In the past week or so, I kept returning to “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” as I scrolled through Bangladeshi Facebook timelines, watching debates multiply in real time around Zaima Rahman, daughter of Bangladesh’s newly elected prime minister, Tariq Rahman.
Her recently viral nightclub photos and short videos show her dancing with friends in London. The sentence, “If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution,” often attributed to anarchist and feminist writer Emma Goldman and paraphrased from her autobiography Living My Life, lingers in my mind as I watch the reactions unfold online. The images and video that were supposed to represent a moment of celebration quickly turned into a political argument on social media about visibility, legitimacy, and the limits placed on a woman’s body.
Much of this conversation is unfolding outside mainstream Bangladeshi news media. Facebook has become an informal editorial space where writers, activists, and politically-engaged citizens feel compelled to respond instantly. Over the past few weeks, I have watched two parallel debates emerge around dance, female visibility, legitimacy, and power. Together, they reveal the contradictions shaping this moment of heightened political awareness both online and offline in Bangladesh.
One side of this debate centres on Zaima Rahman. The timing of the circulating images matters. They appeared just as her father’s electoral victory returned a political dynasty to prominence after the post-July uprising. For some viewers, the images read as an attempt to undermine a newly visible political figure. For others, they expose a contrast between a carefully constructed public image and a more relaxed private life abroad. What unsettles me is how quickly a woman’s body becomes the terrain through which political credibility is negotiated. A fleeting moment of joy is transformed into evidence, accusation, or projection.
At the same time, the responses online are layered and contradictory. Many social media users frame their defense of Zaima as solidarity, celebrating her dancing as a symbol of autonomy. Others read the same images as a failure of judgment. These reactions do not form a single narrative. They reveal a collective process of opinion building that unfolds outside mainstream media, shaped by competing expectations about what kind of political icon Bangladesh wants to imagine for itself. Zaima’s life abroad and her complex relationship to national belonging make her an easy figure onto whom these expectations are projected.
On the other side of this debate is the controversy surrounding dancer Arthy Ahmed’s recognition with the Ekushey Padak, the country’s highest civilian honour. A growing urban audience with disposable income rallied behind her, many of them students who describe her classes as spaces of healing, confidence, and personal transformation. For this demographic, Arthy represents a contemporary relationship to dance that moves away from rigid institutional structures and embraces accessibility and lifestyle culture.
Yet resistance has emerged from within the established Bangladeshi dance community itself. Many voices associated with classical training and cultural authority have questioned the legitimacy of her recognition. Their critique draws on older frameworks of discipline and lineage, reflecting anxieties about how artistic authority is shifting in a rapidly changing Bangladeshi urban economy. The skepticism does not come only from conservative spaces. It also emerges from liberal cultural circles that see themselves as guardians of artistic integrity. The debate exposes a deeper tension between democratizing access to art and preserving inherited cultural hierarchies.
Now, returning to Emma Goldman’s famous line, it becomes important to understand where it comes from. In Living My Life, Goldman recalls being reprimanded by a fellow activist for dancing and appearing too joyful within a movement that valued austerity. She resisted that expectation, insisting that the cause could not demand she become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If revolution required abandoning joy, she wrote, then it was not a revolution she wished to join.
Reading Goldman today, I see echoes of that tension in the debates around Zaima Rahman and Arthy Ahmed. These two figures stand in very different positions. One exists within political lineage and state power. The other operates within cultural practice and artistic recognition. Yet both have become sites where Bangladeshi society negotiates expectations placed on female bodies. The conversations unfolding across Facebook timelines show how quickly joy becomes suspect when attached to symbolic women.
In the case of Zaima Rahman, scrutiny extends beyond personal action. Her position as the daughter of a sitting prime minister transforms her into a national symbol. The circulation of images of her dancing abroad has been framed by some as a threat to dignity. What emerges here is an obsession with icon building. The political daughter is expected to remain polished and singular, to represent an ideal rather than a complex person. When that image fractures, the response is discomfort rather than curiosity.
This reaction reveals a striking contradiction. Bangladesh celebrates dance as culture through festivals, weddings, and public celebrations. Male bodies dominate protest spaces and political streets with little suspicion. Their movement is read as energy or courage. Female celebration, however, is often treated as excess. When a woman moves beyond prescribed cultural scripts, admiration quickly turns into scrutiny.
The debates surrounding Arthy Ahmed expose a different but related tension. Her recognition should have opened a broader conversation about how dance is evolving in contemporary Bangladesh. Instead, the focus has shifted toward questions of qualification and legitimacy. Critics often invoke traditional frameworks that feel disconnected from a changing urban culture where dance intersects with wellness, community, and new forms of participation. The criticism therefore becomes less about artistic practice and more about who controls cultural capital.
What connects these two debates is a shared impulse to regulate movement. Zaima Rahman is questioned for celebrating too openly. Arthy Ahmed is challenged for expanding dance beyond established boundaries. Both cases reveal how power, class, and gender shape expectations placed on women in public life. Conservative voices express discomfort with female autonomy, while liberal circles sometimes reproduce their own forms of gatekeeping by deciding which practices deserve recognition.
If we return again to Goldman’s words, the question becomes less about dance itself and more about the kind of political culture Bangladesh wants to build. Revolutions promise transformation, yet they often reproduce familiar structures of control. The post-July political moment speaks of renewal, but the debates surrounding female visibility suggest that the boundaries of freedom remain uneven.
Perhaps the deeper discomfort lies in our difficulty accepting multiplicity. We want political figures to remain icons and artists to remain within familiar categories. When someone moves outside those expectations, the response is to question legitimacy rather than to rethink the framework itself. Instead of asking how dance might expand our collective imagination, we argue over proximity to power or institutional approval.
What would it mean to think differently? The recognition of Arthy Ahmed could invite reflection on how dance evolves through class mobility and changing social desires. The controversy around Zaima Rahman could open a conversation about unrealistic expectations placed on women within political dynasties. Rather than turning these moments into spectacles of judgment, we might ask how fear of female joy shapes the limits of public life.
A movement that demands emotional austerity risks reproducing the same hierarchies it claims to dismantle. If the post-July imagination is to remain meaningful, it must allow women to exist in their complexity. Female bodies cannot be welcomed only when they symbolize sacrifice or tradition. They must also be allowed to celebrate, to fail, and to move.
“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.” In Bangladesh today, this line reads not as nostalgia but as a challenge. It asks whether we are building a society capable of holding joy alongside accountability and autonomy alongside responsibility. Until female movement is seen as part of political life rather than a threat to it, our revolutions may continue to circle around the same anxieties without fully stepping into the freedom they promise.
Tara Asgar is a Bangladeshi writer and interdisciplinary artist based in New York. Her critical writing explores migration, gender, and the politics of visibility within contemporary art and social movements. Email: taraasgar.ny@gmail.com.