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Feminism and the Politics of Rights: A Qualified Defense of Identity-Based Rights Claiming

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2006

Karen Zivi
Karen Zivi
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Abstract

In this essay, I consider whether or not the contestatory potential of rights politics turns on replacing identity claims with universalist ones, and why one might be inclined to urge such a move from “the ontological” to “the political.” While this argument has much to commend it, as it sheds light on the constitutive dimensions of identity-based rights and their depoliticizing tendencies, I remain unconvinced that a better form of rights necessarily requires detachment from identity per se. Engaging the work of Wendy Brown, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Judith Butler, I argue that an understanding of rights as political claims should include an appreciation of the importance of identity and injury, for rights can function as a discourse through which identity is contested and reconfigured rather than simply reified.This article has gone through many revisions and left me with a debt to generous readers too numerous to list here. But for their direct impact on this version and ongoing enthusiasm for the project, I must thank wholeheartedly Paul Apostolidis, Sam Chambers, Michaele Ferguson, Tim Kaufman-Osborn, Jill Locke, Patchen Markell, Laurie Naranch, and the anonymous reviewers at Politics & Gender.

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics & Gender , Volume 1 , Issue 3 , September 2005 , pp. 377 - 397
Copyright
© 2005 The Women and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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