Paper short abstract:

The paper interrogates and reveals some troubling aspects of this hegemonic construction of domestic violence, programmatic interventions, and its legal literacy framework of human rights practices.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper critically examines the contemporary “domestic violence” discourse. It discusses how it constructs “domestic violence” as an “object of knowledge” and its effects in Bangladesh. The paper contends that constructions of “domestic violence” discourse have fallen into the trap of universal knowledge production. It often constructs an objective truth about women’s experiences of domestic violence by emphasizing the singularity of their experiences. It also focuses on criminalizing domestic violence and producing knowledge within the dichotomy of victim and perpetrator. The paper will argue how such knowledge constructs a decontextualized subject where women are portrayed as “distinct victim” figures. However, the lens of “the practice of everyday life” provides a view of how such a construction of the subject is fraught. The paper illustrates how it is often difficult to unravel women’s struggles from the domestic and working contexts, where multiple structural inequalities constitute their everyday living, by citing examples from urban working-class women’s (often the target of human rights intervention) everyday experiences of living. Only focusing on women’s “victim” subjectivity often ignores the context and other myriads of structural violence that constitute their lives and subjectivities.