1. Differential Assimilability: Racialized Technologies of Exclusion in Anzia Yezierska’s ‘America and I’ and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s ‘The Thing Around Your Neck’ [in revision]
Abstract
This paper compares Anzia Yezierska’s “America and I” (1923) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “The Thing Around Your Neck” (2009) to examine how the American Dream’s promise of meritocratic belonging is racialized and gendered across a century of immigrant women’s writing. While existing scholarship reads each author separately through feminist or postcolonial frameworks, this paper argues that juxtaposing a Jewish immigrant narrative with a Black African one reveals two distinct technologies of exclusion operating under a shared ideology. Yezierska’s protagonist is denied belonging through class and cultural illegibility despite her latent proximity to whiteness, while Adichie’s Akunna is rendered permanently hypervisible through racial fetishization, foreclosing assimilation regardless of labor or effort. Reading these texts together demonstrates that the American Dream does not simply exclude immigrant women uniformly, but calibrates exclusion differently depending on the immigrant body’s relationship to whiteness — a distinction with implications for how comparative immigrant literature theorizes gendered assimilability. Drawing on Bhabha’s hybridity, Crenshaw’s intersectionality, and critical whiteness studies, this paper offers a close reading of embodiment, labor, and sexual objectification in both texts to argue that “otherness” is not a single, transhistorical condition but a differentiated apparatus shaped by the racial logic specific to each historical moment. This comparative approach contributes to immigrant literature studies by proposing a framework — differential assimilability — for analyzing how race, gender, and historical context jointly determine the terms of exclusion in American immigrant narratives.
THE MINORITY SURVIVAL PATRIARCHY PROJECT (THREE-PART RESEARCH SERIES)
A connected series developing Minority Survival Patriarchy (MSP) as an original postcolonial feminist framework: Paper I establishes the empirical foundation, Paper II examines everyday negotiated agency, and Paper III extends MSP into a transferable theory of minority citizenship.
I. Before the Border: Minority Survival Patriarchy and the Pre-Migration Constraints on Bengali Hindu Women in Bangladesh [accepted for conference presentation :4th World Conference on Gender and Women’s Studies, UK]
Abstract
By theorizing the pre-migration terrain, the paper extends migration scholarship beyond border crossing to show how international mobility is socially produced through the everyday insecurities of religious minority women. Drawing on secondary literature and integrating feminist human security, intersectionality, and postcolonial feminist theory, this conceptual paper examines the pre-migration experiences of Bengali Hindu women in Bangladesh. It argues that international migration is constituted before departure, where access to education, resources, mobility, and decision-making power determines who is able to migrate. Women’s capabilities and agency are shaped by intersecting structures of patriarchal power, religious minority insecurity, and material inequality, illustrated by unequal inheritance regimes and histories of dispossession. The paper introduces Minority Survival Patriarchy (MSP) to explain how politically vulnerable minority communities intensify control over women’s education, mobility, marriage, and reproduction as a strategy of collective survival, thereby constraining their migration opportunities. This framework departs from existing accounts of patriarchal nationalism as an assertion of sovereign power, theorizing minority patriarchal control instead as a defensive response to existential vulnerability. In doing so, the paper reframes migration as a process constituted long before border crossing and foregrounds pre-migration insecurity as a critical site for understanding gendered mobility among religious minorities.
II. Negotiating Voice under Minority Survival Patriarchy: Everyday Lives of Bengali Hindu Women in Bangladesh [in progress]
Abstract
Building upon the conceptual framework developed in the preceding article, this study investigates how Bengali Hindu minority women experience, negotiate, and contest the everyday operation of Minority Survival Patriarchy (MSP) in contemporary Bangladesh. While existing scholarship has documented gender inequality and minority vulnerability separately, limited research has examined how these intersect in women’s everyday lives. This article therefore explores how family expectations, marriage practices, inheritance norms, education, employment, mobility, and community surveillance collectively shape women’s opportunities for agency and voice. Using qualitative research methods, including in-depth interviews and thematic analysis, the study examines how women understand and respond to competing expectations originating from state institutions, wider society, and their own minority communities. Rather than portraying women as passive victims, the article analyses the diverse strategies through which they negotiate conformity, resistance, compromise, and everyday agency under conditions of structural constraint. The findings are expected to refine the concept of Minority Survival Patriarchy by identifying both its explanatory strengths and its empirical limits, contributing to feminist ethnography, minority citizenship studies, and South Asian gender scholarship.
III. From Constrained Voice to Transformative Agency: Reimagining Minority Citizenship for Bengali Hindu Women in Bangladesh [in progress]
Abstract
Having established the conceptual foundations of Minority Survival Patriarchy and examined its operation in everyday life, this article explores pathways through which structurally constrained voice may be transformed into meaningful agency among Bengali Hindu minority women in Bangladesh. Moving beyond diagnosis, the study asks what institutional, legal, educational, and community-level changes are necessary to expand women’s substantive citizenship while recognising the particular vulnerabilities associated with minority status. Integrating feminist legal theory, citizenship studies, human rights scholarship, and South Asian gender research, the article critically evaluates the relationship between personal law, inheritance reform, constitutional protections, civil society organisations, educational access, and women’s political participation. It argues that strengthening women’s agency does not require abandoning minority identity; rather, sustainable reform depends upon simultaneously addressing gender inequality and minority insecurity. The article proposes a multidimensional framework of transformative minority citizenship in which legal equality, material independence, epistemic recognition, and community participation operate as mutually reinforcing conditions for agency, concluding the trilogy by identifying realistic pathways for social transformation, with relevance to other politically vulnerable minority communities in South Asia.
CONFERENCE PAPERS
4. Silent Exodus: Media Narratives and Representation of Hindu Migrations and the Diaspora
Community from Bangladesh [presented, South Asian Media and Cultural Studies Conference, Florida State University, January 2025]
Abstract
This paper aims to examine the underrepresentation of Hindu migration narratives in Bangladeshi mainstream media and explores how this omission shapes collective memory and cultural identity, both for Hindu migrants and the nation as a whole. Although Hindu migration from Bangladesh began well before the 1990s, this research focuses on the period from 1992 to 2024, a critical timeframe shaped by the 1992 Babri Mosque demolition in India, which had significant impact on the Hindu community in Bangladesh, triggering social tensions and migration pressures. Guided by Stuart Hall’s “Politics of Representation” and Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses, the study suggests that media functions as an ideological tool that upholds a dominant narrative aligned with nationalist agendas, aligning with insights from Edward Said and Chomsky on how media filters which voices are amplified or marginalized. Methodologically, this research utilizes qualitative content analysis of news articles and editorials from mainstream Bangladeshi media outlets spanning 1992 to 2024, complemented by diaspora literature and interviews with Hindu diaspora communities that foreground narratives of migration, cultural resilience, and identity preservation. The study argues that the underrepresentation of Hindu migration stories is a structured omission that reinforces a narrow, monolithic national identity, and advocates for a more inclusive media landscape that acknowledges Bangladesh’s diverse cultural legacy.
2. Inquiring Queer Studies: Critical Affective Pedagogy as a Transformative Framework for Gender and
Sexuality Education in Bangladeshi Tertiary Institutions [presented, Conference on Critical-Affective Pedagogy for Bangladesh, Department of English, Jahangirnagar University, May 2024]
Abstract
Gender and queer studies courses in Bangladeshi tertiary institutions face persistent pedagogical challenges rooted in sociocultural conservatism, rote-learning traditions, and the emotional inaccessibility of their subject matter for many students. This study critically examines the inadequacies of conventional pedagogical approaches in facilitating genuine comprehension of, and empathy toward, gender-diverse and queer identities. Drawing on critical pedagogy (Freire, Giroux, hooks), affect theory (Ahmed, Massumi), and critical affective pedagogy (Boler, Keddie), the paper employs a mixed-methods design combining survey data from students at Jahangirnagar University who had completed at least one year of gender studies instruction with a theoretical analysis of critical affective pedagogical strategies. Findings reveal significant comprehension deficits and emotional disengagement among students exposed exclusively to conventional pedagogical methods. The paper proposes five contextually adapted critical affective strategies — cultural sensitivity, reparative reading, reflection and reflexivity, a reading resilience toolkit, and the intentional embrace of emotional responses — as pedagogical interventions with potential to render gender studies more effective and inclusive within Bangladesh’s specific socioeconomic and cultural context, contributing to underrepresented pedagogical scholarship at the intersection of queer studies, affect theory, and education in South Asian contexts.
ADDITIONAL MANUSCRIPTS IN PREPARATION
5. The Somatic Border: Height, Nutrition, and the Colonial Aesthetic Norm in International Beauty Pageants — A Case for Bangladesh [in preparation]
Abstract
International beauty pageants continue to market themselves as sites of global inclusion and, increasingly, of intellectual empowerment (“beauty with a purpose”). Yet the informal somatic criteria that structure judging — above all, height and slenderness — remain rooted in a Western, historically colonial ideal of the female body. This proposal argues that these criteria function as a mechanism of structural exclusion for women from postcolonial nations whose average stature is shaped by histories of poverty-driven undernutrition rather than by any essential ethnic trait. Using Bangladesh as a case, where decades of documented childhood stunting and maternal malnutrition have produced a national female population that is, on average, markedly shorter than the pageant-industry ideal, the study asks how this body norm operates, how it compounds pre-existing marginalization within the nation, and whether the industry’s recent rhetorical turn toward “brains” meaningfully alters the physical filter that precedes it. The project situates itself at the intersection of postcolonial feminist theory, critical beauty-pageant studies, and the sociology of the body, proposing a mixed qualitative design combining discourse analysis of pageant judging criteria and media coverage with interviews of Bangladeshi contestants and organizers.
6. The Intersection of Postmodern Consumerism and Contemporary Fashion Culture: A Cultural Analysis of Outfit Repetition in the Age of Social Media [in preparation]
Abstract
This paper explores the intersection of postmodern consumerism and contemporary fashion culture, with a specific focus on the social media phenomenon of avoiding outfit repetition. Drawing from Fredric Jameson’s essay “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” the paper argues that the behavior of constantly seeking new clothing in response to social media visibility reflects key elements of postmodern thought, including the loss of originality, the dominance of pastiche, and the commodification of culture. Fashion, as consumed and displayed on social media platforms, becomes a space where individuality is replaced by imitation, and identity is shaped through adherence to fast-moving trends. The paper examines how this results in a “depthless” consumer experience, where the pressures of conformity and appearance lead to perpetual consumption, reflecting broader cultural shifts in postmodern society, and contributes to understanding how postmodernism manifests in everyday consumer behaviors.
7. Green Consumption Paradox: How Domestic Plant Aesthetics Obscure Systemic Deforestation in Global Capitalism [in preparation]
Abstract
This paper examines the paradox of domestic plant cultivation within contemporary consumer capitalism, arguing that the visual and aesthetic pleasure derived from houseplant ownership operates as a form of environmental distraction that prevents critical engagement with structural deforestation. Through an analysis of environmental psychology, green capitalism discourse, and consumer culture studies, the paper demonstrates how the personal gratification associated with indoor plant aesthetics creates what it terms “commodified ecological consciousness,” a framework that obscures the extractive supply chains and land exploitation structuring both horticultural commerce and global deforestation. The houseplant trend — particularly as mediated through digital platforms and marketed as an environmental practice — is read as a neoliberal solution to ecological crises that individualizes environmental responsibility while naturalizing the capitalist logic driving large-scale forest destruction. The analysis integrates political ecology, environmental justice, and critical consumer studies to expose the systemic mechanisms through which aesthetic pleasure becomes complicit in ecological devastation.
Last updated -September 2026
Tanusree Das 
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