5 Week 03

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.

Due Sunday, February 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 Sexual Contract, Carole Pateman explains that while women have no part in the original contract with civil society described liberal political theorists, they are not left out of the “state of nature.” In your own words, how would you explain the incorporation of women into a sphere that “is and is not in civil society”?