In this article, I reframe the 'female circumcision controversy' 1928 - 1931, focusing on locating Ratna Kapur's 'erotic subject'. Kapur develops the terms 'sexual subaltern' and the 'erotic subject' in order to trouble the boundaries of, and ultimately expand the category of the legitimate, rights bearing subject (Kapur 2005). Searching for the voices of these disruptive subjects also compels fresh interrogations of the gendered, colonised subject.

The Syrian Civil War has been deemed one of the worst humanitarian crises of the twentyfirst century. Since 2011 a large-scale number of Syrian civilians have been displaced and have been forced to seek protection and humanitarian assistance in neighbouring countries. Unprecedented political, social, and economic conditions in Syria have undermined all aspects of human security for the Syrian population. Syrian children, in particular, have been adversely affected as a result of this conflict. Displaced from their homes, and often separated from their families, children are especially vulnerable. With a focus on the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan serving as a host nation for Syrian refugees, this study critically examines one significantly under-reported aspect of violence affecting Syrian refugee children, in particular girls, that has been occurring exponentially since the onset of the Syrian Crisis, that of the practice of forced child marriage in Jordan. By examining international human rights laws and contextualising human rights laws and discourses in relation to Middle Eastern, Islamic and Jordanian understandings of international law and human rights, the aim of this thesis is to critically understand how the practice of child marriage not only continues, globally as well as in the Middle East, but appears to be proliferating. These areas of inquiry are critically examined in relation to conceptualisations of childhood vulnerability, particularly structural and institutional factors, including culture, religion and power relations between adults and children, as each act to subordinate voiceless refugee children.

This thesis finds that in a juxtaposition of human rights definitions and obligations, between the traditional and modern, the religious and the secular, there are mixed implications for the realisation of universal human rights and that this has consequences for the most vulnerable - child refugees. As a result, Syrian children exist in a precarious situation. They are living in a foreign state with an unclear legal status, are largely unidentified and, in effect, stateless. It is in this liminal space that Syrian children are vulnerable and voiceless and highly exposed to forced marriages and the resultant violence and possibly death. While allowed to continue, the practice of child marriage not only severely impedes upon progressive international human rights efforts to eliminate gender-based violence, slavery and discrimination, but significantly impacts on children's physical, mental and emotional health, and their opportunities for growth and development in society.

Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor identifies, '[t]he human body and person [as] the locus of [her] artistic quest'¹ and it is this focus on the body which drives her intimate portrait of Kenya's independence struggle in her novel, Dust. Rather than engaging with the concerns of 'diasporic identities [and] cultural otherness' ², which so often form the preoccupations of the African literary diaspora, Owuor's rendering of East Africa acknowledges the alterity experienced by Africans in their own lands, inhabiting peripheries within their home nations.

Introduction

One of the greatest hopes of the 2010 Kenyan Constitution was that the extensive provisions for the promotion and protection of women's rights would be successful in in breaking the vicious grip of patriarchal politics and promote a new generation of women parliamentarians and local government officials. As well as mentioning women in a list of groups identified as marginalised and in need of institutional and structural support, quotas were entrenched to ensure women's representation in parliament. In spite of these safeguards, the first elections under the new constitution in 2013 returned very few women to elected to positions other than those designated as women only positions.

The violence which followed the December 2007 elections in Kenya promoted an African Union led mediation. The subsequent agreement led to a power sharing government which would be committed to reforming the Constitution and reforming the public sector. A year after the establishment of the power sharing coalition, a group of women's organisations known as the G10 held a press conference where they announced a seven day sex boycott to protest the lack of progress the new unity government had made. This paper examines the significance of the sex strike in the context of the post-election violence and women's citizenship in the post-colonial period, and argues that the women involved in the protest were attempting to redefine and expand the typically masculine Kenyan political subject, by troubling the traditional public/private dichotomy through politicising sex.

Kenya's opposition leader Raila Odinga and his National Super Alliance are contesting the country's general election results in the Supreme Court. Odinga rejected the official results which showed that Uhuru Kenyatta had reclaimed the presidency.

In the days following the announcement that Kenyatta had won, opposition supporters attempted to engage in peaceful protests. International and local media reported on clashes between police and residents in Nairobi and Kisumu.

The bodies of indigenous women and girls in Kenya during the colonial period were contested sites of cultural identity and expression for both indigenous communities and their colonisers. The ritual and the results of Kenyan women's body modification have served as markers of difference, not only between Kenyans and colonists but also across indigenous Kenyan cultures. Indigenous women's agency is often elided in discussion of their bodies - lost in a tendency to use the contest for control over women's bodies to explore the dynamics and pressures of the colonial encounter. This approach necessarily aggregates women's experience to build a picture of their collective experience, and to track the rise of popular resistance movements through women's actions. Discussing women's collective action is useful in understanding the larger narrative of indigenous resistance to colonial oppression, and significant historical work has been done on the centrality of women's bodies in the struggle against colonial rule in Kenya (Thomas 2003; Kanogo 2005). However, this work does not often examine the embodied experiences of these women.