Young professional Bangladeshi women with rebel bones: trans-approaches to language and identity

Abstract

The paper advances our understanding of the ‘translingual turn’ in applied linguistics and its role in exploring women’s entanglement with the colonial/post-colonial/neo-colonial selves. Based on a virtual ethnography and in-depth interviews of four young women from four different professions in Bangladesh, the paper shows that their performances of gender are tied up with the structured expectations of the linguistic and societal norms related to the archetypal images of bhadramahilas/ gentle ladies observed during the colonial period of Indian Subcontinent. With their distinct multimodal creativity, they establish a new form of agency and manage to challenge their triply compromised positions as a post-colonial being, weaker sex, and constructed ‘other’ in a patriarchal society. It also seems that they manage to confront the coloniality of being, sensing, and knowing in the process, while they experience oppressions perpetrated by the archetypal images of bhadramahilas. The paper concludes that creativity plays a vital role in their language practices and their ‘epistemic disobedience’ to the pre-scripted colonial interpretation of women and in transforming their language, thinking, doing, and being. The paper ends by suggesting the ways to the decolonisation of the concepts of language and gender.

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