Feminist Terrains in Legal Domains: Interdisciplinary Essays on Women and Law in India

The essays in this volume explore the relatively new field of women and law from interdisciplinary, feminist perspectives and help to develop an understanding of feminist legal studies in India. As a collection, the book offers insights about women and law as addressed by feminists from the standpoint of both legal and non-legal disciplines. Individually, the different essays explore the legal terrain through historical and cultural analyses of issues such as women’s human rights, gender discrimination, feminist legal scholarship, prostitution, conjugality and the representation of female outlaws in cinema. This varied and contextualised approach explodes the understanding of law as an objective, external, neutral truth. Instead, each writer lays open the contradictory nature of law and shows how it frequently becomes a site of political and ideological struggle.

RATNA KAPUR is an advocate, an activist researcher and a Visiting Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, Delhi, and was formerly Visiting Faculty at the National Law School of India University in Bangalore, Professor at Jindal Global Law School in Delhi, and Senior Faculty member at the International Global Law and Policy Institute at Harvard Law School. She also serves on the international advisory boards of the academic journals Legal Studies and Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and has written widely on the subject of women and law. Her other publications include Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (2018), Makeshift Migrants and Law: Gender, Belonging and Postcolonial Anxieties (2014), Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (2005), and the co-authored volume Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Women and Law (1996).