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The Centre for Law, Religion and Society (CLRS) and the Irish Centre for Human Rights (ICHR) are pleased to host the third lecture in the Gender and Human Rights Lecture Series, featuring Dr Mobeen Hussain (University of York, UK) and Dr Nazife Kosukoğlu (University of Galway, ERC-funded BILQIS Project).

Title: Wives, Strangers, and Subjects: Marriage Law and Gendered Control in South Asia and Turkey

Date: Wednesday, 5 November 2025
Time: 1:00 – 2:30 pm
Venue: CA005, Áras Cairnes, University of Galway
Online: Register via Zoom

Session Overview

This joint lecture brings together two historians whose research interrogates how marriage law has functioned as a mechanism of governance, intimacy, and gendered control across distinct yet resonant contexts - South Asia and Turkey.

Through the lenses of colonial and post-colonial legal systems, Dr Mobeen Hussain and Dr Nazife Kosukoğlu explore how the regulation of conjugality shaped social hierarchies, economic relations, and women’s bodily autonomy. Their dialogue invites reflection on how legal regimes both reflect and reproduce social norms, and how women’s lived experiences continually reshape these frameworks.

Dr Mobeen Hussain will discuss “Contesting conjugality and reforming the marriage market: gender, marriage, and law in late colonial and postcolonial India.”
Her work examines how nineteenth- and twentieth-century debates on consent, child marriage, widow remarriage, and dowry were framed within the colonial encounter and emerging Indian national imaginaries. By analysing legislative debates and matrimonial advertisements, she reveals how the ideal of the “modern wife” was produced through legal discourse and popular media, blending social reform with economic and moral anxieties.

Dr Nazife Kosukoğlu will present “A Husband and a Stranger All at Once: Unofficial Marriages, Gendered Authority and Vulnerability.”
Drawing on her extensive study of more than 8,000 Turkish Court of Cassation cases, she analyses how unofficial religious marriages (imam nikâhı) are alternately criminalised and validated through what she calls “selective recognition.” Her research traces how this ambivalence entrenches masculine authority, excludes women from key legal protections, and reveals the constitutive power of law in shaping even those practices deemed “outside” it.

Together, the two talks offer a comparative conversation on the legal and social governance of marriage—how states and communities define legitimacy, and how women navigate and resist those definitions.

Speaker Bios

Dr Mobeen Hussain (BA York, MA York, PhD Cantab) is a Wellcome Trust Early Career Research Fellow at the University of York. Her research examines colonial legacies of consumption, material and literary cultures, and economic exploitation, focusing on intersections of race, caste, gender, medicine, and corporeal consumption in South Asia. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Cambridge and has held research fellowships at Trinity College Dublin and University College Oxford.

Dr Nazife Kosukoğlu (Nadezhda A. Mihaylova Polatel) is a Postdoctoral Researcher on the ERC-funded BILQIS Project at the University of Galway. Her current work examines gender, law, and authority in Ottoman and modern Turkish contexts, building on her doctoral research on gender violence and criminal law in Turkey (Boğaziçi University, Atatürk Institute for Modern Turkish History). She is the recipient of the Şirin Tekeli Research Encouragement Award and the Yeliz Dönmez Award for Best Dissertation. Her broader interests include gender regimes, socio-legal history, and the intersections of violence and intimacy. This presentation draws on her ongoing BILQIS research.