Abstract
The politics of gender, class, and sexuality has put women’s sexual diversity issues at the bottom of LGBT activism in Bangladesh. Focusing on women’s same-sex desires, this chapter specifically looks at a group of female sex workers who practice heterosexuality as labour and homosexuality as personal sexual desire. Choosing ‘lesbian’ as a strategic label to make space within LGBT discourse and activism, this group of women challenges the politics of sexual identity, labelling, and representation. These women’s ‘personal is/and political’ practices mark the emergence of ‘new sexualities’ in Bangladesh, and their almost invisible presence in an otherwise educated middle-class fabric of sexuality rights activism questions our middle-class framed understanding of heteronormativity, womanhood, sexualities, and rights discourses.
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- 1.
All sex workers (in this research) are migrant women, who maintain one household in Dhaka and support parental family back in the villages. The shaping of one’s public image has to be done at two levels: covering up professional identity and sexual identity. Professional identity is also part of personal identity as a woman, who needs to carefully establish an image of a respectable working woman staying away from home village/family but whose economic contribution is crucial for others too.
- 2.
A workshop entitled ‘Sexual Diversity and Coalition Building’ among the Bangladeshi LGBT community was held February 6–7, 2009, in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, with financial support from the Norwegian LGBT Association (LLH Norway). The topic of ‘Gay Women: Issues and Concerns—Perspectives from Bangladesh OR Bangladesh in Perspective? Perspective of Bangladesh’ (where this Shomopremi group represented the only ‘gay women’s’ group) was addressed.
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Karim, S. (2018). Heterosexual Profession, Lesbian Practices: How Sex Workers’ Sexuality Right Positions Through Intersection of Sexuality, Gender, and Class Within the Hierarchy of LGBT Activism in Bangladesh. In: Hussein, N. (eds) Rethinking New Womanhood. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67900-6_9
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