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Madhu Mehra, "Exploring the Boundaries of Law, Gender
and Social Reform", Feminist Legal Studies VI/1 (1998), 59-83:
This article explores the relationship between law, gender and social reform
through the legal discourse on dowry and domestic violence in India. Its
principal sources are statutory and case law (from the High Court and the
Supreme Court) on the criminal side between 1983 to 1996. The article argues
for re-examining the centrality of law in the feminist struggle for social
reform, in view of the inherent limitations and character of law. It examines
the ways in which legal discourse reproduces traditional socialised constructions
of both dowry and domestic violence, thereby legitimising a degree of the
problem that was sought to be corrected through legal intervention in the
first place. The process of intervening has also led to the construction
of the socialised gendered woman in law. Upon this seemingly universal category
of the gendered woman, the legal discourse has created different types of
women based upon aspects of their identity in addition to gender. While
some types of women are extolled as embodying the natural and ideal qualities
of womanhood, thereby deserving of legal redress, there are other types
who emerge as flawed when measured against the ideal woman, and therefore
deprecated for abusing the process of the law. Feminist engagement with
the law needs to be aware of the inherent power of law to appropriate to
itself the authority of constructing the problem, in a way that largely
parallels the socialised understanding and displaces the feminist and sociological
versions of the problem; further, it must be aware that even progressive
law cannot be uniformly liberatory for all women, as it treats different
types of women differentially.
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