Gender, Law, and Power

This volume opens a dialogue between the Global-South and the Global North by exploring gender-based oppression and deprivation across different registers of power, entitlement, privilege, discrimination, exclusion, and deprivation. It pays close attention to the different dimensions of power-relations that perpetrate inequality and discrimination through distinct intersections of race, class, gender, caste, nation, culture, religion, sexual orientation, and social and economic disparity, and examines multiple struggles for rights, recognition, inclusion, dignity and justice, channeled through social movements and claims made upon the law and the state. Instead of taking the South and the North as self-evident and coherent discursive and political concept-entities, the volume brings legal, gender and feminist studies scholars and activists, anthropologists, historians, and social scientists concerned with injustice, oppression and discrimination from across the globe on the multiple meanings and varied dimensions of the South and the North as they get articulated in the intersecting axes of power, violence and oppression in everyday practices. The volume critically considers patriarchy and the liberal idea of emancipation, keeping in mind ‘non-liberal’ feminine and non-binary subjects located in different parts of the world, and complements and extends feminist perspectives and understandings. Contributions deal with critical race, Global-South, anti-colonial and postcolonial feminisms that seriously engage with what it considers to be the North and conjunctions and disjunctions between the South and the North in articulations of male-centric, capitalist and other forms of violence and domination that shore-up vulnerability and dispossession. Considered accounts of the multi-layered gender-based inequality in the North and its juxtaposition with the South are included. Apart from making visible and denouncing the oppression, violence and the injustice, the volume also considers the agency of women and gender-diverse and marginalized persons, i.e. points to the many alternatives and proposals that oppressed populations articulate within the landscape of Global North-Global South relationships.