Laboring for the Nation: Transnational Capital and ‘Muslim’ Women’s Work in Bangladesh

In Bangladesh, as elsewhere today, bodies marked Muslim are constitutive sites of feminist and other politics.  The figure of the female garment worker – tasked with saving the national economy through her public, visible labor – has emerged as an especially dense site of debate and signification.  This paper traces the ideological labor that garment workers, or rather their sartorial practices, perform for Islamists as well as the secular intelligentsia, in national as well as transnational spaces.  Juxtaposed to accounts of how workers navigate the competing discursive economies in which they are embedded, the paper offers a situated reading of parda (practices of covering).