FUAIM Lecture - Nasrin Khandoker - 26/09/24, Ó Riada Hall, 11:00

10 Sep 2024

Happening On 26/09/2024

Becoming Deviant and Defiant Women with Bhawaiya folk songs in Bengal.

Abstract:

The new gender norms for Bengali women were created by political, religious, and cultural encounters between British colonial mechanisms and the nationalist collective struggle to reconstruct the traditions of the Indian subcontinent. In between those colonial and nationalist binary narratives, one of the most popular folk song genres of Bengalis, Bhawaiya, has existed with sexually subversive emotional elements.

While marriage was established as one of the most potent social contracts through that encounter, in Bengal, the words of embodied or sensual love of ‘illicit relations beyond marital boundary expressed through many lyrics of the Bhawaiya songs. The female subject of Bhawaiya lyrics expressing illicit desire is fictional but symbolises the permissiveness of real women’s defiant and deviant emotions. Moreover, those folk songs’ emotions not only connect singers, performers, and listeners with the instruments and environments, but they also create the process of ‘becoming the woman of the songs’ with the embodied-atmospheric emotions and experience. The decolonial feminist political potential of this subjectivity is that not only does it challenge the colonial and nationalist idea of the passive victim image of marginalised Bengali women who need to be rescued, but it also challenges the coloniality of gender by evoking female emotions transcending the gendered body by 'becoming the woman' of Bhawaiya. This article paper is about that subversive female subjectivity for a decolonial disjuncture from existing histories. 

Biography

Dr Nasrin Khandoker is a post-doc researcher working on a CyberSocial project at the Department of Sociology and Criminology at UCC. She received her PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University. Before that, Nasrin Khandoker worked as a postdoctoral researcher on the Sustainable Alliances Against Anti-Muslim Hatred (SALAAM) project at the University of Limerick and in the GBV-MIG project at NUIG. Before coming to Ireland, she was an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Jahangirnagar University, Bangladesh. In addition to a Master's degree from the Department of Anthropology, Jahangirnagar University, she was awarded an MA in Gender Studies from Central European University, Hungary, in 2014. She received a Wenner-Gren Wadsworth fellowship from the US and a John and Pat Hume scholarship from Maynooth University for her PhD, which she was awarded in 2021. Her research interests are gender and sexuality, social studies of science, Bangla folk song, migration, gender-based violence, emotion and affect, embodiment and post-colonial critiques.