Deliberately silenced: Feminism and what we refuse to hear

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Nabeeha Sultana & Saraf Wamia | Published: April 02, 2026 16:03:31

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The meaning of the word feminism has been shaped by contemporary trends and compounded misconceptions, which have ultimately eroded its true essence and, at times, weaponised it. Driven by a sense of misapprehension of its intent, the word “feminist” is frequently used with derogatory connotations in recent times. While these patterns can be observed most across social media, they signal a deeper structural change in human behaviour, one that extends beyond linguistics into a phenomenon with measurable economic and behavioural consequences. A 2023 YouGov survey across eight Western nations found that as few as 15 per cent of respondents claimed the feminist label unprompted, compared to up to 91 per cent agreeing with its meaning after it was explained to them.
ECONOMIC COST OF LINGUISTIC DEVALUATION: Linguists and social theorists have long observed that a word’s value is shaped more by its social circulation than its formal definition. Feminism appears to have followed a trajectory where its utility is obscured by conflicting usage and resulting polarisation. Social media platforms notoriously reward emotional content, and distorted narratives of feminism frequently fuel this outrage. Those who form their views through such platforms rarely encounter the lived realities of women, and what is dismissed online as excessive or unnecessary often reflects struggles that are very much real, particularly in a context like Bangladesh. Arguably, this stems from identity threat and instinctive responses to concepts that challenge social hierarchies, which lead to delegitimisation of those concepts as a defence mechanism. A consequence of this delegitimisation is that modern initiatives often pivot toward cosmetic or superficial celebrations of feminism rather than pursuing tangible progress. In Bangladesh, where gender norms are deeply embedded, such shifts carry real costs that could manifest in suppressed labour force participation and constrained political agency.
STRUCTURAL FRAMEWORK OF FEMINISM: The Oxford Dictionary defines feminism as the belief and aim that women should have the same rights and opportunities as men. At its core, feminism is a rights-based framework asserting that all individuals are entitled to the same legal rights, economic opportunities, and civic participation regardless of gender. It is an institutional construct rather than a claim about biology, personality, or cultural preferences. This distinction matters enormously because it reiterates that feminism does not assume that women are superior to men. A system that grants equal inheritance to all children does not suggest that the children are physiologically identical or superior to one another. It simply asserts that their legal rights carry the same weight, and feminism operates on this same logic. The framework thus aims to dismantle hierarchies rather than invert them. It does not oppose the family institution but challenges the coerced roles within it. Since the critique is structural, it targets legal, economic, and political systems instead of the individuals within them.
LOGIC OF EQUITY IN UNEQUAL CONDITIONS: The concept of feminism rests on a simple distinction where people can be different without being unequal. While genders have different biological or life experiences, these differences do not logically justify giving one group fewer rights. A common critique suggests that if women seek equality, they should forfeit specific protections such as reserved seating or gender-based allowances. However, these are not bonuses for an equal group. Instead, they are corrective measures designed to offset existing safety risks and systemic barriers. Equitable participation requires accounting for the different realities people face in public spaces to ensure everyone can operate safely and fairly. If one accepts that legal standing, economic opportunity, and civic participation should be independent of gender, then the person is essentially a feminist. A common misconception is that feminism is exclusively a women’s movement, yet the principle of gender equality is neither gendered in its logic nor limited in who may advocate for it. Men who support equal rights and opportunities for women are, by definition, feminists, and excluding them from the movement assumes that only those who benefit from a cause can support it.
QUESTION OF VOICE AND REPRESENTATION: Yet we must ask ourselves who gets to speak about feminism, and whose version of it reaches the ears of those who need it most. The feminist project, as it has travelled across borders and been taken up by different hands, has not always spoken in every woman’s language. In Bangladesh, as in much of the Global South, the woman who stitches garments at three in the morning, the woman who walks miles for water, and the woman who signs a paper she cannot read has rarely been the subject of feminist discourse. She has been its object, its cause, its statistic. But seldom its voice.
Conditions of Meaningful Agency: This is a fundamental problem. Agency is not simply about making choices but rather about having the conditions that make meaningful choice possible. A woman who accepts lower wages because she fears losing the only job available to her is not making a free choice. She is navigating a structure that was never designed with her in mind. Feminism, properly understood, is the demand that this structure be redesigned.
SILENCING OF FOUNDATIONAL QUESTIONS: Arundhati Roy once wrote that there is really no such thing as the voiceless, there are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard. The same might be said of feminist demands in our public conversation. They are not absent. They are drowned out, distorted, and then dismissed as extreme. When a woman asks why she is paid less for equal work, or why her safety on a street depends on what she is wearing, these are not radical questions but foundational ones. The radicalism, if any, lies in how long it has taken to ask them aloud.
FEMINISM AS A GRAMMAR FOR INVISIBLE LABOUR: What feminism offers, then, is more than a grievance. This framework offers grammar, a way of reading the world that makes visible what has long been rendered invisible. It asks us to notice who is absent from the boardroom, from the parliament, from the courtroom. It asks why the labour of care, like raising children, tending to the elderly, sustaining households, still remains economically invisible despite being the very foundation on which all other labour rests. These questions concern more than women alone. They are questions about the kind of society we are choosing to build, and the kind we are choosing to leave behind.
In a country like Bangladesh, which has made strides in women’s education and health outcomes, the conversation on feminism is not a foreign import. It is a domestic necessity. The garment worker who holds up the national economy deserves a framework that holds up her rights in return. The woman who reads the newspaper every morning deserves a public life that has room for her opinions. The feminist framework does not ask for special treatment. It asks that existing promises of dignity, opportunity, and justice finally be kept. As we leave the month of March celebrating women, the focus going forward must remain on institutional reality rather than social performance.