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.