FINDING THE MASCULINITY IN “NEUTRAL” LAWS
Downloads
Abstract
One presumption common to all feminist theories is that “gender” is a social construct, i.e. it cannot be determined biologically but rather is learnt through various social and behavioural norms that are present in the society. The institution of family performs an extremely crucial function in understanding the meaning of gender in our society by appropriating different roles and functions to men and women. India, with its rich and diverse cultural heritage, religious beliefs, and customary practices, provides an extremely complex field of personal laws. Family as an institution, especially in India, has always been considered as something so pure and sacred, demanding privacy and freedom from any sort of public scrutiny. Most of the family laws in India, are based on religious texts, which in turn are based on ‘divine origins’; thus any sort of criticism towards these laws will always be fraught with risk. However, feminism’s principle contribution to the law of family has been to open up this institution to criticisms. By propagating the agenda of “Personal is Political”2, they seek to question the fairness of a system that has, since its inception, permitted the subordination of some family members over the others.
External References to this Article
Loading reference data...
License Terms
Ownership and Licensing:
Authors of research papers submitted to any journal published by The Law Brigade Publishers retain the copyright of their work while granting the journal specific rights. Authors maintain ownership of the copyright and grant the journal the right of first publication. Simultaneously, authors agree to license their research papers under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) License.
License Permissions:
Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 License, others are permitted to share and adapt the work, even for commercial purposes, provided that appropriate attribution is given to the authors, and acknowledgment is made of the initial publication by The Law Brigade Publishers. This license encourages the broad dissemination and reuse of research papers while ensuring that the original work is properly credited.
Additional Distribution Arrangements:
Authors are free to enter into separate, non-exclusive contractual arrangements for distributing the published version of the work (e.g., posting it to institutional repositories or publishing it in books), provided that the original publication by The Law Brigade Publishers is acknowledged.
Online Posting:
Authors are encouraged to share their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on personal websites) both prior to submission and after publication. This practice can facilitate productive exchanges and increase the visibility and citation of the work.
Responsibility and Liability:
Authors are responsible for ensuring that their submitted research papers do not infringe on the copyright, privacy, or other rights of third parties. The Law Brigade Publishers disclaims any liability for any copyright infringement or violation of third-party rights within the submitted research papers.
Published
Issue
Section
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Copyright © 2026 by Isha Malik
The copyright and license terms mentioned on this page take precedence over any other license terms mentioned on the article full text PDF or any other material associated with the article.
