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ly Hutchings doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400329

Recovering subversion: feminist politics beyond the law Nivedita Menon; Permanent Black, Urbana and Chicago, 2004, ISBN 0-252-02969-0, d48.00 (hbk), ISBN 0-252-07211-1, d19.95 (pbk)

In Recovering Subversion, Nivedita Menon examines the relationship between radical feminist politics and the use of law for social change. The text focuses on issues central to the contemporary Indian women’s movement and provides detailed analysis of politics, practices and law reform since the 1980s. Menon’s comprehensive exploration describes significant limitations for the women’s movement engagement with law in order to advance feminist politics. Menon examines the efficacy of utilizing the language of rights for social change and ultimately argues against law as having potential to enact comprehensive transformation for the ethical and emancipatory impulses of feminist politics. The central focus of the text outlines the problematic of ‘the ‘paradox of constitutionality’’ (p. 2), which Menon analyses through a feminist perspective. Menon suggests that for feminist politics, differing moral visions must be asserted; women’s diverse experiences ‘as ‘real’ y acquires meaning precisely through an interplay of contexts, and may be rendered sterile within the rigid codification required within legal discourse’ (p. 107). She argues that this problem becomes apparent in pursuing recognition of these experiences, as legal discourse works by ‘fixing meaning, by creating uniform categories out of a multiplicity of possibilities, by suturing open-endedness’ (p. 107). Therefore, Menon’s analysis contends that legal discourse is not only insufficient for Sveva Magaraggia

feminist review 85 2007

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feminist politics, but can work to consolidate dominant norms and therefore undermine the need for differing moral visions to be asserted and qualified as legitimate. In illustrating the inherent problematic of using law as a progressive force for feminist politics, Menon’s first chapter gives a comprehensive historical and theoretical account of rights discourses. Menon engages with the work of prominent scholars such as Wendy Brown, Jacques Derrida and Nancy Fraser and provides a broad overview of debates on rights. Utilizing the debates put forward by these commentators, she provides a critique of rights for their particular historical and political emergence, their privileging of state interests and in the context of India, their reflection of interests of higher castes. Therefore, Menon questions the ‘assumption underlying understandings of rights, that these are universal and based on a generally accepted moral order’ (p. 26). She illustrates that even international human rights have a specificity of emergence and produce a particular, central moral vision that does not reflect the more expansive feminist view of multiple meanings, norms and experiences. The text is then divided into three sections, focusing on important and contemporary issues for the Indian women’s movement; abortion and femici