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This book examines the gendered policies advocated and implemented by postcolonial developmental states, which are often contested and challenged by women's movements as damaging to their key concerns. The eight substantive chapters plus introductory and concluding chapters cover major debates about gender politics and the state. Included are issues of democratization and the nature of women's participation in formal politics, particularly the creation of quota systems for political representation; governance as global and multilayered; the relationships among gender, knowledge, innovation, and property rights; and analysis of the functioning of the South Asia Research Network (SARN) on Gender, Law and Governance, which the author helped create.
In this review, I focus on four significant aspects of this book: the analyses of the struggle of women street vendors in Delhi (India); the comparison of quota systems in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan; the inclusion of the dimension of "spectacle" to markets, institutions, and ideologies in order to understand governance of polities; and a discussion of the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property (TRIPS) regime, particularly "how governance of global regimes of production fundamentally affects the ways in which inequalities are being reproduced, between the North and the South, between men and women, and among women also" (pp. 5-6).
Tracing the progress of the dispute between 40 women and the Delhi metropolitan authorities about their right to trade from a pavement, Shirin M. Rai shows how these poor women came into contact with agencies of the state and the law. She situates their struggles in the broader context of the relationship between Indian women and the postcolonial state in order to pose questions...