Joyce Das

Joyce Das completed her PhD on gender and religious minority women in postcolonial Bangladesh. Before this, she undertook ANU’s Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development, with a gender specialisation. Joyce brings a decade-long experience working in the development sector in Bangladesh, first with the World Bank and later the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) of Bangladesh. While working as the National General Secretary of the YWCA of Bangladesh, Joyce held a senior managerial position in contributing at the organisational policy and strategy formulation level.

Research: South Asian women from minority religious communities are subject to multiple laws and normative orders, which together comprise a situation of legal pluralism. Laws both constrain and liberate the lives of these women, affecting gender equality in an intimate and complex manner. My ethnographic research seeks to explore whether minority religious communities’ personal and family laws may or may not be contributing towards gender (in)equality in different social, economic and cultural contexts. The focus of my attention is the Christian community in Bangladesh. I argue that socio-political complexities combined with the historical legacies of the Partition of India have created an impasse that is particular to the Bangladeshi context. Consequently, the question of gender equality remains elusive for many women from religious minority communities. The research examines if legal pluralism is robust enough as an analytical framework for understanding gender and the law in South Asia and contribute to the growing body of literature on this field.