Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism

The essays in Erotic Justice address 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, where these different subjects are excluded or included in the postcolonial present on terms that are reminiscent of the colonial encounter and its treatment of difference. Bringing a postcolonial feminist legal analysis to her discussion, Kapur is relentless in her critiques on 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 the legal regulation of sexuality and culture in a postcolonial context. Drawing her examples from postcolonial India, Ratna Kapur demonstrates the theoretical and disruptive possibilities that the postcolonial subject brings to international law, human rights, and domestic law. In the process, challenges are offered to the political and theoretical constructions of the nation, sexuality, cultural authenticity, and women's subjectivity.

The book includes an essay The Tragedy of Victimisation Rhetoric, which critiques VAW mandate arguing that
exclusive reliance on violence in claiming rights casts women as victims who must be rescued, prompting responses that may be imperialist, protectionist or charity-based. They argue that the responses are not concerned with the complex analysis of power and materiality that underlie subjugation and dominance, nor are they grounded in recognition of women’s human rights. Rather, the responses and remedies reinforce stereotypes, often that of the disempowered and brutalized Third World woman as the authentic victim, such as the victim of dowry violence or honour crimes, and essentializes Third World societies as backward (see Paragraph 89 of the Report of the Special Rapporteur on violence against
women, its causes and consequences, Yakin Ertürk(A/HRC/11/6/Add.5).