Hierarchical relations between men and women are maintained, resisted, and transformed in large part through legal processes. Legal consciousness plays a critically important role in the dynamics of gender domination and its resistance by women. This project aims to increase understanding of how legal consciousness is shaped in historically and culturally specific contexts and to assess its complex role in the transformation of gender relations in the late twentieth century. The project uses ethnographic methods combined with techniques of discourse analysis developed in the law and language literature to examine the impact of globally significant ideologies on legal consciousness and gender relations in two East African communities. The project is centrally concerned with examining how two ideologies, feminism and Islamic fundamentalism, shape the legal consciousness of Swahili Muslims in coastal Kenya and Tanzania. The project explores (l) how globally significant ideologies are instantiated at state and local levels, through institutions associated with law, Islam, and women, and events such as conferences, speeches, and media portrayals; (2) how legal consciousness is shaped through encounters with global ideologies mediated through Islamic and secular courts as well as through community organizations; and (3) how gender relations in Swahili society reflect shifts in legal consciousness and the struggle over ideology more generally in the post-colonial period. Of particular concern is the hypothesized contrast between the two communities with respect to the impact of these ideologies and the transformation of gender relations. This contrast should be useful in developing a theoretical model--attentive to local and global phenomena--of the complex interaction among globally significant ideologies, legal consciousness, and gender relations.
