Interview with Professor Dina M. Siddiqi: Capitalism, Colonialism, and Race as they Relate to Transnational Feminism

I interviewed Professor Dina M. Siddiqi, a cultural anthropologist at New York University (NYU). She researches the intersectionality of gender and race, specifically by looking at Islam, transnational feminism, and more. She also extensively studies Bangladesh and global garment systems.

Her bio reads:

“Professor Dina M. Siddiqi is a cultural anthropologist by training. Her research — grounded in the study of Bangladesh — joins critical development studies, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam. She has published extensively on the global garment industry and supply chains, non-state gender justice systems, and the cultural politics of Islam, feminism, and nationalism. She is currently engaged in a project on discourses of national development and the travels of civilizational feminism. Professor Siddiqi sits on the editorial boards of Contemporary South Asia, Dialectical Anthropology, and the Journal of Bangladesh Studies. She serves on the Executive Committee of the American Institute of Bangladesh Studies (AIBS), and is on the Editorial Board of Routledge’s Women in Asia Publication Series. She is also on the Executive Board of Sakhi for South Asian Women. She is affiliated with the Law, Ethics, History, and Religion (LEHR) and the Global Cultures concentrations.” (bio and photo from NYU Directory)

Could you talk about how you got involved in studying Bangladesh, transnational feminist theory, and the anthropology of labor and Islam? What interests you about these topics and/or their intersectionalities?

I grew up in Bangladesh, and I came to college here. Like many people, I came to the US to get an education and to try and help my country. While the general pathways have been studying economics or working for a large development organization, like the UN or the World Bank, I didn’t particularly have that ambition.

I went to Wellesley College, and I really didn’t know very much about it. My mother happened to get me an application and I happened to apply and get a full scholarship. Nevertheless, attending this school was a huge turning point in my life. That liberal arts education changed everything for me. In my first year, I had to take an anthropology class. I came in as an economics major, but I had to take an anthropology class, and the way my professor taught us to “think beyond” when examining development problems or any problems beyond the obvious made me fall in love with anthropology. So, I immediately switched majors.

So much of what I do has to do with understanding the power dynamics that produce the dominant way of understanding something. I aim to go beyond these and also see how lived experiences affect how people see what’s happening. For me, that first class in anthropology was very important for everything else I did. I did a lot more economics, but I had many credits anyway so I became an anthropologist.

At the time I got into my Ph.D. program, garment workers were becoming important globally.

I wanted to understand the ins and outs of the Bangladeshi economy, especially given that I am from there. A lot of my work has been very connected to my biography and to the place where I felt I had an identity.

But also, I was an upper-middle-class, Muslim woman in a Muslim-majority Bengali majority space. I was looking at women who were from what we might call the “working classes.” So, it’s not as though I was studying people who were completely like me. There was a big gap because of class relations, and sometimes religion. It’s very interesting for me to think about that.

When I came to the US as an undergraduate, it was right when colleges were beginning to offer courses in Black Studies, African American Studies, Latina Studies, etc. A lot of my friends were taking these classes. I felt like I didn’t thoroughly understand the topics studied in these classes, though, because I had only taken a couple of women’s studies classes. I looked through the syllabuses of some classes, and I thought that American feminism, even when taught through the most radical courses, did not speak to what I had experienced in my life, because it was very much about the US. There was what I call “nationalist exceptionalism.”

This is where transnational feminism comes in. I didn’t think that anybody was being biased or anything. But, what transnational feminism opened up for me is the ability to see the connections between here, in the United States, and there, in Bangladesh. It allowed me to realize that they’re not just completely separate spaces. You have to study the diaspora and think about larger transatlantic connections. That’s a transnational framework. So, something that I and many other scholars (many of whom have written works way before me), have tried to push is the idea that the lives of women in the United States are actually connected to the lives of women in a place like Bangladesh.

The easiest example to think about this is when considering the consumer. For instance, there is the example of a US female consumer and a Bangladeshi female worker in a factory. That’s one set of connections. So, one set of connections always involves global capitalism. That’s part of transnational feminism. Another set of connections that I’ve been really interested in is these older Orientalist colonial histories. I’m interested in studying how we’ve inherited ideas of what counts as feminist freedom — what counts as a truly free woman. We have inherited ideas from the ways in which colonialism and imperialism worked. So, women have been very central to justifying imperialism and colonialism.

If you’re here in New York, at Columbia’s Comparative Literature Department, there is somebody named Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. She’s a comparative literature theorist and she’s from Kolkata. She grew up there and has written a lot about this idea. She has a wonderful phrase in one of her articles about imperialism being “white men saving brown women from brown men.” Her article centers around the concept of “Sati” which is essentially one of those upper caste things that the British colonials deemed a “barbaric practice” when they were in India. It was a practice that the British used to justify their arrival in India, claiming that they came to “civilize” Indians and save them from their horrible practices like Sati, veiling, foot binding, etc.

Gayatri Spivak is one of those people who teaches us to think about how we’ve thought about what women need. If we go with the imperial global colonial agenda, then we push the idea that the British brought in modernity and that the British saved women in colonial India. So, British ideas of modernity are about freedom. We’ve inherited colonial ideas of what is oppression for women and what is not. That’s another strand of my understanding of transnational feminism.

Also, I study mostly Muslim women. Islam has been so globally demonized, and so I’m really interested in unpacking that discourse. Relating to the ideas I just mentioned, many transnational feminists of Islam tried to dismantle the idea that veiling is oppressive. These are old colonial binaries of what feminist freedom is, and what fairness is. Those who choose not to veil are seen as modern. And those who choose to veil are seen as backward. So, as you can see, transnational feminism is deeply rooted in capitalism, colonialism, and race.

Relating it back to my specific work studying the garment industry, women are always at the bottom of garment factories. This is where all of the previously discussed strands come together. In turn, garment factory workers are at the very bottom of a global supply chain. Many British and Australian brands that produce money produce goods in Bangladesh. These brands always have discourse and try to make profits, because that’s what capitalism is about. But, they are always covering up that discourse, instead using a discourse of empowerment — a discourse of saving women in this case. It’s more convenient for brands to look like they’re saving women. It’s especially convenient when they can look like they’re saving Muslim women. My work ties all of these ideas together.

How have you noticed the influence of gender on garment systems, specifically in South Asia?

I think there’s a lot of ways that it influences it. Generally, there’s the idea of a male breadwinner winner and a female homemaker. It’s actually a much more modern idea — it wasn’t there in the 1600s or 1700s. In these years, people had workshops in which families would work together. But, by the 19th century, the breadwinner idea arose. As a result, this thinking meant that if you think of women working not as the main breadwinners, then you can actually pay them less. This is one of the reasons why women are constantly paid less. The idea has been so institutionalized. Women are constantly fighting it.

It’s also very racialized because African American women get a lot less than white women. One of the things about transnational feminism is that you cannot talk about women as a generic category because there are so many other divisions. Some people work in these garment factories in places like Bangladesh, India, and Cambodia. Women in the global south get paid the least. On the one hand, countries like Bangladesh want this kind of labor, jobs, and foreign direct investment. On the other hand, brands come to places like Bangladesh because they offer low wages. So, if they offered higher wages, then the brands would go elsewhere. It’s like a double-edged sword. That’s where considering gender is very important.

Can you please discuss your chapter “Child Marriage in the Feminist Imagination” from the book “The Cunning of Gender Violence”? What were your motivations for writing this?

I’ve been involved with the Bangladeshi feminist movement, indirectly. I’ve lived there for a lot of my life, and I’ve gone back and forth. I’ve also spent large chunks of time there doing fieldwork and other things. So, I spent a year going to all of the meetings that led to the making of the Domestic Violence Act in Bangladesh. That was very cool.

And then, in 2014, I went to the UN a few times doing separate lobbying. At the UN, there was a workshop with a very well-known organization on child marriage in Bangladesh. At this workshop, I thought to myself “How is that a problem? I’ve never heard of that. Nobody ever talks about that.” I was just stunned that I didn’t know more about this topic, which is really what led to the chapter you mentioned. I didn’t do immediate fieldwork for this, but instead began by just talking to people about it. I hope that my chapter shows how issues that seem so black and white aren’t. I was also interested in examining how what feminists might have as priorities are not necessarily the priorities that are getting funded. And so, feminists work around that. It was really interesting to me to think about what doesn’t get talked about. I combined all of these thoughts into the book.

One such example of something that isn’t talked about a lot is women who disappeared or women whose husbands have disappeared. Authoritarianism will always get the attention of the government because it’s prevalent all over the world to worry about. But something like structural adjustment mining, won’t. There are lots of things we could think of as women’s issues.

So, essentially, I became interested in researching child marriage because I realized there is so much more to child marriage than I had previously acknowledged. But, it did merge with my older work that I’ve been doing on 17–18-year-olds — but I had just never thought of this as child marriage. And nobody else had ever said that it was child marriage. When I was reading those files, nobody said “You must look at these child marriage files.” Instead, they were saying “You must look at the forced marriage files.”

Can you please discuss your work with Sakhi for South Asian Women? How does this work function in conjunction with your research at NYU?

I have known about Sakhi for an extremely long time, but I never had anything to do with them. Nevertheless, it has always impressed me a lot. I didn’t think my work would have anything to do with them. But, about 4 years ago, a Bangladeshi woman from Sakhi emailed me out of the blue, asking if I would be interested in being on the board and mentioning that she had read my CV and work in a Women’s Studies class.

I am the only academic on the board. Everybody else is in the corporate world and is very busy raising money. I just don’t have those kinds of connections in that way. My task is to talk more about Sakhi in a different way. This all started during COVID-19, so the first two years were very bizarre. I am on various committees and programs, which I learn a lot from. They are all very fun. Also, Sakhi interns are everywhere — just recently I took a group through NYU Abu Dhabi to Bangladesh and one student was a Sakhi intern.

A big component of having the Board is having a place to talk. It’s important to have survivors as part of the organization as well, but I’m not a survivor. I just happen to be somebody who could talk about certain things that the other board members don’t. I’ve done so much. I never thought of myself as having done that much. But I have, actually. I love Sakhi — it is just such a fantastic organization. My respect for the organization just keeps increasing, so it’s very much worthwhile.

What advice do you have for those interested in fields similar to your areas of interest? Do you have blogs, podcasts, or summer opportunities that you recommend students explore?

There is one podcast made by Barnard College students that I keep meaning to look up — I can’t remember the exact name. Also, if you live in Manhattan, I would highly recommend trying to get on the mailing list of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. They have two fantastic conferences every year that are open to many people in the Manhattan community. They also blog posts. Their students do some amazing work.

The other thing I wanted to mention is that I made a lot of career decisions very early on that weren’t so orthodox. My advice is that you don’t have to be like me. For instance, I’m very lucky. My husband has a tenure track. I did not want to spend the rest of my life trying to find a tenure-track job and trying to write for an academy. So, I write for myself. I do have a job at NYU, and I do have a great job that is not tenure track that has a lot of benefits. But, I did choose this. I chose it because it gives me a lot more flexibility. This is the first really full-time job I’ve had (7 years and counting). I think following your passion will take you to unexpected places. You don’t have to give up everything for that. My advice is to always keep a little door open for that. Don’t think of life as a zero-sum game. You can do something you really want to do and make a living at the same time.

Is there anything that you want to bring up that we didn’t already discuss?

Sometimes I write out of rage. I hate the way the world writes about certain things, whether it’s garment workers or anything else. On a separate note, I don’t think there is a super tight boundary between activism and scholarship. I think scholarship is really important in framing what activists do. They bleed into each other. We don’t have to randomly wake up and decide that we will be an activist for a given day — that’s ridiculous. I think there is a little bit of that in the US.