Sheltered: a thesis exploring the link between bhodrota and the sexual subjectivities of Bangladeshi middle-class new adults

Abstract

Sheltered’ explores the cultural taboo about sexuality among the urban middle-class in Bangladesh, i.e. the bhodrolok, and the way it shapes sexuality and sexual norms/expectations. This taboo exists to maintain and reproduce the concept of bhodrota (i.e. respectability) as a part of the bhodrolok’s middle-class identity and neoliberal aspirations. My thesis defines ‘bhodrota’ as the cultural capital of respectability of the bhodrolok class, and includes the embodied practices that reproduces and legitimises it as symbolic capital through a language of normativity and assures the hegemony of the middle-class. But this cultural taboo is also challenged and remixed by new adults from the bhodrolok growing up in a globalised world; thereby, the concept of bhodrota is also challenged and changed as neoliberal aspirations of the bhodrolok are articulated by the new members of their ton. The chosen demographic of my thesis is specifically new young adults from urban middle-class families in their first year of university (ages 19-20). I conducted six in-depth interviews with new adults from this demographic, as well as a key informant interview with the director of KOTHA, the only existing sexuality education programme aimed at middle-class adolescents. Using both secondary research into existing SRH programmes, their evaluations and reports, and primary data from these interviews, I illustrate how the ‘bhodro’ landscape and habitus of middle-class sexuality is created and enacted through the tension of defining and redefining the class identity of the bhodrolok, within structures of heterosexual marriage normativity and homosociality. My thesis demonstrates and explains the burgeoning need for a cultural ‘speakable sexuality’ for the middle-class, as opposed to the existing silence of the taboo, to help adults navigate the anxieties and ambiguities of their sexual subjectivities and discourse in a society burdened by its patriarchal rape culture and its stigmatisation of sexuality.