CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Maliha Mohsin |
|---|---|
| Title | Gendered Negotiations for Inheritance between the State and Islam in Bangladesh |
| Summary | In this thesis, I explore the nexus of religion, gender and the citizenship in Bangladesh as legal traditions and reforms for the inheritance of property along familial lineages materialize for gendered peoples through discourses of Islam, kinship, employability and gender. Through my research, I use a decolonial and intersectional approach to chalk out assemblages of discourses and embodiments of gender, as they materialize through and with Islamic discourses and practice, while acknowledging their negotiations in a political reality where the rights, legalities and policies concerning gendered peoples in Bangladesh are affected by the state and its own productive tensions with religious orthodoxy. To do so, I explore the productive tensions between religion, gender and the state on issues of family inheritance in Bangladesh, where the laws of succession are governed by family laws determined by the respective religion of the citizen. I study three different but interconnected discourses in Bangladesh: (i) secular feminist advocacies for family law reforms who seek equal inheritance between men and women, regardless of religion; (ii) discourses surrounding the recognition and inheritance rights of peoples largely identified as “third gender”, who are socially marginalized and dispossessed of kinship and succession but are now being granted protection and rights to claim family inheritance; and (iii) the case study of Cynthia Bhuiyan, a transgender activist and entrepreneur who is also the heir of a Sufi saint in Dhaka. In doing so, I not only demonstrate how different meanings, embodiments and subjectivities of gender and faith are in productive tensions with each other, but also reflect upon the semiotic disjuncture that exists among these discourses. Finally, I conclude, with the help of decolonial feminist theories, that some subjectivities are subalternized by others in these productive tensions with the modern, postcolonial state apparatus. |
| Supervisor | Jones-Gailani, Nadia; Naumescu, Vlad |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/mohsin_maliha.pdf |
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