Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
1117498063
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
Author
Harboun, Claris,
Title
Lawbreaking as lawmaking : redefining women's everyday resistances to injustice
Degree
D.C.L. -- McGill University, 2019
Publisher
[Montreal] : McGill University Libraries, [2019]
Description
1 online resource
Notes
Thesis supervisor: Shauna Van Praagh (Supervisor).
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
"In this thesis, I offer a new understanding of lawbreaking, particularly when committed by women belonging to racially and/or ethnically oppressed minorities, and especially in cases that do not fall within the traditional criteria of civil disobedience. I interpret their lawbreaking as a legitimate manifestation of resistance, aimed at correcting injustices, and as a viable form of lawmaking, capable of jurisgenerating, to use Robert Cover's term: creating legal meanings and mobilizing socio-legal change and reconciliation. Shifting the focus from the big, 'meta' and 'heroic' stories of mass disobedience committed in public by politically motivated people, my thesis suggests paying attention to the daily, 'small', private, and secret forms of 'everyday resistances' committed by women. These cases could be as intimate and covert as a woman putting makeup on her face under a burqa. Using the body as a legal site of defiance, the thesis particularly focuses on two contexts in which it explores women's resistance and agency: a) Lawbreaking and resistance through land in Israel, namely squatting in public housing by Mizrahi women in Israel; and b) Resistance 'through the womb, ' by women having abortions in Canada, pre-and post-Morgentaler. Taking in particular a critical legal pluralist approach, shifting and deepening the focus from state law to society to the individual herself, the thesis focuses on women's jurisgenerative capacity to both transform state law, and/or create their own laws. Lawmaking is demonopolized, so that the state is not the sole 'producer', and 'the turning point' in the creation of legal meanings. However, unlike other critical approaches to law, the thesis does not offer various interpretations to law and legal phenomena from within state law, offering the theoretical and analytical means for interpreting the meaning of women's voice and agency in, or about, the law. Rather, the thesis approaches women's acts as law/s, as legal narratives in and of themselves, capable of creating legal meanings, and changing and altering the meaning of what we perceive as law."--
Other link(s)
digitool.Library.McGill.CA
escholarship.mcgill.ca
escholarship.mcgill.ca
Subject
Law