Reason enough to hope? The citational practices and disorienting subjects that make menstruation a matter of human rights

Abstract

ABSTRACT Calls to think or embrace an ‘after’ to rights, particularly ones that suggest adopting alternative ways of thinking or acting politically, often do so because of frustration with the liberal dimensions of rights. In this paper, I draw insights from theories of performativity and feminist phenomenology to show that rights claiming remains a site of contestation over key elements of the liberal tradition. Turning my attention to efforts to make menstruation a human rights issue, I show how rights claims that cite norms and conventions from the phenomenological tradition work to shift ways of thinking about the subject of human rights, offering new ways of thinking about human vulnerability and agency. This has implications for how we think the ‘after’ in two senses. First, it expands what counts as an ‘after’ that is an effect of specific rights claims and second, it provides important lessons for any effort to think an ‘after’ as a future with or without rights.