Gender and Human Rights: Seeking Freedom Beyond the Liberal Imaginary

Gender and Human Rights: Seeking Freedom Beyond the Liberal Imaginary

 In partnership with the Department of Law

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. Yet more rights for women, sexual and religious minorities, have not necessarily produced more freedom. Campaigns for same-sex marriage, violence against women, and Islamic veil bans have had disempowering and exclusionary effects, illustrating how human rights can operate as a project of containment and unfreedom. I argue that the futurity of human rights rests in delinking the project from liberal freedom ­and exploring its relationship with non-liberal, alternative registers of freedom. In this presentation I offer some reflections on Foucault’s political spirituality and Eve Sedgwick’s Mahayana Buddhist epistemology, as examples of freedom beyond the fishbowl of the liberal imaginary.

Ratna Kapur is a Visiting Professor of Law at Queen Mary University of London. She is also a Senior Faculty at the Institute of Global Law and Policy, Harvard Law School, and distinguished lecturer at the Symbiosis School of Law in Pune, India.  She writes and publishes extensively on issues of postcolonial and feminist legal theory, and human rights. Her current book project is entitled Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (forthcoming, Edward Elgar Press, 2018).