This book addresses the ways in which law has been implicated in contemporary debates dealing with sexuality, culture, and ‘different’ subjects-including women, sexual minorities, Muslims, and the transnational migrant. Law is analysed as a discursive terrain wherein these different subject are excluded or included in the postcolonial present on terms reminiscent of colonialism and its treatment of difference. Bringing a feminist legal analysis to her discussion, Kapur is relentless in her critique of how colonial discourses, cultural essentialism, and victim rhetoric are reproduced in universal, liberal projects such as human rights and international law, as well as in legal regulation of sexuality and culture in a postcolonial context. Drawing her examples from contemporary India, she demonstrates the theoretical and disruptive possibilities that the postcolonial subject brings to international law, human rights, and domestic law, human rights, and domestic law. In the process, she challenges existing constructions of the nation, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and women’s subjectivity. This book will be welcomed by teachers and researchers in law and culture, feminist and postcolonial theory, and international and human rights law.
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