Personal Reflections & Letters

Language is often imagined as the opposite of violence. Yet in Bangladesh’s contemporary social media culture, language increasingly functions as violence itself. Through labels, jokes, memes, slurs, screenshots, comment threads, and moral policing, digital platforms transform everyday misogyny into collective public force. Drawing on linguistic anthropology, gender theory, and digital ethnography, this essay examines how language crossing among young adults intersects with misogynistic mob culture, nationalism, and platformed humiliation in Bangladesh.