Normativised misogyny: A socio-legal critique of colonial indentured labour

Abstract

The rise of feminist scholarship has, in recent times, shifted the focus of the indentured labour discourse towards the gendered subaltern analytical framework. This paradigm has unmasked hitherto overlooked nuances of the experiential counter-narratives and issues of women indentured labourers, revealing the double burden of poverty and patriarchal culture on them. This thematic chapter, based on secondary sources, attempts a critical analysis of the then prevailing colonial legal and social matrix of the plantation colonies. The legacy of the dialectic between the institutional normative legal structures on the one hand and the patriarchal social values on the other is examined. The negotiation of status by the women indentured labourers, and the expression of their muliebrity and agency in praxis, for securing more egalitarian social and gender relations has been explored. The complex dichotomy of historical exploitative subjugation of the women indentured labourers, contra the contemporary emancipation, assertiveness and liberated socio-legal status of women in the erstwhile plantation colonies, and present-day post-colonial States, in the Caribbean, Africa and the Indo-Pacific, has been interpreted through the lens of sociological jurisprudence.