Subordination of Women Between Patriarchy and Imperialism: Can They Speak?

Abstract

This paper addresses how Gayatri Spivak’s theory about the possibility of the subaltern to speak helps understand the ideas and discourse about poor Bengali women and the ideas and discourse used by poor women in Bangladesh in Spivak’s text. This study is based on ground-level experiences of ‘gender and the globalization process of garments production.’ Five apparel factories were selected through snowball sampling, located in different parts of Dhaka. The respondents in this study were from different professional levels in the garment factories and other stakeholders. This study finds the traumatic experiences of women workers at the workplaces, justifying Gayatri Spivak’s analysis of the possibility of the subaltern to speak.