New book sheds light on partner violence in Bangladeshi migrant communities

By Devon Dams-O’Connor

“Remember, you’re not just any random woman. You are from Bangladesh. Some people won’t know where it is. But that does not change you or your history. You come from a lineage of strong women. When in doubt, think of your grandmother who swam to safety during Partition. You took a plane. You have it slightly better. And you don’t need no man.”

That was Marium, recalling the words of her aunt in New York City when Marium moved in with her shortly after arriving in the United States, illustrating how family history, nationalist sentiment and cultural norms intersect to create complex roadmaps women are expected to follow.

She is one of the women we meet in Intimacies of Violence, a new book by Nadine Shaanta Murshid, an associate professor in the University at Buffalo School of Social Work, which studies how middle-class Bangladeshi migrant women personally embody structural violence to shed light on the ways in which violence is produced, perpetuated and resisted.

Murshid’s career-long research has focused on partner violence. In this, her first book, she explores how transnational Bangladeshi women — individuals who occupy space in both the U.S. and Bangladesh — face cultural, social, gender and systemic inequities across borders.

“Ten years ago, I began looking at whether empowering women through microfinance helps them out of poverty and violence,” Murshid explains. “The idea was that if women had the ability to leave, they could. There’s this idea that only poor women experience violence. We know that partner violence happens across the class spectrum, but we only judge the poor women. I wanted to understand more.”

She was also interested in Bangladeshi migrant women who were leaving partner violence, and what policies and resources exist. The women in her research conversations were middle-class migrants or children of migrants with some generational wealth and education.

Because they had certain class protections, they had parents who supported them post-divorce or the means to move away from a Bangladeshi community. While in theory these women could charter new paths elsewhere, Murshid discovered complexities that led many to stay in an unsafe relationship.

“I started a project about women who had sought help from agencies,” she says. “What I was seeing was an assumption that these were empowered women, but what I found was the opposite — they were seeking help because the violence had gotten so bad.”

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Murshid began to wonder about the women she had gotten to know through nearly a decade of research.

“I started to think about some of the women I had spoken to, how they were and if there were more,” she explains. “So, I reached out. What I heard was too much for a paper. In the time that had passed since we last spoke, a lot of them stayed, a lot of them left and there was a lot to talk about.”

That’s when her book began to take shape. Across eight chapters, Intimacies of Violence covers a lot of ground through four broad arguments.

First, it examines how social locations and associated status impact how women experience intimate inequities related to love, sex and desire. Second, the book shows how social norms within families link the structural and the intimate. Third, it illustrates how nationalist narratives about Bangladesh’s history of wartime rape inform women’s construction of violence. Finally, the institutions of home, immigration and the criminal legal system are implicated as sites of violence for transnational Bangladeshi women.

Murshid describes the people she met as women with identities and voices, sharing their backstories and often using their own words to describe their experiences.

“I wanted to paint these women as women with full lives, not women defined by violence, as victims,” she says. “One important thing to do is to see victims as human beings.”

As the first book to examine the private lives of Bangladeshi migrant women, Murshid hopes Intimacies of Violence will help practitioners understand the nuances of this community.

In writing the final chapters of Intimacies of Violence, another book began to show itself: Intimacies of Migration. This second book is a work in progress for Murshid, a continuation of some themes she began to unpack in Intimacies of Violence that merited their own volume. A publication date has not been set.

“All of this is a migration story,” says Murshid. “It’s a look at what creates the people who are here, how they make a home, how they bilocate and have expansive lives and have to navigate a variety of identities, class protections and norms.”

Intimacies of Violence, which was released in November, is available for purchase through Oxford University Press, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and eBooks.