Ratna Kapur
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 645818 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Ratna Kapur |
| NOMBRES | Ratna |
| APELLIDO | Kapur |
| FIRMA | KAPUR R |
| AFILIACIONES | Queen Mary University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7867-4038 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 31 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 54 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 31 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1991 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
From Necropolitics to Piety
I]n the constitution of that Other of Europe, great care was taken to obliterate the textual ingredients with which such a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary-not only by ideological and scientific production, but
TWAIL and Alternative Visions
This Afterward is in response to an invitation by EJIL to engage with Tony Anghie’s Foreword in the same journal entitled ‘Rethinking International Law: A TWAIL Retrospective’. I join in conversation with Anghie to further expand and amplify the redemptive potential of TWAIL, through a focus on human rights. I tease out and amplify a robust account of what constitutes an ‘alternative vision’ found in TWAIL as an epistemological inquiry that refle…
The Ayodhya case, freedom of religion, and the making of modernist ‘Hinduism’
This article offers a close reading of the 2019 Supreme Court decision in the Ayodhya case supporting the construction of a temple dedicated to Rām, a central deity in the Hindu pantheon. It unpacks the implications of the ruling on the right to freedom of religion and the meaning of religion in juridical discourse. In awarding title over a disputed plot of land that had been the subject of decades of litigation to the ‘Hindu parties,’ the Court …
Gender Equality Redux
This article offers a broad review of gender justice jurisprudence in India between 1993 and 2022. In analysing some of the landmark judgements on women's rights in the intervening years, the authors find the judicial approach to gender equality uneven and at times, conflicting. Despite the significant advancements in the jurisprudence of gender equality and dignity, discrimination and inequality persist on a staggering scale. The article argues …
The First Feminist War in all of History”
Rescuing the “other woman” has been an intractable feature of international and human rights legal interventions. This rescue narrative configures the “other woman,” invariably third world or from the Global South, as left behind in the movement toward progress and modernity. Part of the solution envisages the rescue and incorporation of the “other woman” into liberal rights discourse—the teleological endpoint of emancipation. Third World Approac…
Race-making, religion and rights in the post-colony
This paper intervenes in critical socio-legal/post-colonial scholarship on human rights directed at how religion is constitutive of race and shapes who and what is regarded as ‘human’ and entitled to rights. It focuses on the Indian post-colony and legal persecution of the Tablighi Jamaat, a global, quietest Islamic movement, by the Hindu Right government during the Covid pandemic. It analyses how religion structures race in Hindu nationalist dis…
On violence, revolution and the self
This article examines the integral relationship between epistemic violence and power, specifically at the level of the conception of the individual subject in law. The analysis highlights how the assumptions that underpin the notion of the subject within liberal individualism are constituted by a normalised racial and civilisational order, limiting the possibility of revolution. Illustrating how these limits operate through a discussion of Hannah…
Gender and the “Faith” in Law
This article analyzes how concepts of gender, gender equality, and secularism have been addressed by the higher judiciary in India in cases dealing with matters of religion. The discussion focuses on three landmark decisions of the Indian Supreme Court on gender equality. The cases involve challenges to discriminatory religious practices that target women in the Muslim-minority and Hindu-majority communities. In each case, gender equality is take…
Ask a Feminist
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 imperialist, fascist (or neofascist), populist (or neopopulist) social movements that seem to be spann…
Introduction
In this special issue of Signs, the contributors address the complex and powerful relationship between gender and the rise of the global Right. This discussion demonstrates how, in transnational terms, the Right has become a significant player in gender politics. It resists the denaturalizing, deconstructive analysis of gender and sex in critical, feminist, and queer scholarship and directs its efforts toward reinstating dominant essentialized ge…
On Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
This book is about the possibility of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights.Human rights are axiomatic with freedom, quite specifically liberal freedom.I invoke the metaphor of the fishbowl as representing the liberal constellation that shapes and disseminates mainstream human rights advocacy and scholarship as well as particular understandings of freedom.Freedom within a liberal paradigm is envisaged as an external pursuit, in…
Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights…
Subversive Sites 20 Years Later
In this article, we revisit our co-authored book, Subversive Sites. We explore both what we might have done differently with explicit attention to postcolonial theory, queer theory and neoliberal critiques and what part of the analysis still has traction. We then consider three legal interventions related to violence against women: sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape. We ask two questions: (1) What would the theoretical analysis from Su…
The Colonial Debris of Bandung
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Gender Equality
This chapter examines gender equality in post-colonial India, particularly some of the structural and normative factors that make it difficult for women to bring constitutional challenges in their fight for greater equality. It considers efforts at using law, especially constitutional equality rights, to challenge laws promoting sex discrimination in India, along with the use of fundamental rights to equality as guaranteed by Articles 14, 15, and…
The (im)possibility of queering international human rights law
In focusing on queer border crossers, this chapter explores what happens when these two inherently unstable signifiers 'queer' and 'border' intersect. It outlines some of the significant victories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex (LGBTI) struggles for the recognition of gender and sexuality as grounds for migration and asylum seeking. The chapter shows that while there has been progress, particularly in immigration law in the p…
Brutalized Bodies and Sexy Dressing on the Indian Street
Two recent protests in postcolonial India have questioned 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 backdrop against which thousands of young people poured onto the streets of major metropolises demand…
A Leap of Faith
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 India as a Hindu state-on shaping the contours of secularism in contemporary law. The struggle over the…
Erotic Justice
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 postcolonial present on terms that are reminiscent of the colonial encounter and its treatment of difference.…
In the Aftermath of Critique We Are Not in Epistemic Free Fall
Makeshift Migrants and Law
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 overtly between the legitimate and illegitimate subject. The complexities and layering of the migrant’s ex…
Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture
Innovative Concepts for Alternative Migration Policies
IMISCOE is a European Commission-funded Network of Excellence of more than 350 scientists from various research institutes that specialise in migration and integration issues in Europe. These researchers, who come from all branches of the economic and social sciences, the humanities and law, implement an integrated, multidisciplinary and internationally comparative research programme that focuses on Europe's migration and integration challenges
Erotic justice
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." "This book will be welcomed by teachers…
Theme I
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 not reflect the variety of meanings carried by those institutions in the Anglo-American world; and (i…
Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture
In the Aftermath of Critique We Are Not in Epistemic Free Fall
A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves’
This essay examines some of the cultural wars that are being fought out in India in the legal domain, cultural wars that all seem to involve sex. The battles taking place in the legal domain, comprising issues such as a legal challenge to the sodomy laws in the Indian Penal Code, a legal challenge to satellite broadcasting and the struggle to decriminalise prostitution, all involve a contest over the meaning of culture. In each of the controversi…
The profanity of prudery
Imperial parody
Too Hot to Handle
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, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. The continuous targeting of representations of sex…
The Ayodhya case, freedom of religion, and the making of modernist ‘Hinduism’
This article offers a close reading of the 2019 Supreme Court decision in the Ayodhya case supporting the construction of a temple dedicated to Rām, a central deity in the Hindu pantheon. It unpacks the implications of the ruling on the right to freedom of religion and the meaning of religion in juridical discourse. In awarding title over a disputed plot of land that had been the subject of decades of litigation to the ‘Hindu parties,’ the Court …
A Leap of Faith
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 India as a Hindu state-on shaping the contours of secularism in contemporary law. The struggle over the…
On Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
This book is about the possibility of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights.Human rights are axiomatic with freedom, quite specifically liberal freedom.I invoke the metaphor of the fishbowl as representing the liberal constellation that shapes and disseminates mainstream human rights advocacy and scholarship as well as particular understandings of freedom.Freedom within a liberal paradigm is envisaged as an external pursuit, in…
Subversive Sites 20 Years Later
In this article, we revisit our co-authored book, Subversive Sites. We explore both what we might have done differently with explicit attention to postcolonial theory, queer theory and neoliberal critiques and what part of the analysis still has traction. We then consider three legal interventions related to violence against women: sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape. We ask two questions: (1) What would the theoretical analysis from Su…
Cultural politics of Fire
in its representation, is sending a message that the feminist project can be accomplished through the recognition, exercise, and respect for sexual choice and preference. The authors state that 'Fire' ends up arguing tlhat the successful assertion of sexual choice is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition indeed the sole criterion for the emancipation of wonlen. Although their position reflects one of the ways in which to read the f…
Trespass, impasse, collaboration
The profanity of prudery
A Love Song to Our Mongrel Selves’
This essay examines some of the cultural wars that are being fought out in India in the legal domain, cultural wars that all seem to involve sex. The battles taking place in the legal domain, comprising issues such as a legal challenge to the sodomy laws in the Indian Penal Code, a legal challenge to satellite broadcasting and the struggle to decriminalise prostitution, all involve a contest over the meaning of culture. In each of the controversi…
Cultural politics of Fire
in its representation, is sending a message that the feminist project can be accomplished through the recognition, exercise, and respect for sexual choice and preference. The authors state that 'Fire' ends up arguing tlhat the successful assertion of sexual choice is not only a necessary but also a sufficient condition indeed the sole criterion for the emancipation of wonlen. Although their position reflects one of the ways in which to read the f…
Too Hot to Handle
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, particularly when issues of sex and sexuality are involved. The continuous targeting of representations of sex…
Imperial parody
Theme I
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 not reflect the variety of meanings carried by those institutions in the Anglo-American world; and (i…
Erotic justice
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." "This book will be welcomed by teachers…
Innovative Concepts for Alternative Migration Policies
IMISCOE is a European Commission-funded Network of Excellence of more than 350 scientists from various research institutes that specialise in migration and integration issues in Europe. These researchers, who come from all branches of the economic and social sciences, the humanities and law, implement an integrated, multidisciplinary and internationally comparative research programme that focuses on Europe's migration and integration challenges
Makeshift Migrants and Law
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 overtly between the legitimate and illegitimate subject. The complexities and layering of the migrant’s ex…
Pink Chaddis and SlutWalk Couture
Erotic Justice
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 postcolonial present on terms that are reminiscent of the colonial encounter and its treatment of difference.…
In the Aftermath of Critique We Are Not in Epistemic Free Fall
Brutalized Bodies and Sexy Dressing on the Indian Street
Two recent protests in postcolonial India have questioned 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 backdrop against which thousands of young people poured onto the streets of major metropolises demand…
A Leap of Faith
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 India as a Hindu state-on shaping the contours of secularism in contemporary law. The struggle over the…
The Colonial Debris of Bandung
A summary is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Gender Equality
This chapter examines gender equality in post-colonial India, particularly some of the structural and normative factors that make it difficult for women to bring constitutional challenges in their fight for greater equality. It considers efforts at using law, especially constitutional equality rights, to challenge laws promoting sex discrimination in India, along with the use of fundamental rights to equality as guaranteed by Articles 14, 15, and…
The (im)possibility of queering international human rights law
In focusing on queer border crossers, this chapter explores what happens when these two inherently unstable signifiers 'queer' and 'border' intersect. It outlines some of the significant victories of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or intersex (LGBTI) struggles for the recognition of gender and sexuality as grounds for migration and asylum seeking. The chapter shows that while there has been progress, particularly in immigration law in the p…
Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, has had disempowering and exclusionary effects. Revisiting campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights lays bare how human rights emerge as a project of containment and unfreedom rather than meaningful freedom. Kapur provocatively argues that the futurity of human rights…
Subversive Sites 20 Years Later
In this article, we revisit our co-authored book, Subversive Sites. We explore both what we might have done differently with explicit attention to postcolonial theory, queer theory and neoliberal critiques and what part of the analysis still has traction. We then consider three legal interventions related to violence against women: sexual harassment, domestic violence and rape. We ask two questions: (1) What would the theoretical analysis from Su…
Ask a Feminist
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 imperialist, fascist (or neofascist), populist (or neopopulist) social movements that seem to be spann…
Introduction
In this special issue of Signs, the contributors address the complex and powerful relationship between gender and the rise of the global Right. This discussion demonstrates how, in transnational terms, the Right has become a significant player in gender politics. It resists the denaturalizing, deconstructive analysis of gender and sex in critical, feminist, and queer scholarship and directs its efforts toward reinstating dominant essentialized ge…
On Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
This book is about the possibility of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights.Human rights are axiomatic with freedom, quite specifically liberal freedom.I invoke the metaphor of the fishbowl as representing the liberal constellation that shapes and disseminates mainstream human rights advocacy and scholarship as well as particular understandings of freedom.Freedom within a liberal paradigm is envisaged as an external pursuit, in…
Gender and the “Faith” in Law
This article analyzes how concepts of gender, gender equality, and secularism have been addressed by the higher judiciary in India in cases dealing with matters of religion. The discussion focuses on three landmark decisions of the Indian Supreme Court on gender equality. The cases involve challenges to discriminatory religious practices that target women in the Muslim-minority and Hindu-majority communities. In each case, gender equality is take…
On violence, revolution and the self
This article examines the integral relationship between epistemic violence and power, specifically at the level of the conception of the individual subject in law. The analysis highlights how the assumptions that underpin the notion of the subject within liberal individualism are constituted by a normalised racial and civilisational order, limiting the possibility of revolution. Illustrating how these limits operate through a discussion of Hannah…
Political science (27 obras) · Sociology (26 obras) · Law (25 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Gender Studies (16 obras) · Philosophy (12 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Human rights (9 obras) · Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (8 obras) · Epistemology (7 obras)