Paper short abstract:

This paper emphasizes the necessity to look beyond a positive law and the articulation of women's rights within it. The paper takes instead the perspective of legal pluralism that turns out to be crucial to understand women's agency within family disputes in India.

Paper long abstract:

This paper addresses the limits of state power and the role of non-state actors in negotiations of women's rights within family disputes in rural South India. Taking a perspective of legal pluralism, this paper emphasizes the need to look beyond a positive law and how women's rights are articulated within it, and shows how this is crucial for understanding women's agency within family disputes. For a long time in debates about gender justice and law in India, women's movements blamed either the so-called traditional values and patriarchy embodied in Religious Personal Laws or the state's inability to implement its laws on discrimination against women. These positions are based strongly on a liberal faith in state institutions and the rule of law and, at the same time, reveal feminists' and women activists' ambivalent relationship to the state. This paper instead focuses on the entanglement of everyday life and the practice of law in order to illustrate women's active part in configuring the social transformation of unequal gender and power relations in marriage and the family. Based on interviews and participant observations made during a seven months fieldwork in Karnataka, this paper argues that women's agency in family disputes is governed by state and non-state actors and is negotiated in various legal settings, under diverse types of norms and morals aside from the state. Accordingly, this paper highlights the necessity to take into account legal forums and actors beyond the state, which allows women's gendered and plural legal realities to be addressed.