Competing Allies: Legal Pluralism, and Gendered Agency in Mumbai’s Sharia Courts

Building upon participant observation in a women’s sharia court in Mumbai, run by activists of an Islamic feminist movement in India, and its networks with similar alternative dispute resolution forums run by male qazis (non-state actors trained in Islamic law and Muslim personal law), this article explores the modalities of interaction between non-state actors who adjudicate Muslim personal law in India. It also delineates how gendered agency is shaped in these interactions. This article identifies three aspects of this interaction between male and female non-state actors: (1) everyday cooperation between male and female qazi despite their doctrinal differences; (2) the gradual assertion of female qazi in and through everyday cooperation with male qazi; and (3) institutional competition interlaced with everyday cooperation. I explore a range of interactions including contestation and collaborative contestation between non-state actors, a domain that has not been explored in existing scholarship on legal pluralism. I also draw attention to how we might think about women’s agency in a legal pluralist context beyond a straightforward challenge to male authority and as it is forged at the intersection of individuals, interactions, and institutions. Through a critical exploration of women’s agency, I show how women both inhabit and transform gender norms at an individual and institutional level in their interactions with non-state actors and institutions, expanding scholarship on legal pluralism and gender beyond reified “women’s interests.”

Becoming equals: the meaning and practice of gender equality in an Islamic feminist movement in India

Building upon an ethnographic exploration of the pedagogy and alternative dispute resolution activities of an Islamic feminist movement in India called the Indian Muslim Women’s Movement (Bharatiya Muslim Mahila Andolan), this article speaks to the tension between Saba Mahmood’s influential account of religion and gendered agency, and a liberal feminist conception of gender equality. Anthropological explorations of Muslim women’s pious commitments as well as liberal feminist engagements with religion and culture are premised upon a presumed dichotomy between ethical engagements with religion, and a commitment to gender equality. Yet there is little analysis in existing scholarship of how gender equality is constituted by social movements premised on a religious identity, such as Islamic feminist movements. This article moves beyond thinking about gender equality merely as an abstract liberal normative good to explore how the discourse of gender equality is constituted in a movement that brings together everyday ethical commitments inspired by notions of piety and concerted everyday struggles against social and legal inequality. The ethnographic vignettes show how gender equality ( barabari) connotes social and legal equality between men and women premised on their equal spiritual status as God’s creations, their equal pious obligations irrespective of gender and the equal imperative of ethical conduct on both men and women based on Quranic values of compassion ( raham) and justice ( insaf). The pursuit of gender equality also entails reinterpretation of social norms in the light of ethical conduct, and an ethical commitment to collective struggle against gender discrimination in state and non-state forums.

PIETY, TRANSGRESSION, AND THE FEMINIST DEBATE ON MUSLIM WOMEN: RESITUATING THE VICTIM-SUBJECT OF HONOR-RELATED VIOLENCE FROM A TRANSNATIONAL LENS

While I strongly endorse anti-imperialist feminist attempts to uphold devout Muslim women’s gendered agency, I am concerned that these arguments fail to disrupt the intransigent association of freedom, particularly individual freedom, with secularism, and communitarian restraint with Islam. It is not surprising, therefore, that victim-subjects of honor-related violence, whether in a secular state such as Canada or an Islamic state like Pakistan, are discursively installed within the universal secular sphere and reevicted from the religious and cultural community. I propose the notion of transgressive piety rather than the dichotomy of secular society versus pious community within which to problematize gendered Muslim subjects. The transgression of ritualistic and institutionalized practices is associated with practices termed Sufism. Muslim feminists may use the idea of transgressive piety to offer faith-based support to those gendered subjects whose transgressive acts, appearance, or practices define them as legitimate targets of family, community, or state-based violence. In so doing, we may also challenge doctrinaire and narrow definitions of the Muslim Ummah, the all-encompassing and transcendent community of Muslims.

Future Building and Emotional Reflexivity: Gendered or Queered Navigations of Agency in Non-Normative Relationships?

This article sets out a conceptual framework for examining future building as an emotionally reflexive practice of intimacy and gendered agency. Emotionally reflexive future building is a relational activity, subject to gendering but open to queering. We illustrate this by drawing on cases taken from three qualitative studies that deal with the future building of women in relationships that do not conform to norms around having and rearing children. By referring to the future building of single mothers, women who are undecided about having children and women in non-cohabiting distance relationships we illustrate the significance of reflexively making sense of one’s own and others’ emotions in navigating gendered constraints and opportunities. Anger, despair, ambivalence, love, guilt and other emotions are key in how women with differing degrees of economic security imagine and try to create futures that queer gender.

Sketching women: a corpus-based approach to representations of women's agency in political Internet corpora in Arabic and English

In this paper, I use methods from corpus linguistics to examine patterns pertaining to the representation of women in online Arabic- and English-language political corpora. I highlight the discursive differences and similarities that characterise the two corpora. Using word sketches, I identify representational categories in each corpus that are indexed by patterns of collocation. Analysis of semantic preference and prosody in each corpus reveals the ways in which women are represented. An exploration of the representations of women and gendered agency in both corpora reveals incongruities between the message of women's empowerment that the outlets promote and the implicit discursive representations of gender and gendered agency.

Domesticating the “Smarter Than You” Home. Gendered Agency Scripts Embedded in Smart Home Discourses

Smart home networked systems promise a mode of comfort, efficiency and convenience that infers the easing of housekeeping chores. They impact on the moral economy of the home in ways we barely understand. Drawing on feminist technology studies and domestication theory, this article investigates how gendered relations are assigned and legitimated in smart home marketing reports and advertisements to enquire whether men and women are invited to participate equally or unequally in smart home technology. This raises questions about how promotional texts might influence and circumscribe domestic adoption. An interpretive content analysis of marketing reports and advertisements explains the pedagogic role of smart scenarios in coaxing and coaching householders to domesticate IoT-operated technology. The concept of “agency script” is employed to explain how smart actions are conveyed and assigned by promotional texts to activate smart home adoption. This enables an enquiry into the values and ideals conveyed in smart home discourses at the commodification stage of domestication and their implications for later stages. We might assume that smart technology democratises the home by fostering gender equality in the organisation of homemaking routines. But a critical study of the narrativization and assignment of smart home agency reveals significant gender disparities.