The conference organizers invite scholars to consider women’s imaginings of the court in royal and legal contexts between the 16th and the 20th centuries. Scholarship has produced significant studies on royal courts, legal offices, court cases, and women’s roles and agency in these spheres. However, little attempt has been made to think the space of the court capaciously across time and polities, both in royal residences and law tribunals. The court – understood as e.g., darbār, dīvān or ʿadālat – unfolded multiple discourses displaying plural realities and imaginations of power. In its manifold compositions, the court served to legitimate the state authority, since the virtue of ʿadl or justice can be embodied in the personae of the king or of the judge. By drawing attention to the terminology of the court, its diverse definitions and overlapping functions, the conference intends to trace the production of variegated spaces and relations to authority in addressing “the conundrum of sovereignty” (Gilmartin, 2015) and the vexed notion of justice. In its architecture, the court refers to an enclosed yard which rests on visible coding of space alongside norms, values and status circumscribing a male-dominated arena. Beyond the idea of a more or less static composition, we seek to read the court in its dynamic dimension as a site continuously produced in a dialectical process between sovereign authority and women’s commentaries. We ask in what ways this dialectic might help define the court as a protean space that exceeds physical contingency (Lefebvre, 1974), allows pluralistic experiences (Foucault, 1984) and destabilizes the web of power-based social relationship of the court (Bourdieu, 1984). For they participated in creating the space of the court, we seek to uncover women’s imaginaries of the court which challenged, negotiated, or reformulated sovereign authorities. We hope to provide a spatial hermeneutic of the court in foregrounding women’s critical voices emerging from arenas of debate located both within and outside the court.
