I said, "but if we deconstruct without a backdrop/ reference or, even more importantly, something to replace avoiding a vacuum, then we cause nothing but striff."

the professor said, "no. Then you become a scholar."

One of the points in a conversation/argument my professor and I had, today, where I just stopped and said, 'huh.'

In deconstructing women's identity in modern times we find that domesticity in the confines of the nuclear family are basic nationalistic, static parameters to ensure a nations propagation and legitimacy. Law in it's purest form legitimizes this national identity through power. It does not free, it confines. It stifles fluidity of ones identity through ID's like gender, sexual orientation and attributes therein, thus creating the fringe, if you will. Identity should come from ones response to life, a fluid, organic response to our mutating context.

There is need for law. But there is, also, a need in understanding of what law does. In reading Egypt's internal and external struggle to legitimize and create its 'national identity,' it's easy to see their reinterpretation of law (the Shari'a) as a means by which to apply more rights to women; but when juxtapose to the modernizing of European law during the late 19th century, early 20th, we see it used as a tool of modernization and nationalization. Educated women in Europe equaled modernity. The question comes down to whether or not you believe the movement south, in Egypt (whose influence would later transmigrate through the Near East into Pakistan and India), was simultaneous or instituted.

This is what i wrestle with. And deconstruct. The influence of the "West" and Islamic jurisprudence. In here there is a link to my deconstructing/contrarian nature and Christianity's exigency to create the fringe.