The Fear Factor: Gender, Belonging, and the Legal Regulation of the Migrant

This book unmasks the cultural and gender stereotypes that inform the legal regulation of the migrant. It critiques the postcolonial perspective on how belonging and non-belonging are determined by the sexual, cultural, and familial norms on which law is based as well as the historical backdrop of the colonial encounter, which differentiated overtly between the legitimate and illegitimate subject. The complexities and layering of the migrant’s existence are seen, in the book, to be obscured by the apparatus of the law. The author elaborates on how law can both advance and impede the rights of the migrant subject and how legal interventions are constructed around frameworks rooted in the boundaries of difference, protection of the sovereignty of the nation-state, and the myth of the all-embracing liberal subject. This produces the ‘Other’ and reinforces essentialised assumptions about gender and cultural difference. The author foregrounds the perspective of the subaltern migrant subject, exposing the deeper issues implicated in the debates over migration and the rights claims of migrants, primarily in the context of women and religious minorities in India. Contents Acknowledgements 1. Introduction 2. The Making of the Migrant 3. Victims, Whores, and Wives: Migrant Women and the Law 4. Sexual Restraints: The Construction of Female Sexual Subjectivities in Anti-traffi cking Discourse 5. The Citizen and the Migrant Subject: Postcolonial Anxieties, Law, and the Politics of Exclusion/Inclusion 6. The Fear Factor: Muslims, the Gujarat Riots, and the Purge from Within 7. Conclusion: Insurrectional Subjects Bibliography About the Author Index This discussion unmasks the cultural and gender stereotypes that inform the legal regulation of the migrant subject. Focusing on the female, subaltern migrant, it offers a critique from a post-colonial perspective on how belonging and non-belonging are determined by the sexual, cultural, and familial norms on which law is based, as well as the historical backdrop of the colonial encounter, which overtly classified the legitimate and illegitimate subject The book seeks to explode the myth of the migrant as coerced into movement, and unpacks the complex material, historical, and normative factors that produce insiders and outsiders, those who count and those who do not. While it foregrounds the migrant within the context of South Asia, it raises issues that are of contemporary global concern. --Book Jacket This book unmasks the cultural and gender stereotypes that inform the legal regulation of the migrant subject. It critiques postcolonial perspectives on how belonging and non-belonging are determined by the sexual, cultural and familial norms on which law is based and on the colonial encounter