The Subaltern Writes Back

Abstract

The study was grounded in the lived experiences of 13 female and 20 male children of Bangladeshi descent in New York City. It explored how the intersection of ethnicity, gender, generation, and migration shaped the distinctive experiences of the girls as they came of age, straddling the native culture and the host culture. By walking a tightrope between intergenerational continuity of normative gender practice, and change, prompted by egalitarian socialization, they foregrounded educational/career trajectories. Unlike the boys, who acquiesced with the status quo despite its equal opportunity disadvantages, they started rewriting the rules of engagement with patriarchy from this new threshold.

One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman. Simone de Beauvoir (1970, p. 249).

The Persian Queen prevented her death by distracting the King with endless train of stories and basically I am doing the same to my parents to avoid any possible arranged marriage. Natasha, a female informant of this study.

It suddenly felt like a powerful colonizer that laid its siege on the empire so long was finally coming apart. Saima, another female informant, upon entering the medical school of her choice.

Introduction

There is no gainsaying the fact that since the enactment of U.S. Immigration Act of 1990 (P.L. 101-649), allowing for the yearly diversity visas to the underrepresented sending countries, the influx of Bangladeshi immigrants and their children, from 1991 through 2012, has been reshaping the demographic landscape of the gateway city of New York. Nonetheless, major studies on the children of immigrants in this multiethnic context of reception, even in the new millennium (Kasinitz, Mollenkopf & Waters, 2004; Kasinitz, Mollenkopf, Waters, & Holdaway, 2008), have left out the informants of South Asian descent, as if by design. Additionally, “segmented assimilation theory” (Portes & Rumbaut, 2001; Portes & Zhou, 1993) accounting for the unique experiences of the children of immigrants in the United States from the non-European origin, dismantling the theory of straight line assimilation, remained far from inclusive in capturing their gender-sensitive trajectories. The present study was intended to bridge this existing research gap by focusing on how the intersection of ethnicity and gender played out in the lives of the children of Bangladeshi descent, who arrived in the United States with their parents before the age of 10 (G-1.5) or were born in the United States (G-2). It dwelled on how the parents in a Bangladeshi diaspora accommodated dislocation and dispersion from the native country to safeguard intergenerational transmission of gender practices particularly through their daughters, coming of age in a multiethnic context of reception, and what these girls crafted to choreograph their trajectories distinctively from their co-ethnic boys.

The three analytic categories that emerged from the study included (a) duality of structure and agency represented by the dance between the parents and daughters over continuity and change of normative gender practices; (b) unequal parental expectations and their unforeseen equal opportunity disadvantages for the boys; and (c) the rewriting of the rules of engagement with patriarchy over (semi)arranged marriage by the girls.

Literature Review

Gender and migration became inextricably blended as feminization progressively played a pivotal role in shaping the discourse on immigrant experiences, resulting in a particularly focused organizing principle for empirical research (Boyd & Taylor, 1986; Menjivar, 1999). It is not an exaggeration to stipulate that the emergence of feminization of migration (Boyd & Greico, 2003) marked a point of departure from gender-neutral immigration research, in which the male migrant was the unit of analysis (Pessar, 2003), to a gender-sensitive core analytic category capturing the domain-specific experiences of women. Tyner (2003, p. 64) defined this new conceptual framework as a process in which “society regulates human interaction and allocates human resources differentially, based on socially constructed [and context sensitive] norms of masculinity and femininity.” Hondagneu-Sotelo (2003, p. 5) traced three developmental stages of gender and immigration research in the United States. The first stage, spanning from the 1970s to early 1980s, inscribed “women into the research picture … countering sexist and androcentric biases,” to remedy their exclusion, but plateauing out in highlighting women’s complementary role in the structural–functionalist gender practice. Evidently, it was inspired by the founding assumption of the second wave of feminism that women should be understood in terms of essence and their oppression must be attributed to “patriarchy, exploitative economic system, or structural relationship between home and workplace” (Barrett & Phillips, 1992, p. 2). The second stage, which prevailed from the late 1980s to early 1990s, addressed “the fluidity of gender relations by focusing on two aspects: gendering of migration patterns and how migration reconfigures new system of gender inequality for women and men” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003, p. 7), by locating gender studies in the household and/or ethnic network of the diaspora. It was in sync with the third wave of feminism premised on “difference, positionality, language & power” (Kemp & Brandwein, 2010, p. 355) revealing how the (in)equality/difference binary is more interdependent than mutually exclusive (Barrett & Phillips, 1992). The third stage, which expands the scope of gender practices beyond the immigrants’ households and ethnic enclaves to the macro-social, political, and economic realities (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2003), continues to unfold with more mixed realities undermining gender democracy (England, 2010).

Empirical studies shed new light on myriad aspects of gender practices among immigrant women of non-European origin in the United States prompted by the lingering centricity of ethnic patriarchy. In her study of 26 first-generation Korean immigrant women in Los Angeles, Kim (2006) illustrated how they deployed the hegemonic notion of white American masculinity, conceived as gender progressive, to counterbalance the power of co-ethnic patriarchy, representing a subordinated form of masculinity, which thrived on a gender repressive ideology. Similar studies on how social construction of gender actually played out in the lives of U.S. immigrant women revealed mixed results at best. For example, women of Mexican descent were found to have conformed to the subservient role scripted by their native country’s repressive patriarchal value system as a strategy to forestall apprehended discontinuity of intergenerational gender practices in the host country (Parrado & Flippen, 2005). Intriguingly, their adherence to the traditional gender roles provided a mirror image of an increasingly emancipatory role braced for by nonimmigrant women of similar age-group and socioeconomic status in the native Mexico. Conversely, Hondagneu-Sotelo’s (1992) study demonstrated how immigrant experiences in the United States helped Mexican men and women overcome patriarchal constraints and reconstruct gender relations in their families. Immigrant Chinese women in New York City (Zhou, 1992) and Vietnamese women in Philadelphia (Kibria, 1993) also perpetuated traditional gender roles as a source of empowerment in their households; contrary to the conventional wisdom that exposure to more egalitarian gender relations in the United States could predispose them to claim gender equity.

Studies on second-generation South Asian immigrants in New York (DasGupta, 1997), Filipino-Americans (Espiritu, 1999, 2003) and Puerto Ricans (Toro-Morn & Alicea, 2003) in the United States, Caribbean (Lopez, 2003), Indo-Caribbean (Warikoo, 2004), and five other ethnic immigrant groups, including the Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, West Indians, South Americans, Chinese, and Russians (Kasinitz et al., 2008) in New York City, revealed how the girls were outperforming the boys in spite of bearing the brunt of intergenerational transmission of native culture by conforming to unequal gendered socialization, consistent with their ethnic patriarchal value system.

If gender was the core organizing principle in these empirical studies, engendering a paradigm shift in migration research, the second-generation immigrants added a new dimension to the existing conceptual framework by incorporating their “distance from the home country, exposure to American society and movement through historical time as a specific age cohort” (Kasinitz et al., 2004, p. 400).

Methodology

The qualitative data for this grounded theory study were primarily drawn from open-ended, in-depth interviews of 20 boys and 13 girls, between the ages of 16 and 21, from 22 households, in the 4 boroughs of New York City: Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, and Staten Island. Of these informants, 25 immigrated to the United States with their parents before the age of 10 (G-1.5), while 8 of them were born in the United States (G-2.0). In all, 22 of them were in high school, 9 in college, and 4 were already college graduates. All the interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed subsequently. The data collection was triangulated by observations of parent–child interactions over gender practices unfolding in real time in their households together with informal accounts, expressing genuine concerns about raising children in New York City, provided by 25 parents, all recorded in extensive field notes. Among these parents, two fathers had graduate school education from the United States, eight fathers and two mothers had 4 years of college, six fathers and three mothers had 2 years of college, and four mothers had high school education from Bangladesh. A total of 6 fathers and 13 mothers sat by their spouses without active participation. They did not disclose anything about their formal education. Of the fathers, 1 was retired, 1 unemployed, 10 worked for various New York City agencies, 4 were entrepreneurs in building construction, 4 were cab/limousine drivers, and 2 were school teachers. Of the mothers, 1 was a school teacher, 18 worked in retail, and 3 were exclusively homemakers. All the families, but one that immigrated through family reunification program, came to the United States in the wake of Diversity Visa program of 1991. Except for one Hindu family, with three children, and a family in which the parents had secular affiliation, all other families were Muslim. However, despite the differences in their belief system, worldview, parents’ educational qualification and socioeconomic status, gender, year of arrival, they spoke unequivocally about the salience of intergenerational transmission of native culture, especially through their daughters, in the diaspora.

It would be an understatement to indicate that in spite of my shared ethnicity, I was unable to access the Bangladeshi immigrant parents’ households to interview their children, especially the girls, who were particularly overprotected. This impasse was resolved by deploying my marital status and involving my wife to play an active role in contacting and engaging the mothers of potential female informants to recruit them through snowball sampling. Slowly and steadily this strategy proved effective in explaining the purpose of the study to the fathers, invariably the heads of all households and primary breadwinners/decision makers in their families, to obtain the informed consent. In what transpired to be a culturally competent family-to-family dialogic approach, the consenting parents required me and my wife to eat either lunch or dinner at their homes with members of their families, as a prelude, if not a precondition, to interview the girls and, by default, the boys who lived in the household. Typically, during the course of my interview with an informant in a separate room, my wife socialized with the parents to keep them focused on the challenges and opportunities of raising children, including gender practices in the diaspora, to prime them for the informal discussions with me that followed. This arrangement afforded unique opportunities for the parents to share their concerns and viewpoints with me voluntarily after the interviews with their children. It also allowed me to stay at the families’ homes longer, gain the parents’ trust, establish greater rapport with their children, and observe the parent–child interactions in the natural setting without appearing to be intrusive or an outsider looking in. To avoid any bias, the intercoder reliability for content analysis was being received from an eminent qualitative researcher/professor/adviser from a different ethnic/racial/cultural background constantly immersed in the emerging data.

The triangulated data, inclusive of the digitally recorded and transcribed in-depth interviews and extensive field notes on parents’ accounts and my observations of parent–child interactions, were concurrently collected and analyzed without foreclosing any analytic categories prematurely. Consistent with the criteria of a grounded theory study, constant comparisons were conducted progressively through open coding, axial coding, and select coding (Charmaz, 2006). As more theoretical memoing warranted additional sampling, reinterviewing of 13 girls and 11 boys yielded distinctively gender domain-specific practices and vantage points. The normative and unequal gender practices explored in the diaspora were grounded on the boys’, the girls’ and their parents’ perspectives, by using conditional relationship guide, reflective coding matrix, and conditional matrix (Alam, 2013), additional tools for grounded theory data analysis. Clearance for this human subject research was obtained from the institutional review board, Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY).

Structure–Agency Duality: Dance Between the Daughters and Their Parents

The duality of structure and agency was reflected in the parents’ narratives vis-à -vis the boys’ and girls’ narratives. It revealed the push–pull factors between intergenerational continuity of native culture, underpinning the centricity of unequal gender relations, and the threshold of change brought about by the marginalized girls. The synergy between the mother and the daughter cast the salience of center–margin dichotomy in sharper relief.

Parents’ Narratives

Twenty-five parents passionately shared with me their concerns, expectations, hopes, and frustrations about raising children, especially the daughters, in New York City. Consistent with the postfigurative mode of intergenerational transmission, in which the older generation traditionally handed down their cultural and material practices to the younger generation, they emphasized the need of retention of native culture through their children in the diaspora, defined by one of them as “home (with small h) tens of thousands of miles away from Home (with a capital H).” Evidently, their anxiety was prompted by the likelihood of intergenerational discontinuity set in motion by the distance and dispersion from the native country and exacerbated by the growing intentionality among the daughters, more often than the sons, to acculturate in the host country under the influence of secondary socialization in public or private schools. Some parents coped with this conundrum by affiliating with their ethnic network in the diaspora that upheld the structure of patriarchal power relations in the family through various cultural and religious events and festivals, expecting their children’s unquestioned allegiance somewhat analogous to Kurien’s (2003) study. Mr. Arefin [all names are anonymous] believed that “allegiance to native culture” empowered his two daughters “because this commitment anchored them in a safe haven away from the rough waters in a distant foreign land (shudur bidesh-bibhui).” Even though he framed transmission of native culture in gender-neutral terms, his wife described her crucial role in inculcating gender practices in the household with a grain of salt. “I habitually pushed the boys ahead of the girls to give them a head start on how life would look like when they came of age,” she remarked. “But it was neither comfortable nor convenient to do so constantly, especially when the girls were always outperforming the boys.” While she was less than cavalier about culturally compatible gender/grooming practices, Mrs. Raushan, another parent who lived next door, was in agreement with her husband that continuity of native culture would be jeopardized if the girls did not conform to the ethnic gender practices. “The girls are our last best hope to retain the native soil in a foreign terrain,” she interjected with a note of desperation in her voice.

All the informants came from two-parent households upholding patriarchal power structure, generally considered as the bastion of resistance of the immigrant families (Pessar, 2003) against intergenerational discontinuity of native culture. It is inscribed in traditional gender practices, including but not limited to sexual division of labor (particularly in low-income families), unequal gender role expectations (discussed in-depth later), ethnic observances, and religious rituals, underpinning women’s subaltern status. “Even when I work full time in a convenient store, I always have to do almost all the household chores,” reported Tahmina, a mother of four. “My girls assist if and when they can, but not the boys, let alone my husband (who looked embarrassed as he was put on the spot).” The voice of her marginality resonated with the angst of all other mothers who shared their experiences in the diaspora.

Both Hindu and Muslim mothers tried to impress their daughters about the status enjoyed by motherhood in their respective religions. “Every Muslim child should effortlessly locate his or her paradise at the feet of his or her mother,” Mrs. Abedin exhorted her daughters. In her turn, Mrs. Chakravorti encouraged her daughters to “constantly revisit the Hindu mythology in which a goddess was synonymous with a mother worshipped by all.” None of them ever questioned how these idealizations in effect served the interest of the ethnic/religious patriarchal discourse to perpetuate normative gender practices. Mr. and Mrs. Abdullah, who claimed to be “unapologetically secular,” privileged the intergenerational cultural continuity their daughter epitomized. They made sure that she excelled in “Tagore, Nazrul and modern Bengali songs as well as Bharata Natyam (classical Indian dance form) because of their intrinsic (exchange) value for the most suitable [co-ethnic] bridegroom in the future.” It spoke to a commodification of culture embedded in gender practice, unbeknownst to the girl still coming of age.

The Boys’ and Girls’ Narratives

Since the boys, by definition (with exceptions observed in low-income families discussed later), benefited from patriarchal value system, they remained coy with the normative gender practices in their household. For example, Subachan had “mixed feelings about a double standard [of his parents] in raising the boys and the girls in New York City,” but the anxiety of his father’s influence always kept him “mum about the unequal (sexual) division of labor unfair towards [his] mom and younger sister.” Abinash, for one, occasionally [mis]read his father’s attitude toward his sister as “equally fair [or egalitarian] at all times.”

All these boys represented an ineffective individual agency, unable or unwilling to engage the normative ethnic patriarchal structure, or their agentive roles were invested in maintaining the status quo ante. On the contrary, the girls, who “bore the brunt of ethnic patriarchy, reducing [them] to the sidelines,” according to Moushumi, signified an agency indefatigably upping the ante against the dominant discourse. Laila, a 21-year-old college student, described her mother’s “complicity and connivance” in inculcating the values of “constantly yielding to her brothers as if they were the oncoming traffic” in her as “particularly heartbreaking.” By building on her conviction in egalitarian society and drawing sustenance from secondary socialization in public school and college, she wanted to contend with her subaltern status implicit in “uniformly unfair male advantage in the family” without having to relinquish her native culture. Nabanita, a 19-year-old college student, went even further to uncouple ethnic patriarchy from her native culture, eventually reclaiming agency consistent with her pace of acculturation:

I respect my parents and take great pride in Bangladeshi culture, but it does not necessarily mean that I will concede all the privileges to my brothers and play a second fiddle, even when I always make my parents more than proud, unlike my brothers.

Meghla strategized her agency by putting a temporary moratorium on executing “a plan of action” until after her college graduation when she would be poised to carve out the choicest career trajectory. “My brother may be more than happy to re-live my father’s life, but I will never be in my mother’s shoes,” cautioned Saima. “It does not make sense to be in an unequal relationship without any voice; as if the girls are the captives and the boys the captors in the same household.” Her resolve resonated with Asma, her older sister, already a college graduate at the age of 21, who put in no uncertain terms, “my dad no longer has the last word in our family as we [the mother and two sisters] have already broken the veil of our silence [about gender inequity in the family],” reflecting how the empire (or margin of ethnic patriarchy represented by women) is writing back to the center (of ethnic patriarchy) generating a counter hegemonic discourse.

Mother–Daughter Synergy

The synergistic relationship between the mother and the daughter reinforced this decentering dynamic. While a boy owed his privilege to the status traditionally enjoyed by his father in the household, a girl sought to empower her mother, instead of accepting her traditional subservient role, through academic success, discreetly upending the equilibrium of ethnic patriarchy. “Unlike my son, my daughter has constantly empowered me in the family in unforeseen ways and I always tend to fall back on our mother–daughter bond,” confided Mrs. Nur. “Although I love my son and my daughter equally well, it is my daughter who encourages me to believe that I can have more control over my life than what my husband is willing to concede.” Extending the scope of this mother–daughter dynamic among her co-ethnic friends, Nilanjana, a valedictorian from New York City public high school, explained that among co-ethnic families “with only the daughters, gender inequality was less strongly felt and the mothers had a greater voice in decision making.” However, in families without sons, a different and unwelcome shift in parental expectation emerged. For example, Farhana, a college graduate, never reconciled with her parents’ treatment of their “two daughters as two boys, only in terms of educational expectations, in the absence of any male child,” a “sexist attitude that never sat well with” her. However, Fahmina, her younger sister, a college student, admitted that “freedom from an unfair comparison [with male sibling] has created a level playing field to capitalize on.”

Even if these parents represented the structure of traditional gender ideology and practice, their agentive roles were activated in strategizing ways and means to maintain the habitus defined as “a system of durable, transposable dispositions, (and) structured structures predisposed to function as structuring structures” (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 72). In a similar vein, the agency signified by the girls was intended to give morphogenesis or change a more definitive structure by reinventing homeostasis or continuity. This dance continued to be unsettling for both generations.

Unequal Parental Expectations and Equal Opportunity Disadvantages for Boys

Ethnic patriarchal values historically created unequal parental expectations for the girls. However, its inherent inconsistencies were also translated into equal opportunity disadvantages for the boys, privileging the girls, particularly when the father, ideally the primary, if not the only breadwinner, suffered from any disability or life-threatening condition.

Expectations From the Sons

The immigrant parents justified gendered and unequal expectations for their sons and daughters as genuine because this ethnic patriarchal practice was consistent with their continued commitment for intergenerational transmission of native culture in the host country. However, illustrating an inconsistency in patriarchy, this value system generated equal opportunity disadvantages for the boys, particularly where the father’s income had been curtailed because of health condition, stymying their progress, while creating a leeway for the unencumbered girls to pursue their specific educational goals, oftentimes resulting in mixed responses from their parents. For instance, Intikhab had to drop out of high school at the age of 17 to work as a waiter in a restaurant, full time, right after his father, the only breadwinner in the family, became disabled. He managed to earn his general equivalency diploma (GED) after a hiatus of 2 years, but his “dream of getting a college degree in hospitality management had to be shelved forever.” Nonetheless, he was least surprised about this setback “because a son is always expected to take care of the family, if and when anything happens to his father.” Meanwhile, his two older sisters were exempt from this responsibility. Feroj had a mixed feeling about being “at the receiving end” of such an “equal opportunity disadvantage.” “Now that my dad has undergone a couple of invasive surgeries and is unlikely make it back to work anytime soon, I have to work after school.” Even when he gets married, Feroj will have to continue taking care of his parents, unlike his sisters. However, his mother confided to me that one of her daughters, a high school graduate, wanted to assist the family financially right after getting married, because her husband worked as an executive chef of an Italian restaurant. However, she turned down this succor because accepting financial assistance from a daughter, far less from a son-in-law, would undermine her family status. In a similar vein, Imtiaz was being groomed to take on the full responsibility of the family-owned ethnic grocery store upon graduation from high school because his father already had two heart bypass surgeries over the span of 5 years.

Expectations From the Daughters

In most cases, this status quo ante transformed the girls’ disadvantages into their unforeseen advantages. For instance, Nandita was expected to help her mother with the household chores after she completed her homework assignments in the afternoon, but not her brothers. Nonetheless, as the family was plunged into desperate financial straits, in the aftermath of their father’s inability to drive the yellow cab anymore, they had to live up to a different set of parental expectations by taking low-paying jobs; a responsibility Nandita had a waiver from. However, while she was “confined within the four walls [of her home] after school,” her brothers abused their freedom to socialize with “Non-Bangladeshi friends from the neighborhood, who used street language, drank alcohol, and smoked marijuana.” Since her parents were not privy to the best kept secrets of her brothers, they successfully dodged sanctions. In retrospect, Nandita believed that “the double standard,” of her parents proved to be a “blessing in disguise” for her and as a “double-edged sword” for her brothers, reversing the outcome of unequal parental expectations in unforeseen ways. Aneek unabashedly admitted that his “freedom to hang out with multiethnic friends in the neighborhood,” a privilege unavailable to his sister, was a pitfall in disguise, or “a booby trap in the making.” Anamika concurred with her brother that “more [stringent] parental control” on her “turned out to be a boon even if it always tasted unpalatable to begin with.” Moushumi’s secondary socialization in school was confined to her friends who were high achievers. However, Shubachan, her brother, was “hanging out with friends, who were either school dropouts and/or underachievers, almost always on the streets of this ghetto neighborhood,” informed his father. “I won’t be surprised if he is drinking and smoking by association,” he added much to his growing chagrin. Subachan summarily rejected this blanket assessment. Instead of trying to excel in school, he had to fulfill his responsibility “by working on minimum wage to bail out the family.” Because both his sisters outperformed Subachan academically, his parents were giving up on him, albeit with reluctance, by raising their expectations for the daughters to excel. Tanmoy recounted how his two older sisters who transcended parental expectations “by constantly setting the bar even higher” for him and his older brother to measure up to.

“My parents expect their sons to be doctors, engineers or lawyers, and their daughters to be accountants, lab technicians, teachers or nurses, but it hardly turns out that way,” he quipped. His sisters eventually disproved the gender stereotype in the family; one of them was completing her residency requirements upon graduation from a medical school and another was about to become a civil engineer.

More often than not the parents were confounded by the reversal of gender expectations among their children. In an effort to make sense of their perceived affliction, Nabanita explained that her parents felt “doubly insecure” when she invariably outdid her brother in school by a wide margin. “Because they do not know how to come to terms with the reality of raising a daughter who always beats their favorite son,” she reflected with a tone of contrition. “When women gain more power than men in the family or in the community, it turns into a real battleground in which nobody can win,” her mother remarked, while her father nodded before breaking his silence to interject, “look at the instability in Bangladesh caused by the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, both of whom are women.” Fortuitously, this conversation with me took place in Nabanita’s absence.

Rewriting the Rules of Engagement With Patriarchy Over arranged Marriage

Arranged marriage became a site of resistance for the girls to rewrite the rules of engagement with patriarchy. When the parents tried to prevail upon the girls to concede to arranged or semi-arranged marriage as a normative gender practice, regardless of the inequity, the girls discreetly turned it into a discursive practice. It was compatible with their increasing ability and willingness to write back to the center from the margin.

Arranged Marriage as a Normative Practice

Consonant with their native tradition, these first-generation immigrant parents insisted on their marriageable daughters and sons to conform to the requirement of intraethnic and intrareligious arranged marriage, in which the eligibility criteria for the would-be bride/bridegroom must receive their prior stamp of approval. Mr. Ainuddin, a concerned parent, argued that such a traditional arrangement was intended to achieve three clear objectives: “to ensure that the native culture/religion is handed down to the next generation; to preserve the best interest of the family through a marriage of convenience guaranteeing upward socio-economic mobility; and to uphold the [patriarchal] values in which the bride may be the secondary breadwinner, at best, while the groom is responsible to be the primary breadwinner [ideally with a greater earning potential].” His wife insisted on “the orientation or training (that) must begin at an early age.” “You have to start hammering it [the value of arranged marriage] home when the boys and girls are still very young, or you lose it.” Her son (an informant), was groomed to be the primary, if not the only, breadwinner in his family but not her daughter (also an informant). “Even if my daughter performed exceptionally well in school, we expect her to become an ideal wife and a homemaker in the first place,” the parent said. She counted on her daughter, more than her son, to keep Bangladeshi culture and tradition alive among her grandchildren. “I know it is a daunting task, especially in a foreign country, tens of thousands of miles away from native Bangladesh,” she admitted.

Arranged Marriage as a Discursive Practice

However, this normative gender practice played out in the lives of the girls by creating a potent conarrative with an alterity of discourse. Although the boys were characteristically less critical of arranged marriage than the girls, some of them stopped short of an indictment of their parents. Aneek, a 23-year-old young adult, disagreed with this practice in principle. Despite concerns about being coerced by his parents to marry someone of their choice, he continued to procrastinate as long as his time to tie the knot was not imminent. Intikhab was cognizant of his parents’ “final say” over the selection of his wife. He believed that perpetuation of arranged interethnic and interreligious marriage was a testament to “how little things had changed” among his parents in New York City “in terms of attitude and outlook.” However, not every male informant shared this quandary. Abinash, for one, claimed to belong to the “silent majority [in his own words]” on the other side of the spectrum. He attended a boarding school outside of New York City where his classmates were primarily the white Americans. While his parents desired not to assume the role of matchmakers for him to tie his knot in the future, in a rare sign of flexibility, they made it abundantly clear that he would have to find a “desi” Hindu girl as his wife. He was convinced that the selection criteria for arranged marriage would help him find a wife as docile as his mother, “to carry over the rituals of Hindu religion to [his] children.” Joynal, a co-ethnic Muslim friend, shared his conviction that cultural continuity can only be retained through a “co-religious and co-ethnic, marriage,” among the immigrant children.

Conversely, the girls were more forthcoming about their critique of the rationale sustaining arranged marriage. Without rejecting the underpinning of the gender practice in its entirety, while averting confrontation with her parents, Nabanita, who worked for a financial institution on Wall Street, claimed more decision-making power in a “loosely defined semi-arranged marriage, when it comes to pass.” She turned down a foreign doctoral student from Bangladesh, chosen by her parents, because “it was as good as marrying someone who had come from a different culture [as he was not acculturated in the United States].” However, without aggravating her parents further, she agreed to exercise her discretion to select someone from the list of potential grooms provided by them, while retaining the right to contact or reject anyone or all of them, without providing any explanation thereof. This unseemly attitude antagonized her already aggrieved parents who wanted to give her in marriage as soon as possible so that they could invest their energy and time on finding a bridegroom for the youngest daughter who was about to graduate from a prestigious college. “We are racing against time,” her mother complained, “unlike the boys, the girls with college education are more difficult to deal with when it comes to arranged marriage; they want more freedom of choice intimidating any potential groom.”

Framing her ethnic self-identity in the diaspora as hyphenated “Bangladeshi-New Yorker [not interchangeably used with Bangladeshi-American],” Nilanjana weighed the pros and cons of arranged marriage to decide on an equally acculturated co-ethnic groom independent of her parents’ choice, “but not necessarily without their blessings.” Despite her strong reservations about this practice, Moushumi was also unwilling to make her parents totally unhappy. However, she delayed their gratification by postponing marriage right after high school graduation, with an argument that completion of her undergraduate and medical school education would always be worth waiting for. The unfolding narrative of her unbroken academic success enabled her to prevail upon an especially authoritative father to revoke an already arranged wedding. “As long as we stay focused on educational goals and prepare for professional life ahead of us, we will keep our parents at bay,” she reasoned. Natasha likened the narrative of her educational success in postponing arranged marriage to the Tales of One Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade, the Persian queen, postponed her execution by engaging King Shahryar with interminably embedded storylines. “The Persian Queen prevented her death by distracting the King with endless train of stories and basically I am doing the same to my parents to avoid any possible arranged marriage,” she concluded. Nabanita observed that the “acculturated and high-performing (Bangladeshi immigrant) girls were generally very good at deploying the delaying strategy to take away the decision-making authority from their parents for a really good reason; to take power in their own hands.”

Saima’s academic success became a powerful voice of dissent unsettling the privileged narrative of her father who finally caved in with a note of defeatism. “When my daughter is ceaselessly performing well above my expectations in school and college, it is beyond my power to stall her,” he argued. As this informant stood firm on her ground to carve out a solid career trajectory, by entering a medical school of her choice, “it suddenly felt like a powerful colonizer, that laid its siege on the empire so long, was finally coming apart.” In other words, analogous to a colonizer, her parents always expected their sons, not the daughter, to excel in order to perpetuate gender inequality and she was expected to be subservient to the male hegemony. When she outmatched her brothers, the parents did not know how to make sense of her unexpected success. Her efforts to develop an internal locus of control from the margin and deconstruct the external locus of control, synonymous with patriarchy, at the center, were adequately augmented by the narrative of success, echoing Rushdie’s (1982) dictum “the empire writes back to the center with a vengeance.” She was now willing to deploy her new empowerment against arranged marriage.

Although none of the girls in the study expressed unwillingness to tie their knots in the future, one parent sounded particularly sour about “an increasing trend among overachieving immigrant Bangladeshi girls to stay out of marriage because they were unable to find suitable co-ethnic grooms only to join the ranks of almost half of the Americans who made a merit of going it solo.” For another parent, “intra-ethnic and co-religious marriage continued to be the cornerstone of intergenerational cultural continuity” and any departure from it was considered as “the beginning of the unforeseen end it is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to reconcile with.”

Implication for Social Work Practice

The qualitative study contextualized a critical juncture in the life cycle (Carter & McGoldrick, 1988) of the immigrant Bangladeshi families, interspersed with voices from the parents, daughters, and sons, as they unfolded across two axes: the vertical or paradigmatic axis and the horizontal or syntagmatic axis (Walsh, 1997) in the host country. The paradigmatic axis comprised normative/patriarchal gender practices, informed by the native history and tradition of the first-generation immigrant parents, and their value system sustaining intergenerational transmission. The syntagmatic axis entailed the stressors associated with the developmental stage of these families, in light of the overachieving girls who challenged the status quo of ethnic patriarchy consistent with their acculturation in an egalitarian host country problematizing intergenerational continuity. Despite the “dance” of continuity and change as well as willingness of both generations to avoid direct confrontations, the tension between the parents and their empowered daughters over gendered expectation or sibling rivalries between the boys and the girls must be reckoned with. Any realignment in traditional gender practices during this transition/transformation would require radical rethinking of ethnic patriarchy in terms of redefining the always already unequal power relations. In spite of the privilege enjoyed by the patriarchal narrative, the girls’ contesting narrative vis-à-vis the boy’s largely complicit narrative, need to be accommodated in the interest of gender mainstreaming. The synergistic mother–daughter subsystem should be counted on as a genuine strength in the family to build on.

Social work practitioners need to integrate gender as a site of construction of postimmigrant identity allowing for an interaction between the postfigurative (from the parents to the children) and the prefigurative (from the children to the parents) modes of intergenerational transmission of social reality, in light of de Beauvoir’s (1970) dictum that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.” It requires culturally informed practice by facilitating coconstruction of narratives of both generations in individual and family therapies and building on the strengths of both normative and discursive gender practices, validating both but valorizing none in an effort to hinge on the middle ground.

Internal inconsistencies in ethnic patriarchal values creating equal opportunity disadvantages may not sit well with the boys, especially in families with low-socioeconomic status triggered by the fathers’ disability, translating the odds in favor of the girls. If the boys continue to acquiesce with hierarchic and normative gender practices and the girls keep questioning its legitimacy while bearing the brunt of it, it will be questionable how the power relations across the gender lines may play out when the girls, especially those who are overachieving, finally settle, if at all, in co-ethnic marriage in the future. When the incipient changes in gender expectations and outcomes are yet to become a new norm, a handful of overachieving girls may very well end up illustrating “modest gains by immigrant women (who) only nibble at the margin of patriarchy,” Hondagneu-Sotelo (2003, p. 31). The findings of this qualitative study are confined to the participants of the study. Follow-up, longitudinal, and even comparative studies, both quantitative and qualitative, with other South Asian immigrants in and outside of New York City, informed by feminization of immigration, are recommended.