Lisa Joffe

This book provides new, feminist perspectives on famous family law cases that span generations. The chapters take court decisions and rewrite them with feminist ideas in mind. Each rewritten opinion is penned by a leading scholar who relied only on materials available at the time of the original decision. The decisions address topics such as the criminalization of polygamy, intimate partner violence as a ground for asylum, the legality of gestational surrogacy, the rights of cohabitants, discrimination against transgender parents, immigration rules governing non-citizen parents, and child welfare and child support systems, among others. Each opinion is accompanied by a commentary that explains the original opinion as well as its contemporary relevance, and each commentary also is authored by a respected scholar. The combination of a rewritten opinion and its commentary provides an in-depth examination of the most important topics in family law.

This volume explores a variety of ’harmful cultural practices’: a term increasingly employed by organizations working within a human rights framework to refer to certain discriminatory practices against women in the global South. Drawing on recent work by feminists across the social sciences, as well as activists from around the world, this volume discusses and presents research on practices such as veiling, forced marriage, honour related and dowry violence, female genital ’mutilation’, lip plates and sex segregation in public space. With attention to the analytic utility of the notion of harmful cultural practices, this volume explores questions surrounding the contribution of feminist thought to international and NGO policies on such practices, whether western beauty practices should be analysed in similar terms, or should the notion as such from an anthropological perspective be rejected, how harmful cultural practices relate to processes of culturalization, religionization and secularization, and how they can be challenged, come to transform and disappear. Presenting concrete, empirical case studies from Africa, South East Asia, Europe and the UK Interrogating Harmful Cultural Practices will be of interest to scholars of sociology, anthropology, development and law with interests in gender, the body, violence and women’s agency.

In many regions of the world, rights guaranteed under the civil law, including rights to gender equality within marriage and rights in the distribution of family property and child custody upon divorce, are in conflict with the principles of religious law. Women’s rights issues are often at the heart of these tensions, which present pressing challenges for theorists, lawyers, and policymakers. This anthology brings together leading scholars and activists doing innovative work in Jewish law, Muslim law, Christian law, and African customary law. Using examples drawn from a variety of nations and religions, they interrogate the utility of recent theoretical models for engaging with gender and multicultural conflicts, explore contextual differences, and analyze and celebrate stories of successful initiatives that have transformed legal and cultural norms to improve women’s lives.

In Setswana, the word for “polygyny” is lefufa. It also means “jealousy.” Mogadikane, the word for “co-wife” is derived from the verb meaning “to rival, annoy, or cause a pain in the stomach.”² Women complain that polygyny breeds insecurity, hostility, and witchcraft among those who find themselves in competition for their shared husband’s scarce economic and emotional resources.³ Polygyny brings with it both the humiliation of being supplanted in their husband’s affections and anxiety over access to school fees and improved housing.⁴ In many cases, women find themselves involved in a polygamous relationship without their knowledge or consent. Women outside