MD ABDULLAH ALL SHAKIL

Over the past few years, there has been a growing concern over the high prevalence of hysterectomies in private healthcare facilities in Shyamnagar, Bangladesh. NGOs and international media outlets seize the story as an example of “climate victimhood”. In contrast, some local journalists blame shrimp cultivation on brackish water and a network of private hospital brokers promoting hysterectomy as a fix to long-term uterine infection treatment. While women appear as victims in both stories, does a hysterectomy mean more than a discard to them? Using disposability as an analytical lens, this research asks: how do women in Shyamnagar negotiate the interlocking processes of disposability that structure their reproductive lives? Drawing on anthropological and feminist literature on labor, discard, and reproduction, this research defines disposability as a liminal state whose fate is undetermined—what, how, and how much will be discarded depends on material and social conditions. Based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I will examine disposability in three forms: labor, body, and citizenship to show how interlocking regimes of governance marginalize women in Shyamnagar and to propose health and labor policies rooted in their lived realities.