Centring on the Indian subcontinent, these essays deal with the sexual subaltern subject - women, sexual minorities, Muslims and transnational migrants. Law is analysed as a site of discursive engagement by a host of actors, state and non-state, including feminists, where competing understandings are in play concerning 'the West and the rest', nation and cultural authenticity, globalisation and resistance.
Relentless in her critiques of state reproduction of colonial moments, the essentialising of indigenous culture and the victim rhetoric so endemic to Western human rights discourse on 'the Other', Ratna Kapur takes the sexual subject in a postcolonial context as an active subject, here framed within the lens of desire and pleasure and not exclusively violence or the family.