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.

Menon's core argument is that feminism has not effectively confronted the politically dangerous dilemmas of using rights discourse and the law as tools of transformation, because feminism has not resolved its internal dilemma regarding the constitution of “Woman” as its subject. Menon accordingly interrogates women's identities, bodies, and experiences as context-specific representations and constructions, rather than prepolitical, static, already given starting points for feminist activism. She notes that the law stops the ambiguous “play of meanings” about gender, sexuality, and power, incapable of understanding the complexity of feminist issues, gender as performative, or the body's boundaries as fluid and irreducibly undecided. Yet, she asserts brilliantly: “Is it precisely the intractability of the oppression at the level of ‘the body’ which leads feminist practice to attempt to comprehend and contain it in the discourse of coherence and uniformity offered by the law?” (p. 13). In effect, the body is not ontologically prior to the law, but feminists have allowed law the power to collude with various discourses, such as technology, capitalism, and family, to decide what a body can/should be and do. Menon, then, forces scholars of gender and politics to ask: What are the unintended, contradictory consequences of feminist strategies? What if the way we approach gender and politics undermines our very focus on emancipation and transformation?

The author's struggle with these questions engages a wide variety of feminist theoretical viewpoints, imploring scholars and activists to remove concerns about violence, misogyny, and autonomy from the grasp of the law, as it contradicts feminist ethics. Yet she also acknowledges that “[t]he option of abdicating the law is not a viable one, for the law will not abdicate us—the only permissible identities in modern democracies are those put in place by the law” (p. 236). She proposes that the litigation strategies, rather than law reform strategies that simply reinscribe law's centrality, can be useful for temporarily protecting important claims by the oppressed. She also uses the law as a lens for understanding postcolonial India's struggle with modernity, identity, governance, norms, and religion, particularly right-wing Hindu nationalism. Menon, then, galvanizes feminists to productively politicize and work through the paradoxes of the law, rather than abandon the law or harbor illusions about the law's potential.

Menon's empirical case studies astutely showcase the structure-agency dialectic at work in these paradoxes. She specifically looks at the structural oppression, violence, and injustice that make necessary “rights talk” and a focus on agency but also invoke a legal discourse that systematically dilutes and distorts feminist attempts to confront oppression or assert autonomy. For example, in Chapter 3, “Abortion: When Pro-Choice is Anti-Women,” she explores how feminists are trying to promote choice yet must prevent selective abortions of female fetuses, with each attempt at agency cementing the systematic gendered repression. Specifically, the Indian state, communities, and families use the abortion right as a tool of population control and deflection of the issue of poverty, and to discipline women's sexuality and autonomy, thus eclipsing the liberal feminist focus on reproductive choice and access to safe and legal procedures.

Chapter 4, “Sexual Violence: Escaping the Body,” interrogates the presumption that rape and sexual harassment laws can make experiences of sexual violence “matter” socially and politically. This chapter effectively shows that the law, courts, and legislation do not question the centrality of bodily violence to hierarchy and domination, cannot access the meanings of violence, and, in fact, reinscribe prevailing norms about gender, sexuality, consent, and women as always already rapable. This crucial chapter should be brought into conversation with scholars such as Veena Das, Elaine Scarry, and Renee Heberle, all of whom also challenge feminism to radically rethink how antiviolence responses often attach women's experiences and struggles with autonomous selfhood to systematically fixed and limited notions about the body.

Finally, Chapter 5, “Reservations for Women: ‘Am I That Name’,” explores how women and marginalized communities compete for political recognition and participation in political and legislative institutions yet question the implications of quotas on their visibility and voices. Unlike France's commitment to engender “real” universalism through quotas, in India the debates over quotas pivot on a postcolonial critique of abstract individualistic universalism. At the same time, legal and state efforts to “mainstream” gender and women's political participation actually deflect mass politics and the intersection of gender, religion, and caste in India. All three empirical chapters illustrate for gender and politics scholars the limited ability of law and legal actors to handle competing social values, particularly regarding the public, the private, sameness, and difference. Further, they show how the law highlights feminism's difficulty with Woman: How can feminists make legal claims when the bodies, identities, and experiences at stake are fragmented, complex, and constantly redefined?

In the concluding chapter, Menon argues that feminists must “recover subversion” since the law, by its very nature, subverts feminist ethics. The law may rectify how power restricts free will, but it also allows power to produce free will, a supposed autonomy and choice, that is actually anchored to patriarchal oppression. Thus, feminists, in their political challenge to destabilize power relationships, to assert counterhegemonic values, and to imagine nonuniversalist, inclusive, radical democracy, must recognize that law makes possible hegemony.

Given these insights, it is striking that Menon misses the opportunity to theorize the state historically and politically. She explores the emergence of the law and the concept of rights as challenges to the absolutist state, but she refers vaguely to the modern state as an authoritative entity that legitimizes, endorses, and carries out the law. She would do well to incorporate the insights of critical and feminist international relations scholars on the production of state identity and the relationship between the state, nationalism, and gender. Overall, however, Menon successfully conveys the urgency with which feminists must actively question the law as feminist terrain if they are to participate in the “double, and separate, moves of invoking and deconstructing” Woman as its subject (p. 235, emphasis original).