The empire of disgust: prejudice, discrimination, and policy in India and the US

All known societies exclude and stigmatize one or more minority groups. Frequently these exclusions are underwritten with a rhetoric of disgust: people of a certain group, it is alleged, are filthy, hyper-animal, or not fit to share such facilities as drinking water, food, and public swimming pools with the `clean' and `fully human' majority. But exclusions vary in their scope and also in the specific disgust-ideologies underlying them. In this volume, interdisciplinary scholars from the United States and India present a detailed comparative study of the varieties of prejudice and stigma that pervade contemporary social and political life: prejudice along the axes of caste, race, gender, age, sexual orientation, transgender, disability, religion, and economic class.

The Dalit body: a reading for the Anthropocene /Dipesh Chakrabarty --Stigma or red tape? Roadblocks in the use of affirmative action /Ashwini Deshpande --Of big black bucks and golden-haired little girls: how fear of interracial sex informed Brown v. Board of Education and its resistance /Justin Driver --Four types of racism /Emilio Comay del Junco --A social location theory of gender: how gender borders create the category "woman" /Emily Dupree --Gender and anti-discrimination laws in India: modesty, honour, and defiled bodies /Vidhu Verma --Regulating retirement and wrinkles in an age of prejudice /Saul Levmore --Ageing, stigma, and disgust /Martha Nussbaum --Disgust or equality? Sexual orientation and Indian law /Martha Nussbaum --The rule of disgust? Contemporary transgender rights discourse in India /Jeffrey A. Redding --Combatting exclusions through law: rights of transgender people in India /H.R. Vasujith Ram --Disability, exclusions and resistance: an Indian context /Anita Ghai --Process of shaming: the limits of disability policy in India /Nandini Ghosh --What is the case against Muslims? /Aziz Z. Huq --Muslims and the politics of discrimination in India /Zoya Hasan --Class and classification: the role of disgust in regulating social status /Laura Weinrib --The point of discrimination law: securing the freedom to flourish /Tarunabh Khaitan --Economic theories of discrimination: the positive and the normative /Richard H. McAdams.