South Asia Citizens Web

– OEH Working Paper Series, Working Paper No 146 (PDF) 188kb
– Date of Publication April 2007

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 News International, May 28, 2008
Today is the tenth anniversary of Pakistan’s test explosion of nuclear weapons in Chagai ordered by then prime minister Mian Nawaz Sharif. The tests were in response to India’s actions of May 11 when it tested five nuclear devices.
Let’s get one thing clear. All test explosions are basically military threats to the enemy: On May 11 and 13, 1998, India was threatening to nuke Pakistan if it did not stop its proxy war in Indian-held Kashmir. Pakistan’s (…)

Dawn, 24 December 2007
AT a time when political chatter and action are dominated by calls for rule of law, restoration of the judiciary and constitutional government, this article attempts to raise broader issues of economic justice. It focuses only on emigration in search of decent work. Are we missing the forest for the trees?
There are major exclusions in rights — such as the ban on female emigration, denial of collective bargaining, restrictions on family visas — that have not been (…)