Articles by Pratiksha Baxi

The histories of the women's movement's protests transformed the discursive and juridical method of constituting rape as an object of reform and research. A traversal of different kinds of registers--protests and law reform, pedagogy and research, testimony and lawyering--reflects on how publicity, sexual violence and public secrecy constitute a field. We must pay attention to the question of method not just in relation to feminist, sociological or anthropological research, but also to the question of methods in lawyering and law reform.

This paper demonstrates the extent and multiple forms of feminist engagement with the spheres of law, which has yet to be matched in any other field. Yet there is little acknowledgement of the foundational challenges that have been offered over a long history, especially in newly emerging sub-disciplines such as the sociology of law, the curricula of new law schools and mainstream legal publishing. Feminists have especially challenged legal centralism, offering instead plural conceptions of the working out of law in society.