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Is age a natural and universal measure of human capacity? This is the central question that Ishita Pande explores in Sex, Law, and the Politics of Age: Child Marriage in India, 1891–1937. The book is a capacious biography of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (CMRA), a 1929 law that has anchored much scholarship about sexual consent and the women’s movement in India. This book breaks new ground in a crowded field; it is, ambitiously, also an examination of how chronological age itself structures understandings of legal personhood. It accomplishes three theoretical goals. First, in a poststructuralist feminist mode, it unpacks how age is made natural. Second, it takes up the postcolonial imperative of questioning liberal legal universals and investigates how chronologically bound definitions of childhood were universalized. Third, it adopts a queer refusal of the narrative coherence of life stages by “reading sideways” (in the manner of Kathryn Bond Stockton) the history of efforts to end child marriage.
The book is divided into three parts, broadly moving from articulating its critique of age as a universal legal category and theorizing it as “a sexed unit of standard time” (19) to examining specific court cases that demonstrate the shortcomings of age-based legal consent, to then imagining a concrete alternative mode of establishing consent. The individual chapters—each dense and impressively researched—take up distinct questions. The introduction poses the question of how age, as an “intimate manifestation of...