CANCELLED: Working the Tools of the Trade: Designing Research to Study Religion and Culture in Indian Gender and Sexuality Cases

Whether it is abortion, surrogacy, same-sex relations, sex work, marital rape, or beauty pageants, all of them have two things in common: they concern gender and sexuality, and they arouse potent religious and cultural feeling. As feminists, we are familiar with the utterly important work our foremothers have done to deconstruct judicial rulings on these matters. And as public lawyers, we are also aware of critiques from liberalism and secularism that these judgments draw. And while all these critiques are valid, they rely on the 'whack-a-mole' approach of identifying cases we study, and are based on a few 'landmark' decisions-- a manifestation of our methodologically cheeky approach as legal scholars. 

But what if we tried to design research in a more systematic way to catch all the cases on our research question (a task made undoubtedly difficult by the astounding number of judgments in the Indian court system)? Could this endeavour reveal more insights to what is happening in gender and sexuality cases? Yes, it could. Could it make us aware of more legal tools we already have at our disposal to push back? Yes, it could. Could it show us the multifaceted role that religion and culture play, in not just contracting, but also expanding human rights? Also yes. 

In this talk, I discuss my research design (for my upcoming monograph) on assembling cases that rouse religious and cultural contestations and for studying them systematically to reveal legal phenomena that have been missed. Powered by insights from cultural psychoanalysis, feminist legal theory, systematic content analysis, and plain old constitutional and political theory, the idea is to innovate a framework for judges and scholars to work out what to 'do' with religious and cultural claims when they arise (disproportionately, though not exclusively) in gender and sexuality cases. 

Surabhi Shukla works on law and sexuality with a focus on India. She is interested in exploring the social afterlife of legal judgments and the lived experiences of legal institutions. Her work has recently been cited in the Indian Supreme Court’s judicial training manual on LGBTQIA+ issues. For the last six years she has been blogging on SOGI cases in Indian courts: www.lawandsexuality.com. In 2014 she conducted a year-long study on the experiences of gender non-conforming students in Indian schools through a IASSCS Emerging Scholars’ Fellowship: https://genderdiversityinschools.com/. At Sheffield, she has launched the Lectures on Gender and Sexuality in the winter of 2023 with the aim of informing public debate through research.

She also has a sustained interest in traditional constitutional law in which she completed her doctorate. Her doctoral dissertation looked at the prevalence of religious and cultural claims at the frontiers of fundamental rights—same-sex marriage, euthanasia, surrogacy, sex-work and so on. This work is currently being revised for publication. 

She is committed to working with queer communities and in that regard has had the opportunity to work with the ACLU, The Williams Institute, and The Centre for Justice, Law and Society (CJLS) at the Jindal University in India. Before coming to the UK in 2016, she was an Assistant Professor and Assistant Director of the CJLS at Jindal and worked at the Indian Supreme Court and Jagori, the latter one of the oldest women’s rights NGOs in India. Before coming over to Sheffield, she was a lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University between 2021 and 2022 and taught as a Senior Teaching Fellow at SOAS from 2021-2023.

Adrija Ghosh is studying for a DPhil in Law. Her thesis studies minority cultural rights under the Indian Constitution. She read for the BCL at Oxford before moving on to the DPhil and has an undergraduate degree from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences (WBNUJS). At Oxford, she co-convenes the Bonavero Graduate Discussion Forum. Her studies are funded by the Rhodes Scholarship. 

Mihika is a DPhil candidate in law at the University of Oxford. She is undertaking research on legal recognition of personal identities, including race, sex/gender and caste. Mihika completed the MPhil in Law in 2021 working on legal regulation of gender identity, and obtained the Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) with Distinction on a Rhodes Scholarhsip. Mihika is also a qualified Indian lawyer and university medallist from the West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, India, where she completed her B.A. LL.B. (Hons.) in 2019.