Intimate Subversions: Minority women encountering laws and patriarchy
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis asks: How do multiple laws collude with patriarchy to define minority women’s positions in the state, society, and the community? And How do religious minority women in a postcolonial context selectively seek, apply, and subvert these multiple laws to achieve their own objectives? Broadly speaking, this thesis examines the complex relationship between multiple laws and gender in religious minority groups in South Asia. In particular, it examines the roles, both constraining and liberating, played by laws, rules, and normative orders that together comprise a situation of legal pluralism to show how they affect women in the Christian community in Bangladesh. In this thesis, I use a feminist standpoint to interrogate the theories of legal pluralism; hence, I argue for a feminist theory of legal pluralism. By engaging critically with feminist theories, I show that women’s full experience of law cannot be captured if the state is considered as the sole source of laws. Instead, other social sources of laws should also be considered to understand and capture the complexities of legal and social realities that women experience. Therefore, I argue for a shift from the legal centralist to a legal pluralist paradigm in order to capture how women experience the plurality of laws. The second shift that is required for the same purpose is of the centre of analysis of legal pluralism from ‘law’ to ‘women’, by considering women’s intersectional subjectivities where women’s identities intersect with their sex, class, religion, sexuality, and physical location. To illuminate the research questions, I used ethnographic methods in various sites in Bangladesh. The methods include in-depth interviews, archival research, participant observation, and content analysis that were applied at multiple scales. First, I examine how law and gender interact with each other at the state level. I analyse the situation of legal pluralism of religious minority groups in terms of their respe…
abstract: This thesis asks: How do multiple laws collude with patriarchy to define minority women’s positions in the state, society, and the community? And How do religious minority women in a postcolonial context selectively seek, apply, and subvert these multiple laws to achieve their own objectives? Broadly speaking, this thesis examines the complex relationship between multiple laws and gender in religious minority groups in South Asia. In particular, it examines the roles, both constraining and liberating, played by laws, rules, and normative orders that together comprise a situation of legal pluralism to show how they affect women in the Christian community in Bangladesh. In this thesis, I use a feminist standpoint to interrogate the theories of legal pluralism; hence, I argue for a feminist theory of legal pluralism. By engaging critically with feminist theories, I show that women’s full experience of law cannot be captured if the state is considered as the sole source of laws. Instead, other social sources of laws should also be considered to understand and capture the complexities of legal and social realities that women experience. Therefore, I argue for a shift from the legal centralist to a legal pluralist paradigm in order to capture how women experience the plurality of laws. The second shift that is required for the same purpose is of the centre of analysis of legal pluralism from ‘law’ to ‘women’, by considering women’s intersectional subjectivities where women’s identities intersect with their sex, class, religion, sexuality, and physical location. To illuminate the research questions, I used ethnographic methods in various sites in Bangladesh. The methods include in-depth interviews, archival research, participant observation, and content analysis that were applied at multiple scales. First, I examine how law and gender interact with each other at the state level. I analyse the situation of legal pluralism of religious minority groups in terms of their respe…
author: Das, Joyce Mormita
language: en
keywords: Minority women, gender, feminist legal theories, legal pluralism, South Asia, Bangladesh, Christian women, colonisation, patriarchy, marriage, divorce, women's inheritance
date published: 2017
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:07:32Z
provider: Australian Catholic University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Australian Catholic University

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/1885/117525