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Comparative Law, Anti-essentialism and Intersectionality: Reflections from Southeast Asia in Search of an Elusive Balance

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 May 2015

Arif A. Jamal
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Abstract

This paper explores the paradox of diversity and similarity within legal “traditions”. More particularly, in looking especially at comparative law scholarship on Southeast Asia, it asks if there are any lessons that comparative law theory can learn about how to account for commonality and difference in large and diverse contexts from the perspectives of intersectionality and anti-essentialism that have been developed in feminist scholarship. The paper concludes that feminist scholarship does not resolve the paradox that comparative legal study makes evident but that it does make us better realise the importance of open-textured “narratives of affinity” and “contingent classification” in legal contexts.

Keywords

comparative law theorySoutheast Asiafeminism
Type
Articles
Information
Asian Journal of Comparative Law , Volume 9: Special Issue: Socio-Legal Research on Southeast Asia: Themes, Directions, and Challenges , 1 January 2014 , pp. 197 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore 2014

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References

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28 I draw this phrase from Werner Menski’s, Comparative Law in a Global World: The Legal Systems of Asia and Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: CUP, 2006).

29 Of course, Southeast Asia is itself a contentious category but this is like other geographical groupings (South Asia, West Asia, the Indian Ocean etc.). See on this “Introduction” in King, Victor T., ed., The Sociology of Southeast Asia: Transformations in a Developing Region (Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2008).Google Scholar

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32 Ibid.

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34 Modood (1998), supra note 18 at 382.