Publicação
Negotiating power between literature and law: Unity Dow’s women
| Resumo: | Unity Dow is a writer, former judge, and well-known human rights lawyer from Botswana. In feminist legal studies, Dow is associated with her ground-breaking court battle, commonly known as The Citizenship Case. Dow claims the law to be conceptually male, which has resulted in discriminatory legislation against women in Botswana. Within Literary Studies, law and literature research suggests that fiction can be a meaningful venue in the struggle for human rights. The novels of Unity Dow offer a reading of the interconnection between women’s empowerment through education and progressive development of their constitutional literacy. Dow identifies and investigates some of the means whereby women have been disempowered. These include customary law and common law, which have concertedly relegated women to a position of subservience to the established male order, where financial dependence and insufficient legal visibility facilitate gender discrimination and social injustice. Dow’s protagonists are young, educated or fairly educated, and highly motivated. These resources, however, do not guarantee their causes complete success. Dow’s writing suggests significant political unwillingness to identify and act against men in morally undeserving positions of power. Dow is, therefore, only partly optimistic in her approach to the struggle against gender discriminatory behaviour and child abuse as represented in her novels. Dow’s women are met with inflexible notions of masculinity and femininity, asymmetric gender and economic power dynamics, and organised networks of exploitation and abuse no country in free of. That being the case, Dow has joined writers from every continent who have through literature pushed for change. |
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| Autores principais: | Bscaia, Dulce Paula Pimentel |
| Assunto: | Unity Dow Law and literature Feminist legal studies Women’s empowerment Child abuse Social justice |
| Ano: | 2023 |
| País: | Portugal |
| Tipo de documento: | tese de doutoramento |
| Tipo de acesso: | acesso aberto |
| Instituição associada: | Universidade de Aveiro |
| Idioma: | inglês |
| Origem: | RIA - Repositório Institucional da Universidade de Aveiro |
| Resumo: | Unity Dow is a writer, former judge, and well-known human rights lawyer from Botswana. In feminist legal studies, Dow is associated with her ground-breaking court battle, commonly known as The Citizenship Case. Dow claims the law to be conceptually male, which has resulted in discriminatory legislation against women in Botswana. Within Literary Studies, law and literature research suggests that fiction can be a meaningful venue in the struggle for human rights. The novels of Unity Dow offer a reading of the interconnection between women’s empowerment through education and progressive development of their constitutional literacy. Dow identifies and investigates some of the means whereby women have been disempowered. These include customary law and common law, which have concertedly relegated women to a position of subservience to the established male order, where financial dependence and insufficient legal visibility facilitate gender discrimination and social injustice. Dow’s protagonists are young, educated or fairly educated, and highly motivated. These resources, however, do not guarantee their causes complete success. Dow’s writing suggests significant political unwillingness to identify and act against men in morally undeserving positions of power. Dow is, therefore, only partly optimistic in her approach to the struggle against gender discriminatory behaviour and child abuse as represented in her novels. Dow’s women are met with inflexible notions of masculinity and femininity, asymmetric gender and economic power dynamics, and organised networks of exploitation and abuse no country in free of. That being the case, Dow has joined writers from every continent who have through literature pushed for change. |
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