Gender and Anti-Discrimination Laws in India

2018 ◽  
pp. 104-126
Author(s):  
Vidhu Verma

The Constitution of India guarantees not only formal equality but also promises that entrenched power structures will gradually dissolve. However, forms of discrimination faced by women are not just a feature of our social fabric but are supported by the ambiguities of the legal-juridical framework that reinforce unjust gender norms. The persistence of gender discrimination as it exists in the wider societal sphere is expressed by the unevenness that marks women’s access to the legal system. The chapter reviews the contestations, the changing categories, and terms of feminist analysis in law. It turns to address the problem of equal rights in understanding the protection against vulnerability, and various forms the loss of liberty takes in different contexts of marginality about gender discrimination. In what follows, I begin by presenting some methodological concerns. Then I discuss the Indian jurisprudence on sexual harassment and assault. I then focus briefly on the right to temple entry and ‘honour’ crimes in recent years and the legal responses to them. In the last section, I address three strong challenges to my account of gender discrimination. My main argument is that the doctrinal history of harassment and rape in the Indian context points to the power and limitations of legal rights as a strategy for social change. Establishing a basis for legal liability can reshape consciousness about working environments, but this has not deterred those who harass, from using less formal means of attacking women rights. For legal feminists, the law remains a site of discursive struggle where dominant meanings come to inform not only juridical categories but also the social world that define our concepts and practices. The dilemma of preserving difference in law and yet not having disadvantageous effects to unequal parties remain.

Author(s):  
Sarah Song

Chapter 10 considers what is owed to noncitizens already present in the territory of democratic countries. It focuses on three groups of noncitizens: those admitted on a temporary basis, those who have been granted permanent residence, and those who have overstayed their temporary visas or entered the territory without authorization. What legal rights are these different groups of noncitizens morally entitled to? How should their claims be weighed against the right of states to control immigration? The chapter argues that the longer one lives in the territory, the stronger one’s moral claim to a more extensive set of rights, including the right to remain. The time spent living in a place serves as a proxy for the social ties migrants have developed (social membership principle) and for their contributions to collective life (fair-play principle).


Author(s):  
S.N. Korusenko

This paper aims at reconstructing the genealogy of Siberian Tatars of Knyazevs (Western Siberia), identifying the origins of their surname, which is not characteristic of the Tatars, and at analysis of the influence of socio-political and socio-economical processes in Russia in the 18th through 20th centuries on the social transformation of the family. The sources were represented by the materials of the Inventory Revision Book of Tarsky District of 1701 and census surveys of the end of 18th through 19th centuries, which allowed tracing the Knyazev family through the genealogical succession and identifying social status of its members. In this work, recordkeeping ma-terials of the 18th–20th centuries and contemporary genealogical and historical traditions of the Tatars have been utilized. In the research, the method of genealogical reconstructions by archival materials and their correlation with genealogies of modern population has been used. The history of the Knyazev family is inextricably linked to the history of modern village of Bernyazhka — one of the earliest settlements of the Ayalintsy (a group of the Si-berian Tatars) in the territory of the Tarsky Irtysh land which became the home to the Knyazevs for more than three centuries. The 1701Inventory Revision Book cites Itkuchuk Buchkakov as a local power broker of the Aya-lynsky Tatars in the village. During the 18th century, this position was inherited by his descendants who eventually lost this status in the beginning of the 19th century in the course of the managerial reforms by the Russian gov-ernment. Nevertheless, the social status of the members of the gens remained high. In the mid. 19th century, the village moved — the villagers resettled from the right bank of the River Irtysh onto the left one. As the result, the village was situated nearby the main road connecting the cities of Omsk and Tara. At the same time, the village became the center of the Ayalynskay region. That led to the strengthening of the social status and property en-richment of the descendants of Itkuchuk Buchkakov. The Knyzevs’ surname first appeared in the materials of the First All-Russia Census Survey of 1897. Some of the descendants signed up under this surname later in the Soviet period. During the Soviet years, members of the Knyzev’s gens had different destinies: some worked in the local government, whereas the others were subjected to political repressions and executed. Knyazevs took part in the Great Patriotic War and seven of them perished. Presently there are no descendants of the Knyazevs in Bernyazhka as they spread over the villages of the Omskaya Region, some living in Omsk and other towns of Russia and abroad.


1992 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 376-397 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael O. West

SummaryBetween 1924 and 1961 elite Africans in Southern Rhodesia (colonial Zimbabwe) waged a protracted political struggle for the right legally to drink “European” liquor, which had been banned to colonized Africans under the Brussels Treaty of 1890. Refusing to be lumped with the black masses and basing their claim on the notion that there should be “equal rights for all civilized men”, elite Africans argued that they had attained a cultural level comparable to that of the dominant European settlers and should therefore be exempt from the liquor ban. This struggle, which ended successfully in 1961, also highlights other important themes in the history of the emergent African elite in Southern Rhodesia, most notably its political tactics and consciousness. The quest for European liquor helped to hone political skills as well, as a number of individuals who participated in it later became important African nationalist leaders.


2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 601-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcela Cornejo ◽  
Carolina Rocha ◽  
Nicolás Villarroel ◽  
Enzo Cáceres ◽  
Anastassia Vivanco

The current memory struggles about the Chilean dictatorship makes it increasingly relevant to hear a diverse range of voices on the subject. One way of addressing this is to study autobiographical narratives, in which people construct a character to present themselves as the protagonists of a story by taking multiple positions regarding what is remembered. This article presents a study that analyzed the life stories of Chilean people (diverse in their generations, cities, experiences of political repression, political orientations and socio-economic levels) and that distinguished between the positions that they take when presenting themselves as the protagonists of an autobiographical story about the Chilean dictatorship. The results point to salient and recurrent positions that allow people to earn the right to be considered part of the social history of the dictatorship, that involve different definitions regarding those responsible and the victims of what happened, and that unveil a strong family and filial logic of remembering.


Author(s):  
Gabriel Rockhill

This chapter proposes a counter-history of a seminal debate in the transition from structuralism to post-structuralism. It calls into question the widespread assumption that Derrida rejects Foucault’s structuralist stranglehold by demonstrating that the meaning of a text always remains open. Through a meticulous examination of their respective historical paradigms, methodological orientations and hermeneutic parameters, it argues that Derrida’s critique of his former professor is, at the level of theoretical practice, a call to return to order. The ultimate conclusion is that the Foucault-Derrida debate has much less to do with Descartes’ text per se, than with the relationship between the traditional tasks of philosophy and the meta-theoretical reconfiguration of philosophic practice via the methods of the social sciences.


Author(s):  
James Crossley

Abstract This article takes a different look at the work of Burton Mack on apocalypticism and the post-historical Jesus crystallisation of the Christian ‘myth of innocence’ in terms of the social history of scholarship. After a critical assessment of previous receptions of Mack’s work from the era of the ‘Jesus wars’, there is a discussion of Mack’s place in broader cross-disciplinary tendencies in the study of apocalypticism with reference to the influence of liberal and Marxist approaches generally and those of Norman Cohn and Eric Hobsbawm specifically. Mack’s approach to apocalypticism should be seen as a thoroughgoing updating of Cold War liberal constructions of apocalypticism for an era of American ‘culture wars’, from Reagan to Trump. Part of this updating has also meant that, while much of his work against the apocalyptic Christian myth of innocence has been explicitly aimed at the de-legitimising the Right, it also continues the old Cold War intellectual battles by implicitly de-legitimising anything deemed excessively Marxist.


Author(s):  
Sameen Masood ◽  
Muhammad Farooq

It is believed that the economic participation of women in Pakistan has been intensively affected by an enduring male-capitalist social system. Moreover, the history of gender discrimination has been linked with the medieval cultural values that uplifted and empowered men over women in every sphere of life, especially in the economic realm. A typical case is believed to be the Pashtun culture. This chapter investigated indigenous values of Pashtun culture where women are underrepresented in the economy. Women did not see themselves as underprivileged. Rather, they perceived themselves as a vital and prestigious part of the family and the wider Pashtun society. For educated women in Pashtun society, the values system is guided by social structure, which is accounted for by stability and unity in society. Cultural values are operationalized as the mechanism of division of labor. The findings redefine female empowerment and propose a new paradigm in the global context. The indigenous value system guides the social structure which leads to stability and unity in the society.


PMLA ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 133 (3) ◽  
pp. 594-609
Author(s):  
Wolfgang Emmerich ◽  
Nicole G. Burgoyne ◽  
Andrew B. B. Hamilton

East german literary history is a case study of how political and cultural institutions interact. the state's cultural regime mo-nopolized the right to publish within its borders and demanded that the nation's new art describe contemporary life or its precedents. Even authors seen in the West as dissidents understood themselves, more often than not, as pursuing that goal and the broader aims of socialism with their work. During the lifespan of the German Democratic Republic, this political albatross weighed on all literary scholarship. Even now, whatever their feelings toward the socialist state, scholars, critics, and readers are bound to approach a text from East Germany as an artifact of its political culture—and rightly, because the political sphere encroached heavily on the artistic. But since German unification, the rise and fall in the stock of so many East German authors has directly resulted from political revelations, raising a number of troubling questions. Though historical distance seemed to have sprung up as abruptly as the Berlin Wall had come down, to what extent does scholarship from the German Democratic Republic represent only a heightened case of what is always true of literary history— namely, that political motivation colors critical evaluation? Is it possible to consider a work of literature with no recourse to the social and political circumstances under which it was written? And would it even be desirable to do so?


2020 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 15-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Egil Asprem

The election of the 45th president of the United States set in motion a hidden war in the world of the occult. From the meme-filled underworld of alt-right-dominated imageboards to a widely publicized “binding spell” against Trump and his supporters, the social and ideological divides ripping the American social fabric apart are mirrored by witches, magicians, and other esotericists fighting each other with magical means. This article identifies key currents and developments and attempts to make sense of the wider phenomenon of why and how the occult becomes a political resource. The focus is on the alt-right’s emerging online esoteric religion, the increasingly enchanted notion of “meme magic,” and the open confrontation between different magical paradigms that has ensued since Trump’s election in 2016. It brings attention to the competing views of magical efficacy that have emerged as material and political stakes increase, and theorizes the religionizing tendency of segments of the alt-right online as a partly spontaneous and partially deliberate attempt to create “collective effervescence” and galvanize a movement around a charismatic authority. Special focus is given to the ways in which the politicized magic of both the left and the right produce “affect networks” that motivate political behaviors through the mobilization of (mostly aversive) emotions.


2019 ◽  
pp. 90-99
Author(s):  
Julio Meza Díaz

El presente artículo trata sobre la función social del museo y sus acciones a favor de los derechos igualitarios de las personas con discapacidad, dentro de lo establecido por la Convención Sobre los Derechos de las Personas con Discapacidad (CDPD). Los museos pueden efectivizar los derechos contenidos en el artículo 30 de la CDPD, es decir, el derecho a la accesibilidad a la cultura y a la posibilidad del desarrollo de una agencia artística.  Palabras clave: museos, discapacidad, derechos humanos, accesibilidad a la cultura, desarrollo de la agencia en el campo de la cultura.   AbstractThis paper deals with the social function of the museum and its actions in favor of the equal rights of persons with disabilities, within the provisions of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CDPD). Museums can make effective the rights contained in article 30 of the CRPD, that is, the right to access to the culture and the right to the possibility to develop an artistic agency. Keywords: museums, disability, human rights, accessibility to culture, development of the agency in the field of culture.


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