3. The State, the Public, and Women’s Rights

2015 ◽  
pp. 67-96
2009 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohit De

This article investigates the formation of a political consensus between conservative ulama, Muslim reformers, nationalist politicians and women's organisations, which led to the enactment of the Dissolution of Muslim Marriages Act in 1939. The Act was a radical piece of social legislation that gave South Asian Muslim women greater rights for divorce than those enjoyed by other women in India and Britain. Instead of placing women's rights and Islamic law as opposed to each other, the legislation employed a heuristic that guaranteed women's rights by applying Islamic law, allowing Muslim politicians, ulama and women's groups to find common ground on an Islamic modernity. By interrogating the legislative process and the rhetorical positions employed to achieve this consensus, the paper hopes to map how the women's question was being negotiated anew in the space created in the legislatures. The legislative debate over family law redefined the boundaries of the public and the private, and forced nationalists to reconsider the ‘women's question’. The transformation of Islamic law through secular legislation also gave greater licence to the courts in their interpretation, and widened the schism between traditional practitioners of fiqh and modern lawyers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-279 ◽  
Author(s):  
Helen M. Kinsella ◽  
Laura Sjoberg

AbstractIn this article, we focus on the subset of evolutionary theorising self-identified as Feminist Evolutionary Analytic (FEA) within security studies and International Relations. We offer this accounting in four sections. First, we provide a brief overview of the argument that reproductive interests are the ‘origins’ of international violence. Second, we break down the definitions of gender, sex, and sexuality used in evolutionary work in security studies generally and in FEA specifically, demonstrating a lack of complexity in FEA’s accounts of the potential relations among the three and critiquing their essentialist heteronormative assumptions. Third, we argue that FEA’s failure to reflect on the history and context of evolutionary theorising, much less contemporary feminist critiques, facilitates its forwarding of the state and institutions as primarily neutral and corrective bulwarks against male violence. Fourth, we conclude by outlining what is at stake if we fail to correct for this direction in feminist, IR, and security research. We argue that FEA work misrepresents and narrows the potential for understanding and responding to violence, facilitating the continued instrumentalisation of women’s rights, increased government regulation of sexuality, and a more expansive form of militarism.


Author(s):  
Marguba Makhsudovna Nosirova ◽  

This article deals with the situation with violations of women's rights and freedoms in the world in recent years and the increase in violence against them during the COVID-19 pandemic, measures taken in our country on gender policy, a number of presidential decrees. The large-scale work on increasing the participation of women in society and the state, based on the tasks set out in the state programs and responded also was analyzed.


2017 ◽  
Vol 111 ◽  
pp. 258-260 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard Duhaime

While certain aspects of women's rights had been addressed in earlier OAS instruments and more generally in the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man and in the American Convention on Human Rights, many consider that the issue of women's rights was first incorporated in the normative corpus of the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) with the 1994 adoption of the Belém do Pará Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women. This treaty obliges states to prevent, punish, and eradicate violence against women, taking special account of vulnerabilities due to race, ethnic background, migrant status, age, pregnancy, socioeconomic situation, etc. It defines the concept of violence against women and forces states to ensure that women live free of violence in the public and private sphere. It also grants the Commission and the Court the ability to process individual complaints regarding alleged violations of the treaty. Since 1994, the Commission has also established a Rapporteurship on the rights of women, which assists the IACHR in its thematic or country reports and visits, as well as in the processing of women's rights–related petitions. In recent years, the jurisprudence of the Commission and the Court has addressed several fundamental issues related to women's rights, in particular regarding violence against women, women's right to equality, and reproductive health.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 59-66
Author(s):  
Hannah Helseth

For almost two decades, the public debate about Islam in Western Europe has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population. There has been a tendency to victimize “the Muslim woman” rather than to encourage Muslim women’s participation in the public debate about their lives. This contribution to the study of discourses on Muslim women is an analysis of arguments written by Muslims about women’s rights. The data consists of 239 texts written by self-defined Muslims in major Norwegian newspapers about women’s rights. I will discuss two findings from the study. The first is an appeal to be personal when discussing issues of domestic violence and racism is combined with an implicit and explicit demand to represent all Muslims in order to get published in newspapers—which creates an ethno-religious threshold for participation in the public debate. The second finding is that, across different positions and different religious affiliations, from conservative to nearly secular, and across the timeline, from 2000 to 2012, there is a dominant understanding of women’s rights as individual autonomy. These findings will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives to explore how arguments for individual autonomy can both challenge and amplify neoliberal agendas.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Syeda Mehmoona Khushbakht ◽  
Munazza Sultana

In Pakistan, although women’s activism was initiated since the country came into existence, but a diverse activism was observed by the nation in the form of ‘Aurat March during 2018-2020. The current study examines the Western feminism, what it was initiated for and its accomplishments in the current time. By employing a discourse analysis approach to the ‘Aurat March event, this study highlights the women’s activism in Pakistan, ‘Aurat March and the antipathy faced by organizers and supporters from the public because of its strange slogans and ridiculous placards. It also observes the relationship between western feminism and ‘Aurat March activism from the perspective of the social, cultural, and religious transformation of society. The study finds the need to raise a constructive and logical voice for women’s rights with support of the public to eradicate social evils instead of focusing on insignificant matters. It has further recommended that there is a need to build a framework in which one may be able to differentiate women’s rights in the context of western feminism and the limitation of women’s emancipation in Islamic context.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document