Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law in India

Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law in India
Author: Ratna Kapur, (ed.)
Publisher: Zubaan
Total Pages: 278
Release: 1996-12-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9390514150

The essays in this volume explore the relatively new field of women and law from interdisciplinary, feminist perspectives and help to develop an understanding of feminist legal studies in India. As a collection, the book offers insights about women and law as addressed by feminists from the standpoint of both legal and non-legal disciplines. Individually, the different essays explore the legal terrain through historical and cultural analyses of issues such as women’s human rights, gender discrimination, feminist legal scholarship, prostitution, conjugality and the representation of female outlaws in cinema. This varied and contextualised approach explodes the understanding of law as an objective, external, neutral truth. Instead, each writer lays open the contradictory nature of law and shows how it frequently becomes a site of political and ideological struggle.

Colonialism as Civilizing Mission

Colonialism as Civilizing Mission
Author: Harald Fischer-Tiné
Publisher: Anthem Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2004-03
Genre: Great Britain
ISBN: 1843313634

Ranging from studies on sport and national education and pulp fiction to infanticide, psychiatric therapy and religion, these essays on the various forms, expressions and consequences of the British 'civilizing mission' in South Asia shed light on a topic that even today continues to be an important factor in South Asian politics.

The Scandal of the State

The Scandal of the State
Author: Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2003-04-09
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780822330486

Women in custody -- Women in law -- Killing women.

Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman

Empire, Media, and the Autonomous Woman
Author: Esha Niyogi De
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2011-09-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199088500

Drawing lessons from the intersection of literature, photography, cinema, television, dance-drama, and choreography, this book presents a unique analysis of Indian activist thought spread over two centuries. In this wide-spanning work, Esha Niyogi De argues that the 'individual' has been creatively indigenized in modern non-Western cultures: thinkers attentive to gender in postcolonial cultures embrace selected ethical premises of the Enlightenment and its human rights discourse while they refuse possessive individualism. Debating influential schools of postcolonial and transnational studies, she weaves her radical argument through a rich tapestry of gender portrayals drawn from two moments of modern Indian thought: the rise of humanism in the colony and the growth of new individualism in contemporary liberalized India. From autobiographical texts by nineteenth-century Bengali prostitutes, point-of-view photography, as well as woman-centred dance-dramas and essays by Rabindranath Tagore to representations of Tagore's works on mainstream television, video, and stage; feminist cinema, choreography, and performance by Aparna Sen and Manjusri Chaki-Sircar respectively—the book makes use of these and much more to creatively engage with empire, media, and gender.

Global Critical Race Feminism

Global Critical Race Feminism
Author: Adrien Katherine Wing
Publisher: NYU Press
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2000-05
Genre: Law
ISBN: 081479338X

An anthology containing some 30 essays which focus on topics including a critique of American feminist legal scholarship; motherhood and work in cultural context; Josephine Baker and the Cold War; the campaign against female circumcision; violence against Aboriginal women in Australia; and "marketization" and the status of women in China. Includes a foreword by social justice activist and professor at the U. of California-Santa Cruz, Angela Y. Davis. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR

Gender Justice and Proportionality in India

Gender Justice and Proportionality in India
Author: Juliette Duara
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 275
Release: 2017-10-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1351782614

For a judiciary in a democracy, dispensing justice is not only about doing justice, but also about showing that justice is being done; it is about giving reasons and creating a "culture of justification". The question becomes how to nurture such a culture. A number of liberal democratic jurisdictions have answered this question in part with the adoption of the multi-step method of evaluating the constitutionality of legislative infringements on fundamental rights widely known as Proportionality Analysis. Under Proportionality Analysis courts must engage in a structured process of reasoning. This book deals with Gender Justice and Proportionality Analysis in India. The author argues that the Supreme Court of India should consider adopting Proportionality Analysis for the adjudication of the fundamental right to sex equality in Indian courts. The book includes an analysis of Canadian and South African Proportionality Analysis and makes some suggestions on how an Indian Proportionality Analysis could be generated using this comparative investigation. Additionally, the book proposes ways of applying the effects of socio-political context on doctrine, as well as doctrine’s interpretive impact on adjudicated outcomes for gender, thus making a contribution to feminist jurisprudence. Finally, the author analyses Indian gender equality jurisprudence, demonstrating the inadequacies of the current doctrinal framework for achieving the goal of substantive gender equality and suggesting ways in which an Indian Proportionality Analysis might be fashioned to address these inadequacies. A novel examination of the gender situation in India in comparative perspective, this book will be of interest to academics in the field of Gender Studies, Asian and Comparative Law and South Asian studies.

Women and the Politics of Violence

Women and the Politics of Violence
Author: Taisha Abraham
Publisher: Har-Anand Publications
Total Pages: 316
Release: 2002
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9788124108475

Contributed articles on crimes against women in India.

A Question of Silence

A Question of Silence
Author: Janaki Nair
Publisher: Zed Books
Total Pages: 424
Release: 2000-10
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9781856498920

The essays in this volume develop an understanding of the institutions, practices and forms of representation of Indian sexual relations and their boundaries of legitimacy.

Words of Her Own

Words of Her Own
Author: Maroona Murmu
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 331
Release: 2019-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199098212

Words of Her Own situates the experiences and articulations of emergent women writers in nineteenth-century Bengal through an exploration of works authored by them. Based on a spectrum of genres—such as autobiographies, novels, and travelogues—this book examines the sociocultural incentives that enabled the dawn of middle-class Hindu and Brahmo women authors at that time. Murmu explores the intersections of class, caste, gender, language, and religion in these works. Reading these texts within a specific milieu, Murmu sets out to rectify the essentialist conception of women’s writings being a monolithic body of works that displays a firmly gendered form and content, by offering rich insights into the complex world of subjectivities of women in colonial Bengal. In attempting to do so, this book opens up the possibility of reconfiguring mainstream history by questioning the scholarly conceptualization of patriarchy being omnipotent enough to shape the intricacies of gender relations, resulting in the flattening of self-fashioning by women writers. The book contends that there were women authors who flouted the norms of literary aesthetics and tastes set by male literati, thereby creating a literary tradition of their own in Bangla and becoming agents of history at the turn of the century.