å February 2017

I do agree with Brown that human rights are not just defending the innocent and powerless. On page 452 Brown says human rights is effective in limiting political violence, protects individuals from violence and abuse. It is put in place to stop torture, beatings, killings rape  and assault.  These example alone show and prove that human rights are not just to target a specific group of people but a whole population of people. Anything that is put in place in order to not only help the those that are in need  to also but to stop these specific act for good says a lot. Many people around the world as well as in this country that need protection from being rapped and assaulted. That alone is a task with in it self but Brown is trying to say that human rights is almost a cure in a way. If everyone actually followed the human right agenda the world would be so much better. Most times when a human right is violated it is because the other person does not see or understand the person to be human or may feel that the individual does not deserve rights which in turn makes it easier to violate a right that should be common. These are the people Brown is saying human rights are or need to be protected. The people who have not had a voice like African Americans, women, men who didn’t own property were the first people who human rights did not even include. Women were considered property as well as slaves , they were not considered human and so we must through human rights consider everyone and everyone is worth more than the minimum protection but to use human rights for all the things Brown is saying it actually does.

My apologies if you read an earlier version of this response. I accidentally posted before I was finished writing.

During week 2, we focused on the documents and declarations that Lynn Hunt views as precursors to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights passed by the United Nations in 1948. Hunt notes how discussions about “the rights of man” reorganized the relationship of French and American subjectivity to the sovereign, paving the way for discourses that emphasize rights as universal. Carole Pateman’s work takes a different view on “rights,” stressing how in social contract theory “sex right” is joined to such discourse. Hunt suggests that by defining natural rights in terms that stressed a right to property, theorists like John Locke engineered rights in terms that did not challenge slavery. This point becomes much more nuanced in Pateman’s work, I would argue. For Pateman, the conceptualization and arrangement of property and subjectivity (for white men of a certain standing) was joined to the bodies of women who were brought into civil society through the marriage contract.

As we discussed in class last Tuesday, one way of reading Pateman’s work and the distinction between public and private life that she stresses follows contract theorists like Locke and Rousseau who make women more a part of the environment that directors of it. In this way, the subjugation of women and their bodies are connected to the individuality that is being defined for men only. As Allison noted in her presentation, this understanding of women, as something less than an individual capable of making a contract, raises questions about the way equality is being instrumentalized through subjugation. We spent a good portion of class discussing whether and how the inequality that Pateman attributes to contract theory continues to define marriage today. I think Pateman is suggesting we consider as well how the arrangement and conceptualization of sexual difference becomes a way of framing a story about freedom and subjection (see p. 6, for example).

Building on this point, we should consider how the conceptualization and organization of the body (and differences between bodies) are connected to the stories we tell about life and its possibilities. This idea bears some kinship to the argument Wendy Brown makes in the essay we are reading for this week, on “Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism.” If you have trouble following Brown’s essay, I encourage you to read page 460. There is a good synopsis of her argument at the top of this page where she ask us to consider how projects that aim to reduce or limit suffering are already joined to certain ways of imagining subjects and their potential. This point is repeated throughout Brown’s essay as she guides us through a substantive rethinking of Michael Ignatieff’s argument that human rights campaigns can be an apolitical attempt to reduce human suffering.

Wendy Brown’s essay, “‘The Most We Can Hope For…’: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” is a decidedly scathing – and compelling – critique of the prevailing Human Rights discourse articulated by establishment liberalism and embodied, in this case, by Michael Ignatieff. Brown had much to criticize considering that Ignatieff had been the director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, yet also supported the massive bombing campaign and subsequent invasion of Iraq headed by the US military in 2003.

Ignatieff’s position on the Iraq war is, perhaps, Brown’s strongest piece of evidence against the notion that Human Rights work – at least, of the type promoted by the likes of Ignatieff – has much to do with defending those who can’t defend themselves against the powerful. Brown is certainly justified in pointing this out. Indeed, the US bombing campaign against Iraq, nicknamed “shock and awe,” was the most devastating in world history. Estimates of the dead reach into the millions – including nearly 500,000 children – and the utter destruction of multiple towns and cities created what was, at the time, the largest refugee crisis the world had ever seen. Of course, the US was (and remains) the largest, most powerful military force in the world. If the world standard for human rights discourse does not even deem it necessary to defend those on the receiving end of that most massive and powerful of bombing campaigns by trying to prevent it, does it really adhere to any minimal standards as it claims? By almost all accounts, the war in Iraq did not help anyone, most certainly not those who were killed, lost loved ones, or left without a home or even a neighborhood. To do all of this under the mantle of humanitarian intervention only makes it more hypocritical.

Brown also challenges Ignatieff’s arguments about the primacy of, for example, freedom of speech over more basic rights like food, shelter, and healthcare (456). Clearly, the latter three basic necessities form the foundation for human survival. Brown aptly demonstrates that Ignatieff’s insistence on ignoring what should be the most basic of human rights and instead focusing on the lofty and uber-democratic sounding freedom of speech is suspect. First, she makes the rather salient point that, given the political order of a world dominated by corporations and their mouthpieces, “freedom of speech” takes on an almost sinister dimension. She then uses Ignatieff’s own words to show that his real concern has very little to do with defending the defenseless and much more to do with maintaining the ideals of a free market economy – i.e. the ability to pursue profits unimpeded.

Here too, I agree with Brown. That the head of a human rights agency can not concern himself with making sure first and foremost that everyone in the world is properly nourished – a totally attainable goal, in my opinion, if profit didn’t stand in the way – says something deeply troubling about the real agenda of such an agency.

Moreover, Brown’s point about the obsession with individual over collective rights – a throwback to the ridiculous hysteria of cold war anti-communism – is well taken. This, too, seems like a classic bait and switch. Put in the starkest terms, why shouldn’t the right to healthy food be a collective one? I cannot think of an argument against that. Least of all any argument that claims to speak in defense of human rights.

I found the reading of Carole Pateman’s Sexual Contract very interesting. Although it was a lot to read, research and understand I did find it to be very informative. In the Sexual Contract Carole Pateman mentions the word “Patriarchal/ Patriarch” fairly often. A Patriarch is a male controlled government and/or society. A government that is controlled by male dominance is one that will forever under mind women.

In the past women were viewed as property. When marrying a woman in the past, a man would expect to receive land, money etc. Women were the subject in marital contracts dominated by men. These women were not labeled slaves but with no rights, not being seen as equal to their male counter parts, and not having a role in the governing society in which they lived basically made them slaves. If a civil society is one that connects its people by similar interest and “collective activity, how can a woman in the past or even now feel like they matter in a civil society that does not view them equal to men?

Carole Pateman brings up numerous theorists from the past. She speaks on these three theorists, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the social contract. A social contract is made by a community and/or society that wants to create or define rules, benefits, rights and duties for its members. Once again social contracts were created by men. The making of the social contract did not include women although they were part of the society.  In my opinion “social contracts” were hypocritical because they were supposed to be created by members in the society but women (members of society) were not making or were not part of making social contracts.

The state of nature- “is a concept used in moral and political philosophy, religion, social contract theories and international law to denote the hypothetical conditions of what the lives of people might have been like before societies came into existence.”  In the Sexual Contract by Carole Pateman mentions that “wives” were not mentioned. Since Marriage combined man and woman to husband and wife, “they appeared only in civil society”. Thomas Hobbs believed that in a civil society and civil contract that men had no need to over power women however, women we still and are still over powered by men. With all of this information in these readings I still wonder what needed to be done or what needs to be done in order for women to truly be treated, respected and viewed as equal to men?

Due Sunday, February 19th, by midnight. Word count: 400 words. Please make sure everything is in your own words. If you paraphrase, make sure to include the proper citation.

In Wendy Brown’s essay, “‘The Most We Can Hope For…’ Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism,” she argues that human rights activism is more than it claims to be. In your own words, describe some of the evidence Brown provides to support her claim that human rights activism cannot be reduced to “a pure defense of the innocent and powerless” (2004:453). Do you agree with Brown? Why or why not?

This reading definitely had so much information compacted in to it its had to talk about just one specific thing, however one of the major points I gathered from this reading was Rousseau’s point that the social contract forces individuals to give in to the state and civil law in which freedom becomes obedience in exchange for protection. I thought this was one of the more powerful points of the text because here you are as the individual and if obedience has to be exchanged for protection then how are you really free? If you as the individual have to be subjected to the state and civil laws that say women are not even considered an individual but in fact just property , how is that freedom, and disobedience to the law would result in you politically being unprotected by the state. This is not unlike today where there are many laws that are in place that should be irradiated but to obtain protection from the law u must follow the law and in the same case obedience is exchanged for protection.

Another interesting point that was made was about the classic theorist creating and basically defining what it is to be a man or a woman. Defining that only men are considered individuals and naturally all men are born free and created equal. The problem with this is that if one man is allowed to be ruled or governed by another man then how can they be equal? The answer is they can not be equal. This brings us back to the invention of rights. The rights defined were never meant to include women or blacks. They were meant for the white man who owned property such as slaves and money and status. There is no way you can start an argument off with all men are created equal while one man owns another, and whats even more disheartening is that women were not at all included in these liberties. As the author of the text stated women had no natural freedom and are not born free. They were automatically considered property of their father and then of their husbands. Hobbes explained that women lacked the attributes and capacity to be considered an individual. In this case to be sexually different is to be politically different. This brings me back to my previous point . the phrase “all men” is even less than literal because not only does it excluded actually certain males but most definitely excludes all women.