CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Frolova, Ekaterina Viktorovna |
|---|---|
| Title | Tajik Women's Experiences with Arranged Marriages |
| Summary | The standard causal approach to understanding and explaining Tajik women’s lives, especially in matters concerning marriage and family life, leaves them as agents out of the picture. Thus, Tajik women often disappear as agents of their own lives from the more general context of events occurring to them. The aim of this thesis was to explore Tajik women’s experiences with arranged marriages and identify the ways in which they exercise their individual choices and deal with a variety of “oppressive” situations related to their marriage. With this purpose, I interviewed eight women from Tajikistan, ranging in age from twenty-two to sixty eight and from different social and economic backgrounds. The main questions this work attempted to answer were: how do Tajik women deal with arranged marriages? What are the ways in which they exercise their agency? What coping strategies and techniques do they use in order to resist dominant power structures that tend to oppress them? How do they manage to (re)establish their power in situations that are basically turned against them? In order to answer my research questions and provide an in-depth account on Tajik women’s agency, I have placed my study into a conceptual framework based on Giddens’ structuration theory and Meyer’s approach to reconstructing women’s agency. This thesis therefore, was an attempt to challenge the victimization discourses about Tajik women and investigate the coping strategies and techniques that these women adopt and use in order to obtain (more) power. |
| Supervisor | Francisca de Haan |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/frolova_ekaterina.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University