Nadine Murshid. (2024) Intimacies of Violence: Reading Transnational Middle-Class Women in Bangladeshi America. Oxford University Press.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici offers a history of how women came to be constructed as socially inferior beings in the primitive accumulation of capital. Repeatedly in history, women were exploited in the service of capital, as rulers sought to divide the proletariat, by offering up the exploitation and violence of women. Thus, violence against women is not natural, but an integral part of the violent production of capitalist relations by the ruling classes, which constituted tearing people away from their land, breaking up communities, and dividing the proletariat. But primitive accumulation is ongoing, accompanied by new technologies, the international division of labor, and new cycles of violence. In this context, Nadine Murshid’s scholarship on the violence experienced by transnational Bangladeshi women in America offers a new lens into the destructive effects of capitalism on the lives of women who form a part of the new global labor force.

For her new book Intimacies of Violence, Murshid interviewed 30 middle-class Bangladeshi women living in the US who experienced intimate partner violence in order to examine the structural production of gender-based violence in the family, community, nation, and global capitalism. Murshid moves away from a traditional, positivist treatment of violence, in which violence is accepted as a given, natural and cultural, to interrogate the hidden structures of control and domination of women. The book constructs violence as already existing, poised and ready to punish women for crossing the line.

Murshid locates the violence experienced by Bangladeshi middle-class women in the US squarely within capitalism and US imperialism. Under capitalism, women are forced to compete with one another for marriage, love, attraction, and power. US imperialism and a globalized labor force compel transnational bodies to compete with and turn against one another as they strive for economic stability and status, alienating different economic classes of Bangladeshis from each other, and forcing women to turn on one another. In a continuation of these violent social relations produced by capitalism, the transnational women in the study recognize that the US acts as a disciplining power on its global labor force through the criminal legal system and immigration system, compelling women undergoing violence to offer testimony to the state against their male partners in exchange for their own security and immigration status.

The book is divided into four parts: intimacies, kinship ties, nationalism, and structures. Rather than starting with violence, the book explores female desire as its locus, centering the women’s desires, ambitions, choices, and vision of romantic love, thus identifying women’s pursuit of their desires as a location of freedom. Paradoxically, women’s desires also make them vulnerable to the violence of the community, as any exhibition of desire makes women’s bodies dissident and places them at odds with the structures of the community. The family and the community govern women’s bodies in service of patriarchy and justify and ignore violence against women.

Murshid views patriarchy as upholding capitalism, as women fight for resources by serving men, who are seen to be the bread earner, the head of the household, and the ones who go out and uphold the family’s prosperity in the masculine business world. Thus, women are forced to serve patriarchy – by defending the very men who commit violence, by blaming women, and by justifying violence against them. The gendered rules and norms governing women’s bodies that begin at adolescence are set and governed by the community, which the book identifies as manush ki bolbe (what will people say?). Interlocutors report that their own mothers take on the role of disciplining their bodies and behavior and putting constraints on their desires.

Murshid deploys the figure of the metaphorical aunty who disciplines young women by spying, gossiping, and acting maliciously against them, even going so far as to justify the violence they face as a consequence of their behavior. At the same time, Murshid finds that the aunty is a dialectical figure, often shielding the young women from society’s discipline, offering small freedoms, an alternative model of being a woman, showing young women how they can thwart the power of patriarchy, and rescuing them from violence. Thus, the aunty in Murshid’s book is a woman who understands the rules of patriarchy and at various points tries to communicate these boundaries to the young women while also modeling for them how to revolt, scheme, and escape the constraints of patriarchy. Murshid quotes Kareem Khubchandani, who sees the aunty as a figure who can both “permit and foreclose gender and sexual dissidence” (p. 1).

The book refuses to judge the aunties and instead identifies them as both victims and participants in these structures of violence. Aunties themselves have to fight patriarchy and come up with weapons to empower themselves within the system, while also weaponizing patriarchy and working within the system to compete for capitalism’s favors as women. Often, aunties serve as role models for dissident women, as young women observe older women liberate themselves from the system through divorce or offer new role models for women to follow.

When women decide to step out of a violent relationship, ending the violence often means leaving the community, isolating themselves from their own mothers’ and own families’ ways of seeing their futures. Once they step out of the patriarchal bonds of the Bangladeshi community, they also learn how the capitalist system expropriates consent and cooperation from them to incarcerate Muslim men in exchange for their freedom and visa status to stay on in the US, and how they must exchange their value as cheap labor to empower themselves to leave their violent relationship. A deeply felt insight emerges from the interviews, as women who have passed through violence realize that marriage is patriarchal and violent, and that the community is capitalist and based on division, foreclosing their freedom and solidarity with other groups by creating insular enclaves for upward mobility. Murshid’s interlocutors seem to identify several violent structures simultaneously, including the patriarchal values of their formative homes; the patriarchal structure of marriage and the jealous efforts of the men in their lives to control their behaviors and bodies; the violence of the community that will judge and punish women for speaking out against their own violence; the violence of the capitalist employer; and the violence of the US criminal legal system and US immigration system. Many of the interlocutors recognize that freedom lies outside of these structures. In one interviewer’s words, her mother reacted to her divorce by crying out, “Now who will marry you?” The interlocutor replied, “No one, I hope” (p. 24).

Murshid offers an analysis of the structures that contribute to the intensification of violence in the lives of transnational Bangladeshi women. The Bangladeshi community in the US forms part of the global labor force that serves the capitalist interests of the US, contributing their wage labor in exchange for imagined benefits. However, migration to the US is marked by economic stress and insecurity, as well as loss of status, which affects both men and women. Murshid’s interlocuters recognize that their value as labor in the US empowers them (this includes their upper-class education and ability to speak English) and offers them a way out of the constraints of their homes. Similarly, US imperialism’s targeting of Muslim men as terrorists helps Bangladeshi women lodge their cases as the victims of violence of Muslim men and be heard by the US criminal legal system.

The disciplining of women seems to occur through an aesthetic of the female body constructed by mothers, aunties, and the men with whom they have relationships. Bangladeshi women are seen as hypersexual and dangerous and objects of male desire, rather than agents of sexual desire. On the other hand, women who travel to the US report falling prey to fetishization, being exoticized as the Other and having to compete with whiteness as the standard of beauty.

Bangladeshi national production of the 1971 liberation war constructs sexual violence as rape by the enemy, memorialized in the figure of the Birangona, who experienced wartime rape. Given this nationalist construction of rape, instances of rape by Bangladeshi men, particularly rape by men that women know, is rarely recognized as rape. The problem is compounded by the construction of women as dangerous creatures inciting male sexual arousal. Thus, Bangladeshi women’s understanding of sexual violence is informed by this nationalist construction of rape as horrific and spectacular, committed by an enemy of the state. Rape in intimate spaces is made invisible because it does not fit into the national discourse of spectacular, violent, and brutal rape as an attack on a nation. Women themselves fail to recognize that they have been sexually violated when the violation falls short of this definition.

For transnational Bangladeshi women, the US further complicates the understanding of rape by representing sex as sexual freedom, thus creating confusion and guilt in women who experience violence while seeking relationships or pleasure. Transnational Bangladeshi women find that, in the US, a victim of sexual violence can be blamed for what happened. The book documents an incident where a Bangladeshi college student reported her sexual assault to the international student office, only to be dismissed and told not to embarrass her parents. The insinuation was that she had initiated relations and therefore her experience did not constitute sexual violence – it was simply a bad sexual experience.

Murshid interrogates women’s desires and finds that desire itself can be constructed by capitalism. The image of the United States produced by American television and movies attracts Bangladeshis to America, but women report being misled by the idea of the workplace as being generous and liberating from marriage, or they pursue marriage, thinking that marriage would offer greater liberties than the suffocating surveillance of their parental home. Murshid also finds that some of her interlocutors inherit the ideas of social hierarchies inherent in the Bangladeshi immigrant community, which often participates in anti-Black racism, seeing Black bodies as lazy, and internalizes the myth of hard work as a path to social mobility in a bid to become part of the obedient, timid labor force.

Murshid attempts to offer insights into why men are primed to commit violence in romantic relationships. Men are supposed to earn money and run their family businesses in a climate that is highly masculinized. Their financial success allows women in their families to be transnational and to travel to the US for higher degrees even when male spouses stay behind to manage the family business. Men who move to the US seem to suffer a greater loss of status than do women. Brown men in the US are subordinated in a hierarchy that places white masculinity at the top, as a continuation of the social hierarchies produced by histories of colonization and imperialism. Paradoxically, the chapter that deals with the physical and sexual violence and domination experienced by the interviewed women also interrogates how the criminal legal system targets their abusers in racialized ways as part of US state violence against Muslim, brown, and immigrant men. Although Murshid does not delve into the psychology of the men who commit violence, their violent behavior appears endemic, involving control and domination, as reported by her interlocutors. Male violence is also likely encouraged by the community, who support their behavior and often malign the character of women who are abused. The interlocutors reported that they did not want their partners to be incarcerated. Rather, they wanted apology, accountability, healing, and change. While the criminal legal system labels those who experience violence and those who produce violence as victim and perpetrator and offers incarceration as the solution to violence, Murshid refers to scholarship and interventions that show that the real solutions often lie in restorative justice, community relationships and support, and imagining a different world.

The book does not separate the different categories of the women the author interviewed. On the one hand, there are the upper middle-class women who grew up in Bangladesh, who enjoy social status through their family status, shown by markers like living in Gulshan, an upper-class neighborhood, or belonging to Dhaka Club, an elite club with membership fees. On the other hand, there are the children of families who came to the US, who may have been working class. The book also does not distinguish for the reader between women who came to the US through marriage and women who came to the US as single women or by leaving partners behind to study in US colleges, although one might expect these two categories of women to be distinct in their liberalism, worldviews, and behaviors. Thus, several categories of class, mobility, and gender are collapsed. This was likely a deliberate strategy by the author to protect the identity of interviewees, but also an act of refusal to separate women or judge women based on their circumstances.

Instead, the research locates people within structures that influence and incentivize their behavior, as workers, transnational bodies, and women competing in a capitalist system of dire resources in which they recognize their ways to freedom and attempt to reach it. From their common experience of facing violence at the hands of intimate partners and their location as transnational subjects, the women arrive at common insights about the formative experience of patriarchy in homes that disciplined their bodies and delineated boundaries, the violent and patriarchal experience of marriage and community, the ways they can navigate different structures to gain power and freedom, and find their subjecthood outside of the boundaries constructed for them.

This book is unique in studying violence in the Bangladeshi middle class, a taboo subject in a group that constructs violence as the lot of lower-income, working-class women. Paradoxically, middle-class Bangladeshi women experience violence as part of the same structures that produce violence against working-class women, as violence serves capital to maintain women as inferior beings, in a divisive, hierarchical organization of social relations. Murshid’s scholarship on the experiences of transnational Bangladeshi women offers an important insight into the place of women in global capitalism, as Bangladeshi women arrive in the US as new workers as part of a global capitalist system.