How does the 'Female Zone' serve females?

Someone's sense of modesty, someone's choice to practise their faith, someone's personal preference for privacy, all deserves respect. My argument, therefore, is not about purdah or against anyone's right to seek privacy. Those choices are not up for debate here. What is up for debate is the curtains.

When DUCSU unveiled a curtained-off ‘Female Zone’ around a single table in the TSC cafeteria, it was generously presented as a private corner where a mother could breastfeed, a female student could rest, or someone could adjust her clothes without an audience.

All of these are real needs and no one should be dismissing them. The question is, are those two pieces of cloth strung around a cafeteria table really the best offer? Because if so, it quietly says about how women's needs have been handled in this campus all along.

As a Dhaka University graduate, I admit this one got under my skin in a way the usual campus controversies don't. Because whatever the intention they put is behind it, how generous it is, it is also how familiar the shape of the "solution'' feels. So let's set the outrage from both sides aside for a moment.

There's a term for what seems to be happening here, and I will name it ‘plaster on a fracture trick.’ An authority does something so small yet visible and symbolic and in doing so, gives itself permission to stop worrying about the larger, less photogenic problem next door.

The university already has two female residential halls right next to TSC plus dedicated female common rooms in almost all of the faculties, for the females seeking privacy to rest, to pray, to eat.

Now I dare you to ask around about the conditions there. You will for sure hear some same complaints over and over again. Poorly maintained, under-resourced, often locked or unusable when needed.

So when DUCSU’s newest answer to ‘where can the women practicing ‘modesty’ can comfortably rest on campus’ turns out to be inside two curtains in the busiest, loudest, most public space in the campus, why is it that unusual to ask, ‘why here, of all places?’

Hypothetically speaking, a female student, who is also a mother, needs to breastfeed her child while she's in class. This new arrangement is suggesting that she should skip the common room a floor or two below her department, skip her resident halls just a short walk away and head across campus to sit behind a curtain in TSC instead. Is that what privacy should look like?

In my opinion, there's a subtler cost to designating one specific corner as the ‘Female Zone’. By naming it, the rest of the cafeteria, every other table gets coded as the default, the "normal" space. Which is to say, the male space, even if no one will call it that out loud. And the general space loses any obligation to be respectful or accommodating on its own, because as the logic now stands, if a woman wants comfort, she knows where the curtain is.

Put some curtains in a busy space. Low effort, high visibility and suddenly "the woman problem" feels solved. Meanwhile, the broken toilets, the malfunctioning sanitary pad machines, the patchy lighting after dark at the very same TSC, let alone the common room spaces, none of that needs to be dealt with today, because "the zone" now exists as a kind of moral alibi.
And it isn’t a Band Aid laid neatly over a fracture? It doesn''t heal anything, but it looks from a certain angle like care.

Who took the initiative? DUCSU Common Room, Reading Room and Cafeteria Secretary Umme Salma. Who inaugurated it? DUCSU General Secretary SM Farhad. Now this fact doesn't disqualify the initiative. Student union leaders, regardless of gender, are entitled to oversee shared facilities.

But it becomes a little harder to take seriously once you notice who's doing most of the defending online. Not primarily the women the zone is supposedly for, but the male leaders, male commentators and the male students, confidently explaining to women what ought to make them feel comfortable.

The same crowd's priorities get even harder to square when you look at the hall curfew debate happening alongside this one. Many of the male students most invested in defending the Female Zone are far more worried about what might happen to women if the 10 pm hall curfew were lifted.

They can roam the campus and the city at any hour without needing anyone's permission, but the moment the same freedom is proposed for women, it's suddenly a matter of "safety" or "moral collapse" or a "disorder waiting to happen."

You can't simultaneously insist that women need protection from an unsafe campus and resist every measure that would actually make the campus safer. A measure built for women should be shaped by the women who'll use it, not defended loudest by the men standing next to it.

If you want to know whether an initiative is really about women's comfort, watch what happens to the women who criticise it. Students and commentators, including women pointing out that a working washroom would help more than a curtain have been met with personal attacks and gendered insults rather than an actual argument. An institution that lets a woman get shamed into silence for questioning a "women's comfort zone" measure tells you quite clearly how much safety and respect that measure was ever built to provide. If dissenting women aren't treated with dignity, it's fair to wonder how much dignity the zone itself was designed to deliver.

There's no medical dispensary worth mentioning. The less said about the food the better. The very washrooms meant for the women this initiative claims to centre remain, by most accounts a mess.

None of that can be solved by the low-effort curtain moves. But a curtain is cheap, quick and easy to photograph, which may be exactly the point. DUCSU knows this is a sensitive issue. DUCSU knows that offering something, no matter how small it is, buys them a certain amount of goodwill without requiring the harder work of actual, inclusive reform.

And this is where the anger stems from.