ALSA 2025 meeting

In rural China, women who marry into another village often lose their original identity rights in the collective economic organization and corresponding land rights, despite not legally transferring their “household registration”(“hukou”). In land rights disputes, the identity choices, group affiliations, and legal strategies of married-out women and female villagers form a noteworthy contrast. Relational legal consciousness, which is built upon relationships, provides a targeted analytical approach to this phenomenon. How do they choose the prioritized identity and group when facing the conflict? How do they perceive and decide to use state law or customary law to address the issue based on the identity recognition?  By tracing the answers to these two questions, this paper aims to establish a dynamic identity prioritization mechanism to analyze how married-out women dynamically adjust the prioritization of their multiple identities in response to changing contexts and choose specific legal strategies within a framework of legal pluralism.