Featuring Beth Prosnitz, PhD Student

Department of Sociology, The University of Texas at Austin

This presentation will focus on the women’s property rights movements in the 1990s and 2000s in Nepal. Through an investigation of property rights litigation, the paper shows how Nepal Supreme Court cases challenged dowry laws and laws that restricted married women’s ability to inherit property from their fathers. Lawyers filed these cases a critical time in Nepal’s political history: from 1990 to 2006, Nepal, a Hindu monarchy, experienced both wide-spread democracy activism and an armed conflict between state security forces and the Communist Party of Nepal-Maoist (CPN-M). In 2006, the Nepal government signed a peace agreement with the CPN-M, and in 2008, when its first-ever constituent assembly was elected, the Hindu monarchy ended. Existing narratives of the democratic transition in Nepal treat women’s property rights movements as auxiliary to these larger democratic processes. However, current sociological theory suggests that women’s rights movements are both constrained and enabled by political spheres (Ray 1998), and can be understood as a “politics from below” (Charrad 2014), in which women steer discourses and action on women’s rights. I examine how these Nepal Supreme Court cases were part of a “politics from below,” that was central to the democratic movement and the constitution of political spheres in Nepal.

Beth Prosnitz is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her primary research interests are in the relationships between property rights, citizenship, and social movements in South Asia. Beth earned her BA in Religion from Smith College and MA in International Affairs from the New School.