Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of Post Colonialism by Ratna Kapur r, London, Glass House Press, 2005, 219pp, ISBN 1 90438 524 9

Ratna Kapur’s Erotic Justice is yet another recent addition to the vast and heterogeneous field of postcolonial discourse. Firmly placing her theoretical trajectories within postcolonial legal feminism, Professor Kapur examines the theme of the subaltern subject. Although her text focuses primarily on the issue of women, she also considers other subjects at the margins of traditional legal discourse, such as transnational migrants, sexual minorities, and Muslims. In her work, she reconceptualises law as a system of domination and resistance, where the role and place of the world’s peripheral subjects and cultural Others have been (and continue to be) constructed (and reconstructed). Kapur uses her sexual subaltern subject to trace the hegemonic operations of the law, where the Other is culturally configured (continually) in hierarchical structures of difference. In this text, she explores how the law has been implicated in recent debates on sexuality, culture, and subalternity, and significantly, how it is ‘used not only as a site of empowerment, but also as a device for excluding the world’s Others, or including them on terms that are quite problematic, both historically as well as in the contemporary context’ (p2).