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Recovering Subversion: Feminist Politics Beyond the Law. By Nivedita Menon. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 2004. 288 pp. $60.00 cloth, $25.00 paper

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2005

Meghana V. Nayak
Affiliation:
Pace University

Extract

In this intriguing, multilayered, and eloquent work situated in the Indian landscape, Nivedita Menon argues that “rights,” when bound up with law, are not in the service of emancipatory politics but rather of hegemonic projects, such as patriarchy and capitalist modernity, that legitimize only particular ways of being and doing. Rights are socially constructed and contextualized within particular moral universes, yet they lose their transformative potential when encapsulated in and institutionalized by the law, which is an exacting, universalizing discourse that fixes meanings and identities. Although feminists are increasingly invested in legal redress, any appeals to democracy, equality, and justice through the law, may have reached their discursive limits, requiring a renewed feminist emphasis on political struggle.

Type
Book Reviews
Copyright
© 2005 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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