Kiran Kaur Grewal is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University. Her areas of research specialisation include postcolonial and feminist legal theory, sexual violence, human and women’s rights and the relationship between law and subaltern struggles for justice. Prior to joining ACU, Kiran was a lecturer in human rights and socio-legal studies at the University of Sydney. She has also worked with Amnesty International and as a litigation lawyer in Sydney, specializing in administrative and immigration law. Kiran is also the author of the book, The Socio-Political Practice of Human Rights: Between the Universal and the Particular.
'The author of this important book carefully and gently tries to conceive of a simultaneously anti-racist and feminist response to the phenomenon of gang rapes in France and in Australia. Aware of the extremely controversial nature of the events that she has chosen to analyze, she scrutinizes the sometimes self-contradictory ways in which national public discourses and the media have constructed the figures of the victims and of the perpetrators, imposing their definition of the kind of violence that rape constitutes in this case. This books helps us disentangle the disturbing and often hidden connections between the racialization of migrant and Muslim bodies, secularism and certain types of nationalism, feminism and postcolonization.' - Mireille Rosello, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands 'This book is critically important. Sexual violence is becoming the central strategy of anti-immigration arguments. So it is crucial for both anti-racist activists and anti-rape activists to think through the complex intersections of racism and sexism that occur both in the public discourses and in real world cases. Grewal provides a balanced analysis that takes each of these concerns seriously, criticizes both left and right responses, and charts a path for the difficult work of talking about both race and rape with clarity and courage.' - Linda Martin Alcoff,