"The State attempts, with law as its instrument, to answer these questions for us, through legislation and, when contested, through court judgements. 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 inuiry, 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 Supremem 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 gender in the first place." -- Back cover
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