Gender, Alterity and Human Rights

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. This book builds on the critique of this mainstream and official position on human rights, drawing attention to how human rights have been deployed to advance political and cultural intents rather than bring about freedom for disenfranchised groups.

Its approach is unique insofar as it focuses on queer, feminist and postcolonial human rights advocacy, exposing how such interventions have at times advanced neo-liberal agendas and new forms of imperialism, and enabled a carceral politics rather than producing freedom for their constituencies.

Through a focus on campaigns for same-sex marriage, ending violence against women, and the Islamic veil bans in liberal democracies, human rights emerge as forms of governance that operate through normative prescriptions, which bind even as they purport to free, and establish a hierarchy of the human subject: who is human and who is not; who qualifies for rights and who does not. This book argues that the futurity of human rights rests in a transformative engagement with non-liberal registers of freedom beyond the narrow confines of the liberal fishbowl.

This book will have a global appeal for students and academics concerned with international and human rights law, jurisprudence, critical legal theory, gender studies, postcolonial studies, feminist legal theory, queer theory, religious studies, and philosophy. It will appeal to political activists and policymakers in the global justice arena concerned with the freedom of disenfranchised groups, human rights, gender justice, and the rights sexual and religious minorities.

'Ratna Kapur's latest book Gender, Alterity, and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fish Bowl masterfully tackles a normative claim that has been gaining increasing momentum over the last few decades: the human rights agenda has hit an impasse and needs serious transformation. Kapur writes with the assured confidence of the erudite theorist she is and her voice demands audience.'
- Feminist Legal Studies

'In an elegantly written book, Ratna Kapur takes the critique of the human rights project a step further to make a case for alternative registers of freedom and emancipation.'
- Open Magazine