Paper short abstract:

While analysing two Facebook based autonomous initiatives: 'Nari': Mohila Bus Service and the Ga Gheshe Daraben Na, this paper not only explores Bangladeshi women's agency to collectively protest sexual harassment but also documents the problems associated with such digital solidarities

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines 'Nari': Mohila Bus Service (NMBS) and Ga Gheshe Daraben Na (GGDN) and explores the extent to which social media is, or is not, compatible with organising for women's activism to address sexual harassment (SH) in Bangladesh. NMBS is a women-only Facebook group created to raise money for launching women-only bus services to the major Dhaka city routes to reduce SH. GGDN is a woman's attempt to raise SH awareness on public buses by designing hairpins and t-shirts containing the tagline: 'Ga Gheshe Daraben Na' ('Don't stand too close'). Using data gathered from ten life-story interviews with these women, this paper demonstrates how the 'free and easy' use of social media to narrate SH experiences enabled these women not only to make such experiences visible but to challenge the hegemonic social norms that discourage women from openly talking about this 'taboo' issue (Clark-Parsons 2021; Thrift 2014). NMBS not only worked as a safe space for many women to openly narrate SH experiences, but their shared SH stories enabled them to create direct, personal ties with other SH victims based on their shared frustration and anger, thus, ensuring affective solidarities to protest SH. These initiatives also created feminist consciousness to collectively challenge sexual harassment. However, online connections created by NMBS and GGDN provided a fairly weak form of solidarity because only a select group of middle-class, mostly Muslim, women in their twenties or early thirties participated in these initiatives and they also lacked experience of grassroots level political organising.