Paper short abstract:

I examine young women’s everyday attempts to thwart the time regimes of capitalism, revealed through the experiences of Bangladesh’s iconic “iAgents.” iAgents must mediate village timescapes with capitalist and nationalist timescapes, harnessing the one for the other, yet exploited by both.

Paper long abstract:

A woman hurriedly enters a garments factory, afraid of being late. A second woman accepts a microcredit loan to pay for her own dowry. A third woman helps a village auntie to conduct a Skype call with her migrant-worker son in Muscat, enabling her to bridge space and time, as she ignores disparaging remarks about women who work.

Bangladesh undergoes monumental change in its economy and society, and young women walk the forefront of transformation. They epitomize the liminality, uncertainty, and ambiguity that characterize the nation's experience with the conflicting times of speculative growth, development "success," and political chaos.

This paper examines the everyday ways in which young women confront and attempt to thwart the time regimes of capitalism, revealed through the experiences of Bangladesh's iconic "iAgents." Women acting as iAgents must mediate village timescapes with capitalist and nationalist timescapes, harnessing the one for the other, yet exploited by both. Whereas historically commercial transactions within kinship relations (such as dowry) were about women, now women have moved to the forefront as actors in such processes. By assuming an agentive role, women experience new room to maneuver, but they also remain bound by the time rhythms and expectations of their role held by men as fathers, uncles, loan officers, social-enterprise managers, and foreign investors. I reveal ways that women reclaim a sense of agency, for instance by exploiting the time stretch of bureaucratic regimes as subtle acts of protest and by invoking long-cycle ethical registers through acting virtuously in the present.