5 Outline

Hi everyone,

In response to a question asked about the notes you can bring to class on Tuesday, you can bring in one page of handwritten notes. You may use both sides of the paper. Please make sure your notes are handwritten and do not include quotes.

If you are looking for all of the information posted about the midterm exam on our WordPress site, I have tagged everything I have written so that it will appear under “Outline” in “Week 08.”

Elizabeth

Hi everyone,

This is just a quick note to let you know that the midterm will take place next Tuesday, March 21st, as scheduled. If you have questions, please post them to our website so that your colleagues can benefit from reading your question and my response.

Thanks and stay warm,

Elizabeth

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3094897/Readings_S17/Student_Work_12_16.pdf

In light of our discussion last night about the midterm exam, I re-read your posts this morning on Hunt and Moyn.

In assignment 1, many of you focused on the promise of “human rights” that Hunt attributes to documents like the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Others of you cannot move beyond the contradictions of these documents that proclaim equality yet do not address all of humanity. Both of these issues are addressed by Hunt. The midterm asks you to consider the relationship of “human rights” to “the rights of man,” a relationship that is treated differently by Lynn Hunt and Samuel Moyn. To understand Hunt’s argument, I recommend reviewing pages 18-19.

Re-reading your responses to Moyn, for assignment 4, several of you underline his point that “the rights of man” are joined to the creation of states and nations. This is a point that he stresses when he argues that human rights should be distinguished from the Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. He argues that we must pay attention to the political and economic circumstances surrounding the broader appeal for human rights that emerged in the 1970s. (One place he makes this argument is on page 12. You might also re-read pages 42-43.) Human rights are different from the rights of man, as Moyn explains in conclusion to chapter 1, as they refer to rights that would be placed above the state and nation.

In the chapter we read from her book, Transnational America, Inderpal Grewal begins by underlining that human rights discourse is a relatively new idea: “the only way to address issues of social justice, oppression, and inequality within states and across them” (2005:121). As you consider the relationship of her work to Moyn’s and Hunt’s, I encourage you to re-read pages 123-124 (especially the questions she raises on these pages). Here Grewal considers human rights discourse as a way of understanding relationships among states in a global world. She refers to these relationships as “techniques of governmentality,” a term that signals her view that “human rights” have some positive but also negative implications. I also recommend looking again at pages 126-130. On these pages she notes that the idea of “women’s rights as human rights” gained currency among diverse groups, including the U.S. State Department and rebel groups around the world.

I hope this helps guide you as you begin to prepare for the midterm. Please bring your questions about the exam to class next week or post them on WordPress.

Due Sunday, March 12th, 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 The Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that as a social-economic system, capitalism is committed to sexism and racism (2004:17). In your own words, describe the degradation of women that Federici points to in chapter one of her work. How does she connect that degradation to accumulations of wealth in a capitalist political economy?

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3094897/Readings_S17/Midterm_WRHR_3_17.pdf

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3094897/Readings_S17/MidtermExamRubric.pdf

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.

Due Sunday, March 5th, 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 their work, V. Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi argue that we should interrogate the connection of “human rights” in connection to heterosexism rather than focusing on, as other feminists have, the androcentrism of human rights discourse. In your own words, explain why they believe heterosexism is a more precise way of analyzing the relationship of gender difference and human rights.