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.

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

Law & Social Inquiry ◽

10.1017/lsi.2021.39 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 1-21

Author(s):

Sagnik Dutta

Keyword(s):

Islamic Law ◽

Participant Observation ◽

Legal Pluralism ◽

Women's Agency ◽

Male And Female ◽

Women’S Agency ◽

State Actors ◽

And Gender ◽

Personal Law ◽

Gendered Agency

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.”

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Juxtaposing The Great Indian Kitchen and the Kudumbashree: Women, Work and Agency in Kerala

Indian Journal of Human Development ◽

10.1177/09737030211035863 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 097370302110358

Author(s):

Daigy Varghese ◽

Shubha Ranganathan

Keyword(s):

Young Woman ◽

South Asian ◽

Unpaid Work ◽

Women’S Empowerment ◽

Ethnographic Research ◽

Paid Work ◽

Women's Agency ◽

The Family ◽

Women’S Agency ◽

Household Labour

The recent Malayalam film ‘The great Indian kitchen’ invoked debate in Kerala on women’s unpaid work in the house. Taking off from this film, this commentary draws on ethnographic research with women participating in the Kudumbashree, a women’s empowerment programme in Kerala, to engage with questions of paid work, household labour and care arrangements within the household. While the film depicts the struggles of a newly wedded young woman in her in-laws’ house and how she leaves the marriage to follow her dreams, this article shifts the focus to the tactics and strategies used by women in their 40s and 50s who remain within the family fold. We look at the experiences of these women who negotiate work and care arrangements to meet their needs. In doing so, we seek to understand what these strategies say about the conceptualisation of women’s agency and independence, particularly in South Asian contexts.

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