on Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl

• Published in: Feminist review 2019-07, Vol.122 (122), p.167-171
• Main Author: Kapur, Ratna
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Academic freedom; Accumulation; Advocacy; Aftermath; Alternative approaches; Colonialism; Conflict; Constituents; Court decisions; Courts; Deconstruction; Domestic violence; Dualism; Epistemology; Feminism; Freedoms; Gender; Governance; Homosexuality; Human rights; International courts; International law; Intimate partner violence; Islam; Justice; Law schools; Left wing politics; Liberalism; Minority groups; open space; Otherness; Peace; Political factors; Postcolonialism; Religiosity; Same sex marriage; Scholarship; Semantics; Sexuality; Value; Values; Women
• ISSN: 0141-7789; 1466-4380
• DOI: 10.1177/0141778919847398

Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Kapur, 2019) is about the possibility of freedom in the aftermath of the critique of human rights. Human rights are axiomatic with freedom, quite specifically liberal freedom. I invoke the metaphor of the fishbowl as representing the liberal constellation that shapes and disseminates mainstream human rights advocacy and scholarship as well as particular understandings of freedom. Freedom within a liberal paradigm is envisaged as an external pursuit, involving the accumulation of rights by a rational, finite and individual subject, and void of political preoccupations and outcomes. I demonstrate how the critical legal project, including postcolonial and feminist interventions, has successfully dismantled the façade of this claim, exposing the substantive political effects, contingency of universality, and hierarchy of the subject that structures human rights. Building on the existing critiques, I illustrate how human rights emerge as a governance and regulatory endeavour specifically in relation to gender and alterity, and how more rights for women and sexual and religious minorities have not necessarily produced more freedom for these constituencies. The central concern that this book seeks to address is: what happens when the faith in human rights as a liberal freedom project is so substantively eroded? If human rights cannot give us what we want—namely, freedom—then what can? One answer lies in foregrounding non-liberal, not illiberal, alternative registers and understandings of freedom, and examining the futurity of human rights in such a pursuit.