Unpacking the Closet : Queer Disclosures from Bangladesh

Abstract

Unpacking the Closet is a project inspired by a curiosity about disclosures in the context of Bangladesh. What does ‘coming out’ mean, if anything at all, for queer Bangladeshi women? Through interviews and media analysis, this research investigates the ways that queer Bangladeshi women perceive their own identities in the midst of broader struggles over queer visibility, LGBTQIA+ rights, and gender equality in Bangladesh. In doing so, the project examines how the contemporary understanding of gender and sexual identity categories vary across the intersections of socio-economic class, social and geographical mobility, and generational shifts.

In order to understand practices and representations of ‘coming out’ in Bangladesh, this study employs two methods: first, collecting narratives of lived experiences through semi-structured interviews with women in Bangladesh and the Bangladeshi diaspora; and second, critical engagement with the popular culture and online media that frames sexual and gender politics in the Bangladeshi public sphere. The research takes the paradigm of ‘coming out of the closet’ as a point of departure, and builds on scholars such as Eve Sedgwick and Carlos Ulises Decena, who propose concepts such as performative silence and tacit subjects, respectively, in establishing the subtleties and significance of context, especially cultural context, in exploring narratives of queer disclosures. It considers the inadequacies of established global identity categories and representations of queerness in communicating the experiences of queer Bangladeshi women.

The research draws on the works of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Ghassan Hage, incorporating the notions of queer emotions, cruel optimism, and existential immobility. It takes into account contemporary national discourses of development and womanhood, and traces how it collides with the aspirations of queer Bangladeshi women. The research demonstrates how such conflicts create forms of crisis and induce a sense of ‘stuckedness’ in them, compelling them to believe that a queer future is unavailable in Bangladesh and must be sought elsewhere. The research also tracks how causes of stuckedness travel across transnational spaces, changing form and continuing to affect the identities, kinship relations, future imaginaries, and senses of belongingness of queer Bangladeshi women.

Unpacking the Closet identifies frictions between established global markers of embodying gender and sexual identity categories and the lived experiences of queer Bangladeshi women. It attempts to fill up a research gap within a research gap – incorporating the routinely unheeded voices of queer women within an already underexplored field of gender and sexuality studies in Bangladesh.