Dr Matiur Rahman

The alleys of Dhaka’s sprawling urban slums are not only sites of poverty and hardship, but also contested spaces where power is negotiated, defied, and subtly reshaped each day by the women who inhabit them. These women, many of them domestic workers, garment labourers, or informal vendors, face not only economic marginalisation but also the deeply embedded patriarchy of their households and communities. Their lives are framed by structures of power that are both visible and invisible: the landlord who threatens eviction for late rent, the husband who resorts to violence, the bureaucratic systems that ignore their
needs, and the wider urban planning frameworks that erase their agency. Yet these women are not merely passive victims. Drawing on James C. Scott’s concept of “everyday resistance” and the theoretical insights of feminist urbanism, this essay examines how women in Dhaka’s slums engage in subtle, often invisible acts of resistance and negotiation to carve out space, agency, and survival in the city margins.
Everyday resistance, as articulated by Scott, refers to the ordinary, low-profile, and often indirect forms of opposition employed by subordinate groups to survive and undermine dominant power structures without openly confronting them. These include foot-dragging, evasion, gossip, feigned ignorance, or subtle sabotage tactics designed to reduce risk while still asserting agency. In Dhaka’s slums, this resistance takes on distinct gendered forms,
shaped by the context of patriarchy and urban precarity. Feminist urbanism adds an essential layer to this analysis by foregrounding the gendered dimensions of space and the lived experiences of women in cities. Feminist scholars argue that urban planning and governance often exclude women’s voices and reinforce male-dominated norms, making women’s navigation of the town particularly challenging. Together, these frameworks enable us to understand how poor urban women resist not only economic deprivation but also the social orders that seek to control their bodies, labour, and spaces.
Consider the everyday act of negotiating rent with landlords. In many of Dhaka’s slums, rent is a constant pressure, often consuming a disproportionate share of monthly income. Women,typically responsible for household management, frequently engage in informal negotiations with landlords, promising partial payments, offering small gifts, or appealing to shared community ties to delay eviction. These are not overt challenges to power but strategic
engagements that subtly shift the dynamics of control. Through this bargaining, women assert their presence and needs within a system designed to render them voiceless. They exploit moments of personal vulnerability in the landlord’s life—a sick child, a local death, a religious festival—to reframe their late payment not as delinquency but as shared hardship. In the domestic sphere, resistance becomes even more nuanced. Domestic violence remains a pervasive issue in urban slums, fueled by poverty, substance abuse, and entrenched gender hierarchies. Yet many women respond with resilience and cunning rather than retreat. They may seek out female neighbours as allies, create support circles for emotional and logistical backing, or hide away small stashes of money and essentials in preparation for a future escape. Others manipulate household dynamics—cooking selectively, using silence as protest, or invoking religious or moral codes—to push back against abuse in ways that won’t provoke further violence. These actions, often hidden even from their closest kin, represent a powerful form of embodied resistance, where women maintain their dignity and protect their autonomy within oppressive domestic environments.

Work is another crucial arena for subtle rebellion. Many women in slums are employed in thei nformal sector, where labour laws offer tle protection and exploitation is rampant. Female garment workers, for example, may endure long hours and poor working conditions, but resist through small refusals, such as taking extended bathroom breaks, slowing down production quotas, or forming informal peer networks to exchange information about wages and rights. Vendors in local markets create informal coalitions to resist extortion by local thugs or corrupt police. They may use coded language, religious identities, or kinship
networks to stall or evade fines. These are not formal unions or collective actions, but micro-level solidarities rooted in shared struggle and survival. The spatial dynamics of Dhaka’s slums also reveal gendered strategies of resistance. Public space is often unsafe or off-limits for women, especially after dark. Yet women subtly reclaim space through temporal adjustments—waking early to access water sources before men, gathering in courtyards during school hours to socialise or exchange resources, or occupying narrow alleys to teach children or prepare food communally. These are acts of reclaiming the city, of reasserting presence in a landscape that excludes them. Feminist urbanists argue that such spatial negotiations are deeply political, challenging the male-centred design and policing of cities.
Networks of mutual aid form another powerful line of resistance. In the absence of formal welfare, women in slums often create informal savings groups, childcare exchanges, and food-sharing arrangements. These networks, although appearing apolitical, serve asmechannism of survival that redistribute power horizontally and circumvent state neglect.
They also provide emotional and psychological support, helping women cope with the everyday violence of poverty and marginalisation. Through these informal solidarities,women challenge the isolation imposed by neoliberal urbanism and assert a collective presence that is both resistant and sustaining.
Religion, too, plays a paradoxical role. While often associated with patriarchal norms, religious identity can also serve as a shield and resource for women’s resistance. By involving religious morality, women may shame abusive spouses or demand fairness from landlords.Participation in mosque-based women’s circles or religious festivals can offer safe spaces for dialogue, solidarity, and spiritual resilience. These engagements allow women to recast religious narratives in ways that empower rather than subjugate, aligning personal dignity with divine justice.
Even motherhood, often framed as a burden in slum life, becomes a site of political manoeuvring. Mothers fiercely protect their children’s education, usually sacrificing their meals or wages to pay school fees. They navigate bureaucratic systems, plead with teachers,or leverage political connections to gain school admission. These are not merely maternal acts but political interventions that contest the reproduction of poverty and inequality. They
represent a generational resistance—one that envisions a different future even if it is not immediately attainable.The state’s role in these slums is ambivalent—present in the form of occasional welfare schemes or police harassment, but largely absent as a provider of consistent services. Women’s interactions with state institutions are marked by suspicion, improvisation, and selective engagement. They may feign ignorance when asked for documentation, perform deference when interacting with officials, or mobilise community leaders to mediate access to state benefits. These are performances of compliance that mask deeper strategies of resistance and survival. They exemplify what Scott calls the “hidden transcript”—the unofficial, often coded discourse that challenges the dominant script without confrontation. It is important to note that these everyday resistances are not always transformative in a radical sense. They may reproduce certain hierarchies even as they undermine others. For instance, some women may internalise caste or ethnic prejudices or reinforce patriarchal norms in raising sons. Others may ostracise single women or resist collective organising for fear of state reprisal. Yet these contradictions are part of the complex terrain of everyday politics. Resistance in slums is not pure, linear, or uniformly progressive; it is messy, improvisational, and deeply contextual. What makes these acts powerful is their cumulative effect. Over time, they erode the foundations of oppressive systems by making them porous, negotiable, and unstable. The slum itself becomes a site of contested power, where dominance is never absolute and subordination is always provisional. By drawing attention to these micro-politics, we challenge the dominant narratives of slum life as passive suffering and foreground the agency of those who are most marginalised. The politics of everyday life in Dhaka’s urban slums reveals a complex choreography of resistance, negotiation, and survival enacted by women who are often seen as powerless.Through the dual lens of James C. Scott’s everyday resistance and feminist urbanism, we uncover a rich tapestry of gendered struggles that challenge power not through grand revolutions but through the slow, steady, and subversive acts of everyday life. These women,navigating the fault lines of patriarchy and poverty, are the unsung architects of resilience in the city’s shadows. Their stories remind us that the most profound forms of resistance are
often the quietest, etched not in manifestos but in the rhythms of ordinary existence.
The writer is a researcher and development worker.