å Saturday, March 4th, 2017

Interestingly, V. Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi examines the relationship between human rights and hetero-sexism, rather than solely investigating and questioning androcentrism as the foundation of human rights. Androcentrism, or something focused specifically on men, is clearly evident through close examination of the creation of human rights for a number of reasons we have already read about and discussed. However, hetero-sexism is not something I have necessarily related to the human rights discourse until reading this week’s reading assignment.

According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, hetero-sexism can be defined as a discrimination or prejudice against homosexuals by heterosexuals. With uprisings of revolutions, declarations, and ultimately of the Western civilization, there was an establishment of societal standards. These societal organizations and standards included social order and structures, language codifications, socioeconomic statuses, naturalization, a type of hierarchy within a society and ultimately, the inclusion of human rights. “Because we take modern state making as our starting point and fail to investigate this earlier transition, we ‘forget’ how political the making of sexuality and subjectivities – of ‘men’ and ‘women’ – has always been, and remains so today,” (p. 141). In other words, sexuality and gender have been appointed meanings and behaviors associated with fixed norms that are ostensibly, or seemingly, natural and innate, similar to our supposed human rights.

Much like the creation of the vague and questionable human rights, or even the rights of man, the creation of these fixed gender and sexuality identifications are advantageous for the male population for a number of reasons. Accepted and appropriate heterosexual relations equate to the acceptance of women’s subordination with acknowledgement of the equally accepted marriage contract. Hetero-sexism and masculism go hand and hand, and to limit hetero-sexism means to limit male dominance, which is essentially a problem for males in power. With sole acceptance of only heterosexual relations and binary sexual identities, hetero-sexist practices defused any potential for any other explorations, sexual orientations or gender identifications. Even in modern day societies, due to these historical definitions of “norms” in association with gender and sexuality, people are still facing oppression with regard to liberation and freedom of identity, sexual orientation and preferences. Groups, like LGBTQIA, have been created with the intent of revolutionizing how one’s identity can be interpreted and accepted where hetero-sexism is still instilled within the framework of a society.

“By normalizing hetero-sexism, non-heterosexual identities and practices are stigmatized as abnormal, thus fueling persecution of those who do not conform. And by creating the category of deviants while refusing to take responsibility for their protection, the state denies the violence it colludes in producing,” (p. 146). Again, there is still oppression within several states, considering that same-sex marriage is illegal and nonconformity of the “norm” for self-identity and sexual attraction is still subject to consequence by state law, law that is not subject to consequence for limiting someone’s self-expression and romantic desire. If hegemonic structures and governments have control over preferences, relationships, and ultimately how an individual can self-identify, then there is no question about the lack of credibility and the lack of disseminating human rights under, or even without the law, considering the actual amount of hetero-sexism built into the creation of these same human rights.

I’ve been thinking about our discussion last Wednesday and want to mention a couple of points from Ranciere’s essay, “Who is the Subject of Human Rights,” as they relate to arguments from Moyn’s book The Last Utopia.

In the introduction of his essay, Ranciere reads Arendt’s work The Origins of Totalitarianism to stress a distinction she makes. Arendt differentiates “the rights of man,” or political life, from “bare life,” or a conceptualization of “humanness” that she defines as a life that is abstracted from the political realm. As Ranciere explains, Arendt situates this turn—from the rights of man to human rights—as emerging from the conditions in Europe after World War I. In the aftermath of the war, there were refugees who had no link to “nation” that would ensure their rights. Like Arendt, Moyn suggests we need to differentiate the rights of man that predicated politics on a relationship to the state from the notion of “human rights” that emerges in the 1940s and that people begin to rally around in the 1970s and 1980s. As Moyn writes, “[human rights] was less the annunciation of a new age than a funeral wreath laid on the grave of wartime hopes” (2010:2).

But in his reading of Arendt, Ranciere stresses (and disagrees with) this distinction between political and social freedom. For Arendt, political freedom refers to the right of the people to oppose political domination, but her conception of social freedom refers to a conditionality of immediate necessity where there are forms of life that are not even worth oppressing. Connected to social freedom are the private rights of those who have nothing left other than their property of being human (Ranciere, 2004:298). Ranciere seems to object to Arendt’s argument that a political world is emerging that treats certain persons as beyond the realm of rights and counters Arendt’s approach with an understanding of “human rights” that instead politicizes distinctions that determine who can participate in politics.