Bangladeshi Women and Transnational Mobility

This book explores the life trajectories of urban, educated and middle-class Bangladeshi women who have chosen to migrate to the UK and are actively engaged in (re)making their lives within a transnational space between the two nations.

Employing intersectionality as a heuristic analytical framework, the book investigates how these women's transnational experiences are shaped by overlapping axes of identity (such as gender, class, race or ethnicity), as well as by political orientations and religiosity. Chapters reveal how their lives are simultaneously constrained, and enabled, by these intersectional identities – as well as by what they perceive as the limitations and opportunities of life in the UK – and explore their career trajectories, domestic commitments, relationships and community life. Their life stories, gathered over 12 months of fieldwork around London, are foregrounded as co-produced sites of feminist theorisation and look in particular at the broader politics of belonging within the UK. By foregrounding the complex lives of this relatively understudied group, the book addresses a significant ethnographic and conceptual lacuna in migration studies, particularly concerning gendered experiences.

The book will be of interest to researchers in the fields of social anthropology, cultural geography, international development, migration studies, gender studies and South Asian studies.