Gendered Discourses about Women’s Inheritance in Patriarchal Communities Case of Beni Weragh Community .

Abstract

Discourse on women‘s inheritance has gained momentum in recent decades. The question of who can rightfully own or control and therefore inherit is often highly linguistically gendered in many patriarchal communities. In the BeniWeragh community, the discursive notions of women’s inheritance reinforce gender bias against the woman. The present article describes the way discourse and specific linguistic terms are invested to perpetuate women’s exclusion from inheritance. To do so, we adopt the Fairclough approach to critical discourse analysis. This study suggests via its findings that discourse about women’s inheritance in the BeniWeragh community in Algeria is highly gendered and supported by patriarchal ideologies and discriminatory customs which are the major deterrent to women’s exclusion from inheritance. This article elaborates upon and reveals how gendered discourses produce and reinforce gender inequities, which continually and to some extent explicitly naturalizes women’s exclusion from inheritance.