Ethical Reckoning: Human Rights and National Cinema in Bangladesh

Abstract

Abstract:In this article the author builds on the idea of Bangladeshi national cinema as human rights cinema to explore its role in documenting and engendering understanding about women, vulnerability, and agency within a Muktijuddho gender ideology. Drawing from feminist sociologist Patricia Hill Collins's conceptualization of a Black gender ideology, the author proposes that in cinematic traditions, an idealized Muktijuddho gender ideology influences and entrenches gendered social norms and reinforces perceptions of masculinity and femininity in war. These perceptions serve to justify patterns of legibility, recognition, and rejection for discursive practices of national inclusion and exclusion. Specifically, the author analyzes Nasiruddin Yousuff's Guerrilla (2011), an award-winning film featuring the story of Bilqis Banu, a middle-class, Muslim female combatant who takes on at once the national struggle for selfdetermination and the gender struggle against patriarchal cultural norms. The film opens up new ways of imagining the category birangona and elicits a deeper appreciation of differentiated agency, vulnerability, and humanity.