are often framed as neutral, technocratic phases in which ‘larger’ concerns; stability, and security, electoral order must take precedence, while gender justice is deferred to a later stage. But postponement is itself a political choice. A transition that reproduces existing gender hierarchies under new leadership or softened rhetoric does not transform power; it simply repackages it.
Transition without gender justice merely rearranges who speaks about women, not who governs with them. It replaces overt exclusion with polite acknowledgment, structural discrimination with symbolic inclusion. The faces may change and the language may evolve, but the rules of political access remain largely intact. Women are invited to witness democracy, not to exercise it.
International Women’s Day, then, should be less a moment of self-congratulation and more a moment of reckoning. The critical question is not whether Bangladeshi women are resilient — they have demonstrated that repeatedly, often at great personal cost. The real question is why they are still required to be resilient at all. Until political transitions redistribute power rather than merely rebrand it, women will continue to be praised at the margins while decisions are made at the centre without them.
Feminist political theory offers a clear warning: equality cannot be deferred until stability is secured. Stability built on exclusion is not stability; it is managed inequality. If Bangladesh’s political transition is to be genuinely democratic, women must be included not as symbols of morality, culture, or endurance, but as political actors with authority, resources, and protection.
The issue is not whether women appear in transitional narratives, they always do. The real question is why power continues to be negotiated without them, and why women’s bodies remain political battlegrounds instead of political voices.
Dr Lubna Ferdowsi is an academic and a researcher at the University of Hull, UK.
