Trishia is a feminist organizer and a foresight strategist from Bangladesh. In 2011, she founded Meye Network, a feminist grassroots organizing platform, as a response to gender discrimination in the workplace, while she was working as an engineer in Dhaka. The platform evolved organically through the solidarity, leadership, and entrepreneurship of Bangla-speaking women, and expanded its horizon to other forms of marginalization intersecting with gender. Trishia holds a Master’s degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. Her final research project for the Master’s investigated how women-centric digital spaces could act as third spaces and impact the future of gender equity with women in a patriarchal society. The research findings led to the origination of OGNIE, a service-focused project to provide life-centric solutions to gender-specific problems. Third Space Feminism (TSF) is her story that encompasses the inception of her activism ten years ago, and the future she envisions to attain through her lived and learned experiences as an activist and designer.
I would like to call my story Third Space Feminism (TSF). It was the title of my final research project for the master’s at OCAD University. The title encompasses the inception of my activism ten years ago, and the future I envision. I am a feminist organizer and a foresight strategist from Bangladesh. In 2011, I founded Meye Network, a feminist grassroots organizing platform, as a response to gender discrimination in the workplace, while I was working as an engineer in Dhaka. The platform evolved organically through the solidarity, leadership, and entrepreneurship of Bangla-speaking women, and expanded its horizon to other forms of marginalization intersecting with gender. In 2018, I left my job and life in Dhaka and went to Canada to pursue a master’s degree in Strategic Foresight and Innovation (SFI). Because I wanted to find a future for Meye Network that had a lasting impact on the gender landscape of Bangladesh.
My story started with a utopia. When the surrounding reality feels too hostile to thrive, I tend to create an imaginary perfect world for myself. My parents did the same for me while I was growing up as a girl in a patriarchal society, and my school did that for all girls for twelve long years. Finally, that is what I did with Meye Network where we, the women created a utopian bubble to allow ourselves to believe in a present that did not exist, to reach a future that was absent yet attainable. The platform started with my rage and gathered momentum with stories of other women, growing into a safe space where people connected through love, equality, empathy, respect, and friendship. As the platform expanded and started interacting with the world outside, we started facing the question – How do you survive in a world that does not believe in your utopia?
I faced the same question when I stepped into the real world as a young adult looking for a job. Some employers would reject my application because of my gender. Some would say I could not do the jobs involving field visits as a woman. Some would ask if my parents would be okay with me traveling for work. What if my husband did not ‘allow me’ after I got married? What if people refused to accept a woman in a certain professional role? I was thrilled for a few months after landing a job in a small company headed by a woman until I realized that patriarchy is gender-neutral. My boss would often exert power declaring herself a man and stating her preference for men at the workplace since women had ‘limitations’ like menstruation, denying me access to a toilet during my period. I was baffled and angry. I needed an outlet for my inconsolable rage and answers to questions that no one would answer.
It was in June 2011. Already two and a half years in the blogging ecosystem of Bangladesh, I was exposed to the sexual innuendos and sexist languages in digital spaces. I was seeking a space where I could speak to other women about gender-based abuse and discrimination. Not having found any such spaces, I decided to create one myself. That is when I started Meye (girl/woman in Bangla) as a group on Facebook. I did not have any visions yet. All I wanted was to speak and ask questions. I invited all the women I knew from all walks of life to join the dialogue.
The group became more relevant with every passing day as more women joined and I moved to a bigger company. Everything from the job responsibilities to the office space was gendered. Women would be reminded of their gender identity at every step. Many women would even use that to their advantage, by accepting less significant responsibilities and gender segregation, which seemed to be an established norm everywhere I went to work. The group seemed to be a sanctuary from the patriarchal world. We, the women of Meye discovered that we were a bunch of misfits in a patriarchal society who had the same adventures and anger, seeking refuge in the group from the hostility of the real world. Through our stories, Meye evolved organically, growing beyond the boundaries of a group and turning into a network of seven thousand women battling discrimination in Bangladesh.
When I started Meye, I never imagined that it could come this far. Meye has been a tremendous journey from ‘I’ to ‘us.’ Whatever ‘we’ did in the first eight years, was out of instinct and desperate need. We never followed anyone’s footsteps because we did not know where we were headed. We only had ourselves, our stories, pain, anger, failures, strength, and dreams. We listened to our hearts and created a new path for ourselves, uniting our voices to resonate together for a stronger impact. Eight years later, I left home with a unified dream of finding a future for that utopia of grassroots social activism.
Having an academic background in a highly technical field and the experience of activism with a feminist focus, I was looking for an interdisciplinary program that would allow me to weave through the intersections and design a brighter lens for the future. I chose SFI because I wanted to understand the design and the future of an organization that originates from digital space, evolves organically, and makes a difference in a patriarchal ecosystem through mass participation. Third Space Feminism was my research, rooted in urban Bangladesh, involving adult women and men from Dhaka, the capital. Through the research, I wanted to understand if spaces like Meye Network made any sense and if they had a role to play in changing the reality of gender in Bangladesh. I investigated how women-centric spaces could act as ‘third spaces’, an alternative space generated through conflict and marginalization, and envision a meaningful feminist future.
I had started the research with the assumption that I needed to find a way for the sustainability of women centric digital spaces like Meye Network to sustain collaborative storytelling with women. In the end, I realized it was the unstable nature of such spaces that facilitated spontaneous changes towards the future. I was convinced that the agility and openness of a conscious feminist third space should never be confined to any structure for the sake of sustainability. Because a third space needs to be open to organic changes. It needs to remain a fertile environment in which participants can combine diverse knowledge into new insights and plans for action. A feminist third space needs to sustain a flexible, interactive, and intersectional point where marginalized voices unite and evolve with the goal of a collective change in a patriarchal society.
Through TSF, I discovered the power of invisible leaders arising from women-centric digital spaces who would blend in the background and enable change without any tangible reward system. I found hopes of alignment and alliances beyond the boundaries of communities and organizations through passive communications across different kinds of third spaces. I discovered that the feminist third spaces in digital platforms hinted at the tip of the iceberg to a deep-rooted and persisted failure of women empowerment in Bangladesh. They indicated the necessity of a radical shift in worldview and metaphors of patriarchy for a long-term change. I realized through the study that a feminist digital third space like Meye Network could inspire a cultural shift by creating a channel for the participation of marginalized voices, existing players, and other platforms through dialogues and actions, despite the risks from the state and the fundamentalist groups.
Meye Network had taught me how much power stories hold. I believe, our lived experiences are the testimony of our struggles and dreams. However, the research helped me get past my biases and change my worldview on sustainability. I was surprised to find out how Meye Network had shifted away from its initial focus of gender equity to sustain its business model in the previous years. I realized that an organic network has its own life. I decided to let Meye Network evolve on its own and let myself grow with it. I started OGNIE (Organising Gender Narratives for Inclusivity and Equity) to complement Meye’s core vision of combating gender discrimination with visible impact. OGNIE is going to gather lived experiences of gender-based injustice and design a gender-inclusive future through storytelling and design thinking. Currently, OGNIE is working towards creating gender-sensitive toilets at workplaces. I chose to start with toilets because it has been found to be a persistent point of discrimination and rejection at the intersection of private and public places in Bangladesh. I aim to start creating physical impact through OGNIE from the toilet for women that was denied to me ten years ago which led to the origination of Meye Network. I hope OGNIE will act as an anchor for women-centric feminist third spaces to keep the focus of my activism fixed while making room for change.
Trishia is a feminist organizer and a foresight strategist from Bangladesh. In 2011, she founded Meye Network, a feminist grassroots organizing platform, as a response to gender discrimination in the workplace. In 2018, Trishia went to Canada to pursue a master’s in Strategic Foresight and Innovation from OCAD University. Her final research project for the master’s investigated the reality and plausible futures of women-centric digital spaces in a patriarchal society. The research inspired the origination of OGNIE, a service-focused project to provide life-centric solutions to gender-specific problems, which Trishia initiated after coming back to Bangladesh in 2020.
16 Stories of Feminist Activism 