Ratna Kapur / Precarious Desires and Human Rights

In this talk the speaker interrogated the liberal assumption that human rights are the primary mechanism through which to secure freedom for disenfranchised, marginalized and stigmatized groups, and specifically LGBT people. She discussed how subjects come to be recognized in human rights discourse as experiencing injuries and harms that are deemed as unjust, reparable or remediable through rights – where freedom is directly equated with securing rights. Ratna examined the discursive operations of these interventions within and against already established normative and material frameworks; that is, against racial, cultural, sexual and civilizational differences that inform both the advocacy and the apparatus of international and postcolonial human rights.

She specifically examined how pursuits of human rights have an impact on precarious desires, and how these pursuits, while conferring recognition and legibility, not only reproduce the normative framework in which precarity and precarious identities are addressed, but also clearly incorporate the rights-seeking subject and illegible nonsubject within a space where freedom is strongly defined in terms of the market and consumer agency.