Session #6: Sunday, 11 January, 10.00 - 11.45 (CSLG)
Panel coordinator(s): Uma Chakravarti, Feminist Historian, Delhi (umafam@gmail.com)
Chair/discussant: Sara Hossain, Advocate, Supreme Court of Bangladesh (hossains@citechco.net)
Panel description
Panelists, paper titles, and abstracts
This panel will bring together activists and scholars who have engaged with concepts of domestic and custodial violence in order to examine how claims to citizenship are structured in the domestic realm. The circulation of the category of honour crimes has produced disturbing efforts: while the judiciary has placed ‘honour crimes’ outside the framework of national patriarchies, police sociology has used the category to sexualise ‘children’s’ bodies in India by treating women as ‘minors’ requiring the protection of guardians—parents, or the state as ‘in loco parentis’, supposedly acting on their behalf, in recovering women who have made marriages of choice. The panel will subject the opacity of the category of honour crimes to critical scrutiny. Taking a cue from Pakistani feminists whose slogan ‘there is no honour in honour crimes’ offers a critique to the naming of such forms of violence against women; we start with the premise that the naming of ‘honour crimes’ is an ethnographic category that circulates among perpetrators, witnesses and victims. It is a category that is translated into the law against those subjects who reject specific patriarchal forms of governance by the family, community or caste. The criminalising of choice marriages provides a route to disciplining and punishing those who transgress such forms of governance in South Asia. The threat of detention and custodial violence, which marks the alliance between policing practices of the family and the state, remain central to our analysis of the normalisation of the politics of honour by drawing attention to the politics of naming violence against women through using the categories of honour. The panel brings to our attention the fact that while thinking of how to re-name the ethnographic category of honour crimes we must remember that the category always brings together custodial violence with domestic violence, and therefore must be seen together. We bring together a set of papers that converse with comparative legal traditions in South Asia.
This paper explores and offers an analysis of so-called “honour”-based crimes, arguing that they are crimes of violence against women rather than gender-neutral cultural practices. The paper thus explores the relationship between gender and violence in communities where “honour”-based crimes are committed, beginning by focusing on the status of women in South Asian communities before considering other contexts in which “honour”-based crimes are practiced. The paper then analyzes the criminal justice response to the issue over the last ten years, exemplified by a unique round-table discussion held in 2007 following the murder of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Banaz Mahmod. Case descriptions are used throughout the paper to illuminate how the concept of ‘honour’ is used to mediate gendercidal violence, demonstrating how the official UK response is often at variance with the day-to-day reality of “honour”- based violence. The paper concludes by recommending strategies for reducing this type of violence in the UK.
During the last decade or more, a series of high profile cases of violent killings of women who either chose to marry without parental approval or tried to exit bad marriages have drawn the attention of the media, and civil society; conflicting opinions were expressed on the validity of marriages without parental approval and the matter was taken to the courts which ruled, somewhat reluctantly, that such marriages were valid. Another case that has challenged both civil society and the courts is that of a young couple who sought the protection of the courts; the young husband had surgically changed his gender from female to male. The courts responded in different ways, the lower court charged the young man with perjury for lying to the court about his gender and sent him to judicial custody, the Supreme Court was more sympathetic and granted him bail pending ruling on the substantive issues raised by the case. The presentation will focus on the responses that the case generated, in the media, in public opinion and among human rights and women's rights groups, and outline the complex and unexpected dimensions of these responses.
This particular paper will look at case law, testimonies and activists narratives around cases of Habeas Corpus involving Queer women and analyse it at multiple levels. It will make a comment on the position of queer women and the law in India; look at the construction of the body of the queer woman and her relationship within the court room and in the legal sphere on the whole; the definitions of the ‘state’ will get challenged in this context. Through this analysis we will broaden the meanings of ‘custodial violence’ within the legal sphere and will look at it not within the strict terms of violence perpetrated by state bodies alone but also by family which often espouses the arguments of the state machinery. It will be as much a recording of the history of queer women and the law as well as a theoretical analysis of the legal position of queer women and its implications on their lives, on queer struggles and on the writing of theory around feminist jurisprudence in India.