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The Law of Desire Rulings on Sex and Sexuality in India

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The Law of Desire Rulings on Sex and Sexuality in India

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Specifications

	Publisher: Speaking Tiger Publishing Pvt. Ltd.
	Author Madhavi Menon
	Language: English
	Pages: 148
	Cover: PAPERBACK
	7x5 inch
	Weight 140 gm
	Edition: 2021
	ISBN: 9789354471155
	HBU156

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Book Description

About the Book The State attempts, with law as its instrument, to answer these questions for us, through legislation and, when contested, through court judgments. As this brilliantly insightful book argues, though India's laws and courts claim to know what they mean when they declare an expression of desire criminal, obscene or unnatural, upon inquiry, their logic appears muddled and often casteist and patriarchal. Thus the law struggles to 'rescue' 'fallen women', for sex work cannot be work, but a sign of immorality; a Supreme Court judge can exonerate the artist M.F. Husain on charges of obscenity, but claim that 'obscenity lies in the eyes of the beholder', leaving us wondering how, then, the law can ever define what's obscene; and while a court may declare that the 'third gender' has fundamental rights, no one really knows what fundamental rights have to do with geder in the first place.

About the Author Madhavi Menon is professor of English at Ashoka University, and writes on desire and queer theory. She is the author of Infinite Variety: A History of Desire in India; Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama; Unhistorical Shakespeare: Queer Theory in Shakespearean Literature and Film; and Indifference to Difference: On Queer Universalism. She is also the editor of Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare.

Preamble Can a woman choose whom to marry if her father disapproves of the match? Does sex remain sex to be when it becomes work? Can a man become a woman because he feels like one? Is it the law's task to ensure heterosexuality? Does reproduction need regulated? These are some of the many questions with which the law is faced, and upon which it pronounces. Ranging from deliberations over Bills to the passage of Acts, from hearings in the lower courts to appeals in the Supreme Court, from cases under British rule to those post Independence, the law has been deeply entangled with desire. But how, and with what assumptions, are legal pronouncements on desire made? How does the law appear when looked at from the vantage point of desire? What are the consequences of specific laws on the texture of desire? The recent judgment in Mobashar Jawed Akbar us Priya Ramani (2021) makes clear the multiple assumptions about desire that go into a legal verdict. In February 2021, Justice Pandey cleared a journalist on charges of defamation for publishing an account of sexual harassment. By ruling that women can and should speak publicly about incidents of sexual harassment, the Court sent a clear signal that we must not tolerate unwanted sexual attention.

Ackmowledgements A non-lawyer writing a book on the law needs to rely Kon strong legal minds for support. I am very grateful to the legal expertise of Vasuman Khandelwal, Upendra Baxi, Ratna Kapur, Prashanto Sen, Ajay Gandhi, Shyam Gopal, Bharat Jairaj, Chitra Narayan, Ritin Rai, and Kunal M. Parker. My legal and non-legal desires were supported and encouraged by a wide circle of friends and family. In Delhi, Jonathan Gil Harris (steeped in the sweetness of jaggery), Amma and Achan, Shohini Ghosh, Poonam Saxena, Anupama Chandra, and Mandakini Dubey nourished both the book and its author. In far-flung lands, Lee Edelman, Nandini Gopinadh, Vishnu Balchand, Nikhil and Rohan and Zippy Menon-Schjerning, Kalyani Menon, Kevin Schjerning, Judith Brown, Ashley T. Shelden, Bill Cohen, Freyan Panthaki, and Nayanika Mathur were the icing on the cake. My students, both in and out of class, my invaluable research assistants, especially Ketan Jain and Diya Mukhedkar, my priceless editors, Ravi Singh and Nazeef Mollah, and my co-conspirator, Shiv Datt Sharma-thanks to you all. This book is dedicated to my grandfather, N. Gopala Menon, whom I never met, but who injected the legal genes into my family.

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