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Description of  Kinship, Patriarchal Structure and Women s Bargaining with Patriarchy in Rural Sindh, Pakistan (Gender, Sexualities and Culture in Asia)

The book provides insights into the prevailing patriarchal system in rural Pakistan. It elaborates on the kinship system in rural Sindh and explores how young married women strategize and negotiate with patriarchy. Drawing on qualitative methodologies, the book reveals the strong relationship between poverty and the perpetuation of patriarchy. Womens strategies help elevate their position in their families, such as attention to household tasks, producing children, and doing handicraft work for their well-being. These conditions are usually seen as evidence of womens subordination, but these are also strategies for survival where accommodation to patriarchy wins them approval. The book concludes that womens life-long struggle is, in fact, a technique of negotiating with patriarchy. In so doing, they internalize the culture that rests on their subordination and reproduce it in older age in exercising power by oppressing other junior women. Read more