Gender Rights vs Personal Laws: Issues and Challenges Meena Gopal* Abstract This paper focuses on feminist articulations situated within the contemporary women’s movement, of the situation of women’s rights vis-à-vis family laws. The contemporary women’s movement struggles emerged forcefully after the Shah Bano judgement of 1984. But with the resurgence of fundamentalist forces of all hues, the women’s movements in India have felt greater necessity to pose gender justice for women outside of the domain of religious identities. Autonomous women’s organisations as well as those organisations that have been working for reform within communities have attempted to campaign for family laws. Over the years, however, an understanding of the pursuit of both paths travelling alongside each another is evident. In the last couple of decades, the emergence of queer movements and struggle for transgender rights have furthered the debate around gender justice, rights in intimate relationships, new ways of imagining families and living arrangements. The criticality to these debates on intimacies and families gaining strength is paralleled in several recent judgements of the courts. Significantly, for a majority of women, marriage is the only means of economic security, but contribution to the household through unpaid and unrecognised labour leaves them without any entitlement in the event of a breakdown of a marriage. Therefore, the focus of laws dealing with the personal realm has to be on providing gender justice, especially ensuring that women’s invisible labour within the domestic (private) sphere is recognised and compensated. 1. Introduction The question of gender rights or the rights of women and other marginalised communities has emerged and been situated in opposition to the rights of communities or group rights. This has especially manifested itself in the debates over personal laws, where the debate has been posited in a manner that privileges group identities and their notions of security and status rather than the rights of individuals, specifically women seeking justice. Personal laws * Dr. Meena Gopal is Professor at Advanced Centre for Women’s Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), Mumbai 91