Knowledge Integration Seminar
Veiled Muslim Women: Challenging patriarchy in the Canadian legal system
While I was in law school, I wrote a paper called Veiled Muslim Women: Challenging patriarchy in the legal system. It explores the idea of objectivity in the law, seeking to challenge objectivity as an ideal, and creating a case for perhaps rejecting it, altogether. I do this by looking at two Canadian cases, that of Ishaq v. Citizenship and Immigration Canada, which was about a woman who wanted to take her Canadian citizenship oath while wearing the niqab, or full face veil, and the case of R. v. N.S., in which a Muslim woman was barred from giving testimony about her own sexual assault while wearing her niqab. My analysis investigates what legal projections of veiled Muslim women might reveal about the operation of patriarchy in the Canadian legal system, and what we can learn about how the social and political context in which law-making takes place.
Zainab Ramahi graduated from KI in 2015 (Copenhagen I) and from Berkeley Law in 2019. She is passionate about social, political, and economic justice and is outspoken on issues relating to settler colonialism. She is currently clerking for a federal judge in the US.
Friday, September 25, 2020
1-2:30pm
online: students access link via their LEARN calendar
Friends and visitors are welcome at this public talk! visitor registration