Analysing The Subjectivity Caused By Semiotic And Symbolic Structures In Religious Fundamentalism

Analysing The Subjectivity Caused By Semiotic And Symbolic Structures In Religious Fundamentalism In Spain In The Last Century With Regards To Women’s Property Rights As Theorised By Julia Kristeva

Samhita R.H. Nidigattu, Law Graduate from OP Jindal University, Sonipat, Haryana and an LLM Candidate at the University of Dayton, Ohio

ABSTRACT

This paper attempts to analyze the subjectivity caused by semiotic and symbolic structures in religious fundamentalism in Spain in the 20th century with regards to women’s property rights.

We examine the effect of the global feminist movements in the recent century and their effect and role in transforming the law towards gender equality in Spain. It is an attempt to examine the inheritance laws with a psychoanalytic feminist lens. It aims to map the journey of Spain from a patriarchal society to one striving for gender equality and feminist progress.

Used in this paper are contentions by Julia Kristeva about the material body and its functions and the views on a women’s body and the roles associated to it and how they affect women’s rights. Her most influential work ‘Subjectivity as a process’ talks about the basis on which we construct a notion of selfhood and ‘Revolution in Poetic Language’ between the semiotic and the symbolic which expands on how language plays a role in placing the individual in a gendered symbolic system.

Spain is majorly Catholic as a country and therefore catholicism holds a lot of religious influence over their practices and laws, mapped in this paper is the progress of this country from orthodox laws to a secular laws free from religious influences of the Catholic Church and their ideas of subjugation of women in their various roles viewed through the lens of Julia Kristeva.