This book is about the relation between law and feminist politics. Nivedita Menon identifies a key dilemma that faces a radical politics today, namely the 'paradox of constitutionalism'. This occurs when various differing moral visions come up against the universalising drive of constitutionality and the language of universal rights. By examining three issues that the women's movement in India has engaged with—the practice of selective abortion of female foetuses, sexual violence, and reservations for women in representative institutions—Menon unfolds a two-pronged argument, namely that

1. the language of rights and citizenship is no longer unproblematically available to an emancipatory politics; and
2. that specifically in the context of feminist politics it has become increasingly difficult to sustain 'woman' as the subject of such a politics, despite (or perhaps because of) the explosion of 'gender' as a category of analysis in official state and NGO discourse.