Judges of Normality: Mediating Marriage in the Family Courts of Kolkata, India

Abstract

When legal reform proceeding from feminist movement demands is institutionalized in courts, there may nevertheless be distinct gaps in delivering substantive gender justice. Can feminist reform be enacted through agents who may be resistant to feminist critiques of marriage? This paper evaluates feminist legal reform around marriage by profiling lawyer-free, mediation-based family courts in Kolkata, India, a much-touted experiment in alternate dispute resolution alleged to provide direct and less alienating access to the law for marginalized subjects. Through an ethnography of everyday adjudication, it maps the new modes of mediation that judges and counselors (paralegals or social workers, not lawyers) proudly foreground, in which they see themselves providing better kinship through law and protecting women’s economic interests while keeping families intact. But these scripts reveal the difficulties of stepping outside gendered norms of permissible legal agency, appropriate class behaviors, the degree of violence tolerated, and conjugal authority. The women’s movement itself has become deeply divided around whether lawyer-free venues are better for gender justice given judges’ increased authority and minimization of the violence women experience. In this article I argue that while both law and marriage have been deeply gendered sites of subordination and while one experiment in altered modes of speaking and adjudication cannot change the valences of marriage law, feminists must continue to push for changes in the legal system.