Ratna Kapur

Queen Mary, University of London | QMUL · School of Law

For this edition of “Ask a Feminist,” Cynthia Enloe-feminist, activist, writer, scholar, and research professor at Clark University-speaks with special issue editors Suzanna Danuta Walters, Ratna Kapur, and Agnieszka Graff about the relations between gender and militarism and imperialism, in particular about the role of gender in the rise of the im...

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. This book builds on the critique of this mainstream and official position on human rights, drawing attention to how human rights have been deployed to advance political and cultural intents rather than bring about freedom for disenfranchised groups. Its approach is unique insofar as it focuses on que...

Ben Golder’s new book on Foucault and the Politics of Rights is a landmark text that engages with one of the most intriguing questions regarding Foucault’s later work: did his turn to human rights represent a capitulation to the liberal project? Golder’s answer is a resounding ‘No’. Presenting us with a finelybalanced and careful reading of Foucaul...

div class="title">Pluralism and Democracy in India: Debating the Hindu Right. Edited by Wendy Doniger and Martha C. Nussbaum . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. 400. $35.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0195395532. - Ratna Kapur

Critical International Law: Postrealism, Postcolonialsm and Transnationalism edited by SINGH Prabhakar and MAYER Benoît. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. xiv + 365 pp. Hardcover: £29.99. - Volume 6 Issue 2 - Ratna KAPUR

I interrogate the idea of legal justice that informs LGBT and women’s international human rights interventions. I reveal the governing sexual, gender and cultural norms that limit the capacities of legal justice in relation to precarious desires and explore alternative registers of justice including in feminist affect theory as well as postcolonial...

I interrogate the idea of legal justice that informs LGBT and women’s international human rights interventions. I reveal the governing sexual, gender and cultural norms that limit the capacities of legal justice in relation to precarious desires and explore alternative registers of justice including in feminist affect theory as well as postcolonial...

I interrogate the idea of legal justice that informs LGBT and women’s international human rights interventions. I reveal the governing sexual, gender, and cultural norms that limit the capacities of legal justice in relation to precarious desires and explore alternative registers of justice including in feminist affect theory as well as postcolonia...

T wo recent protests in postcolonial India have explored the potential of gendered bodies in the protest sphere to disturb gender categories and dominant sexual norms. One was the response to the brutal gang rape and murder of a twenty-three-year-old student on a moving bus in Delhi in December 2012. The specter of her brutalized body formed the ba...

The article challenges the claim that human rights, which have constituted one of the central tools by which to establish the truth claims of modernity, can produce freedom and meaningful happiness through the acquisition of more rights and more equality. Third World, postcolonial and feminist legal scholars have challenged the accuracy of this cla...

This article describes the competing models of secularism that have been debated and contested in postcolonial India. I focus on the constitutional legal discourse and judicial pronouncements on the meaning of secularism in India and on the increasing influence of the Hindu Right—a conservative and religious political movement seeking to set up Ind...

The long-standing contest over a 1500 square yard plot of land, situated in the city of Ayodhya, located in the district of Faizabad in the state of Uttar Pradesh in north India, has become a site where religious groups, pilgrims, lawyers, and even gods are battling to establish their claims of rightful ownership. The issue has been simmering in in...

This forward to a symposium issue of the law review maps the terrain of legal regulation of sexuality. It locates sexuality within a matrix of power, knowledge, and resistance and the question of regulation of sexuality is approached from the perspective of the sexually marginalized subject -- the sexual subaltern. It briefly reviews the contributi...

In this paper, I use the recent ‘Delhi rape’ case that received global attention in 2012 to trace how an appalling episode of violence against a woman is articulated within stable categories of gender and invites state intervention in the form of criminal justice, stringent sentencing and a strengthened sexual security regime. I argue that the stab...

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 analyzed as a discursive terrain, where these different subjects are excluded or included in the postcolon...

This chapter examines the faith that continues to inform human rights scholarship and advocacy in relation to gender equality. It argues that such faith obscures the gender and cultural assumptions on which the right to gender equality is based. The chapter is organized as follows. The first section examines the different approaches to equality and...

The SlutWalk campaigns around the world have triggered a furious debate on whether they advance or limit feminist legal politics. This article examines the location of campaigns such as the SlutWalk marches in the context of feminist legal advocacy in postcolonial India, and discusses whether their emergence signifies the demise of feminism or its...

This book unmasks the cultural and gender stereotypes that inform the legal regulation of the migrant. It critiques the postcolonial perspective on how belonging and non-belonging are determined by the sexual, cultural, and familial norms on which law is based as well as the historical backdrop of the colonial encounter, which differentiated overtl...

The struggle to secure the constitutional and political protection of secularism in India has been long and difficult. Recently, the Hindu Right- a nationalist and right wing political movement devoted to creating a Hindu State- has hijacked the dominant understanding of secularism as the equal respect of all religions in order to promote its visio...

In this article, Brenda Cossman and Ratna Kapur explore the ways in which law is implicated in women's socio-economic inequality and poverty in India. The authors examine several different areas of the law to illustrate the extent to which law is based on and serves to reinforce women's economic dependence. Family law, labour law, and rural develop...

Co-authored with Ratna Kapur, this commentary engages the interrelationship of hegemony and coercion in legal regimes of the modern state. Against the backdrop of regulation of sexuality in fascist Spain, we posit a model of modern state power that draws upon the work of Gramsci, Althusser, and Foucault. It is argued that ideology is the velvet glo...

This Article examines how the legal subjectivity of the migrant subject is intimately connected to the construction of the citizenship subject and how both have been products of the colonial encounter. Deploying the lens of postcolonialism, I argue that the migrant is addressed through a spectrum of legal rules based on normative criteria reminisce...

This article unpacks three normative claims on which the human rights project is based and exposes the dark side of the project. The author examines the larger context within which human rights has taken shape, and critiques the claim that human rights is part of modernity’s narrative of progress; interrogates the assumption that human rights are u...

This paper discusses how the "War on Terrorism" and its secondary goal of protecting women has been addressed largely within the rhetoric of religion, civilization, and "a just war," rather than a concern for women's human rights. The focus on women's concerns through the prism of religion and culture not only serves to cast Muslim women as "other,...

The paper analyses three responses to the transnational migrant that characterize some of the contemporary legal interventions. The first response is reinforcing difference through categories such as gender and race, which regard these traits as immutable and unalterable and subject them to subordinating and paternalistic legal regulations. The sec...

Excerpt - "Although Nussbaum makes perfectly plausible and important arguments against the use of shame and disgust in law, there are nevertheless troubling concerns over her determination to find the answers dilemmas she raises within the terms of liberalism. My central critique arguments is that she never addresses the role of power in the conte...

In this presentation I shall describe (i) a process of expanding the institutional frameworks of economic and social development that apply on a global scale principles found in the Anglo-American world; (ii) the reinterpretation of these institutional frameworks by ascribing to them a narrow – to a certain extent ideological – meaning which does n...

In this Article, I examine how the international women's rights movement has reinforced the image of the woman as a victim subject, primarily through its focus on violence against women (VAW). I use the example of India to examine how this subject has been replicated in the post-colonial context, and the more general implications this kind of move...

The focus on women’s concerns through the prism of religion and culture not only serves to cast Muslim women as “Other,” it also serves to justify the liberating impulse of military intervention, defending such interventions as humane rescue operations. The rhetoric of civilization justifies any intervention to rescue women from barbarism and the t...

While the world mourned in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, an international legal response was sculpted in the corridors of the UN Security Council, NATO, and the US Congress. This response was subsequently presented to the world as a coherent package termed the war against terrorism....

This essay explores the ways in which the definition of Indian culture has become a site of contest, and how this contest played out in the controversy that erupted over the release and screening of Deepa Mehta's diasporic film, Fire, in India. I locate this controversy within the broader controversies that are taking place over culture, particular...

In this chapter1 I examine several concepts that are important to un- derstanding the impact that the rise of the Religious Right has had on women’s human rights in contemporary India. In particular, I discuss the ways in which equality and secularism, the cornerstones of a liberal de- mocratic state, have been deployed by the Hindu Right, and to s...

The article discusses struggle to secure the constitutional and political protection of secularism in India. The opponents of secularism, including the Hindu Right, are increasingly waging their war not in opposition to secularism, but in and through it. The Hindu Right, which is a nationalist and right wing political movement devoted to creating a...

A developing tenet of feminism is the need to work collaboratively in order to avoid assumptions of universality and embrace differences between women. In this paper, Cossman and Kapur reflect upon their attempts to put this principle into practice in research on women's rights in India. They highlight ethical dilemmas raised by their project which...

Typescript (photocopy). Thesis (LL. M.)--Harvard Law School, 1988. Includes bibliographical references.

V The recent series of Supreme Court judgments in cases against elected representatives of the Shiv Sena-BJP government in Maharashtra has delivered a mixed message. While finding several of the accused guilty of corrupt electoral practices, the court has given legal sanction to the Hindu right's ideology of hindutva as well as to its discursive st...