A collection of revised versions of lectures given in 2002 on the general topics of gender, sexuality, and human rights (with two additional commissioned pieces), this volume is in some ways what one would expect: a loosely connected group of essays most (but not all) of which discuss the relationship of gender and (other-than-normative) sexuality to human rights. As the cover photograph—of two men in dress clothes embracing, perhaps in the aftermath of a gay commitment ceremony—suggests, one unifying theme of the work is whether lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) people's claim to be treated by society, the law, and the state with the same respect and protection as are heterosexual couples is, in fact, a human rights claim. However, readers who might be led by the packaging to expect the work as a whole to center on that consideration will be disappointed.

Only two authors, Judith Butler and Robert Wintemute, deal extensively and directly with LGBT rights. Butler, in an essay that is the book's most interesting and lucid contribution, considers human rights in terms of what it means to construct a livable world. Her meditation on the lives that society sees as grievable, and on the importance of sexuality, ecstasy, and fantasy to human life, reminds us that the commitments to human dignity that lie at the heart of what remains radical about liberalism can still inspire in an inhumane world. Wintemute, on the other hand, offers us a rather tedious essay that was already in some ways obsolete before the volume was published. His typology of LGBT rights worldwide sees such rights as mainly depending on claims to formal equality and against (invidious) discrimination, claims which should be intelligible to rational and secular societies everywhere. In making this point, Wintemute gestures toward the clear but often overlooked or misunderstood connection of LGBT rights to women's rights, themselves still a subject of contestation across the globe. Indeed, women's rights is, in fact, the most prominent topic in much of the book, especially as this relates to the conflict of the demands of local cultures for group autonomy and self-determination versus the universal claims of human rights to protect individuals from discrimination and oppression.

While evaluations of what is often called “cultural relativism” are certainly germane to LGBT rights, it is not in those terms that the issue is here mainly discussed. Susan Moller Okin, in another of the book's best essays, analyzes the progress made toward achieving women's rights in the twentieth century, seeing the rising of cultural claims against women's equality as one of the “steps back” that women have faced (the other being a deteriorating economic situation in many countries due to Western lenders' demands for structural adjustment policies). The first of the commissioned essays, by Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, also addresses this problem, though from a different perspective, arguing that it is better to “sidestep” an analysis of women's traditional subordination in terms of a “conflict of rights,” focusing instead on “the values and interests rights are meant to protect.” In her view, it is better to “privileg(e) Shari'a” than to try to achieve “liberal divorce laws,” “respecting the ‘cultural, religious and historical contexts’ in which the interests and values take shape” (pp. 135–36). Of course, she does not tell us what to do with the fact that women worldwide are still facing regimes that do not value them or their interests in ways that can support meaningful equality. One must wonder, as well, what process allowed hers to be the only essay in the book to escape appearing with an introduction, which might have forced her to be more clear in what she means by this.

Yet another of the volume's main concerns is the reality of the often horrific violence that is routinely inflicted on sexual transgressors of all sorts, be they heterosexual women who flout patriarchal norms, men who engage in anal sex, or any others who refuse to reliably conform to the rigid prescriptions of traditional gender. Rose George's essay, “Share a Spliff, Share a Girl—Same Difference: The Unpleasant Reality of Gang Rape,” confronts this issue in the French suburbs, while Alan Sinfield discusses another face of the rapist in an analysis of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (and does make some points about gay male sexuality, but not of the sort that are particularly revealing to a consideration of human rights, and also seems a bit naive about the relationship of desire to reality). Finally, the volume concludes with Maria Warner's essay on public apologies by authority figures, a rather puzzling piece that pronounces such performances “feminine,” indeed “‘a girly thing’” (p. 234), but does not ever tell us how its analysis is relevant to the human rights of women or anybody else.

In sum, this book is a mixed bag, and rather irritatingly so. While many of the essays are worthy in themselves, their gathering in a book entitled Sex Rights, especially given the cover attached, amounts to something of a “bait and switch.” Readers interested specifically in LGBT and human rights issues can certainly find better resources, or at least ones more to the point. One must also wonder why, when soliciting new work for such a volume, the editor would seek an article about gang rape that fails both on its own terms—in that it tells us little about who these people are who are raping women or who are the women being raped, beyond their place of residence—and that also fails to deal with all the issues of sexual violence that affect LGBT people. If the point of soliciting additional articles for such a volume is to fill in some of the gaps, what gaps exactly was this journalistic and perhaps subtly racist essay meant to bridge? And then, what happened to the lecture delivered by the usually fascinating Jeanette Winterson? The editor explains that the volume contains “revised versions of five of the six lectures given” because Winterson “did not submit a written version” (p. x). As I would write to a student, “And … ?” These lapses, combined with the missing Rajan introduction, and the high price of $27.50 for a book that looks and feels as if it will physically fall apart in a day or two, leave me wondering what is going on here.