Senior Research Seminar with Professor Katy Gardner (London School of Economics)

Professor Katy Gardner (London School of Economics)

Based on ethnographic research in a feminist NGO in Dhaka, this paper examines the bureaucratic processes whereby people are classified as victims. In particular, the paper focuses on young women deemed to be ‘marriage victims’, who are held in a secure Safe House on the outskirts of the city. As a fuzz-word and label, ‘victim’ allows out-of-place women and children to be sorted and placed in locations where what Ticktin calls ‘armed love’ generates containment and discipline. As the paper argues, this process allows feminist lawyers to negotiate between the competing demands of patriarchal kinship and Development’s agenda of ‘empowerment’.

Katy Gardner is Professor of Social Anthropology at the London School of Economics. After her undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology at Cambridge (Newnham College) she completed her PhD at the LSE (1990). Since then, she has worked at the University of Kent, the University of Sussex (1993-2013) and the LSE. Her research has focussed on transnational migration between Bangladesh and the UK, childhood and ageing amongst British Bangladeshis, development and the extractive industries and, most recently, marriage trouble and divorce.