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Remaking Law: Gender, Ethnography, and Legal Discourse

Review products

Hirsch Susan F., Pronouncing and Persevering: Gender and the Discourses of Disputing in an African Islamic Court. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. xix + 360 pages. $48.00 cloth; $19.00 paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Anne Griffiths
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Extract

In her book Susan Hirsch explores how Swahili Muslim women in the Kenyan coastal cities of Mombasa and Malindi pursue marital disputes in local Kadhi's (Islamic) courts. Focusing in particular on the Malindi Kadhi's court, Hirsch highlights how Muslim women actively use legal processes to transform the religious and local norms that underlie their disadvantaged position in this Swahili community in postcolonial Kenya. In her microlevel study, based on empirical work featuring court records, court observations, and participation in everyday life in the community, the author offers a nuanced analysis highlighting the ways in which women are both constrained and empowered in this setting where customary law, religious law, Western law, and social norms concerning male and female speech intersect and interact. Although constraints derived from local and religious norms operate to urge compliance with social convention that projects women as persevering wives who should suffer in silence in relation to their pronouncing husbands, some women are, nonetheless, able to negotiate these stereotypes to circumvent male power. Hirsch's study details the process whereby some Muslim women who resist patriarchal norms are silenced while others succeed in transforming the perception of womanhood to their advantage in their disputes with their husbands.

Type
Review Essay
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , 2001 , pp. 495 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © 2001 Law and Society Association.

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