The politics of legibility

Abstract

This chapter examines the ‘battleground’ for the contestation of human rights associated with gender (identity), sexuality and associated violence that has emerged at the Human Rights Council, where the feminist achievements of the last two decades are looking frighteningly precarious and queer rights claims struggle for legibility. A conservative coalition of states is promoting a novel interpretation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights arguing that it is based on a set of ‘Traditional Values’, from which equality is conspicuously absent. At the heart of these battles is a struggle over how families are recognised. The traditional heteronormative, patriarchal, racialised family is promoted as providing ‘protection’ for its members from human rights abuses, which effectively denies any human rights abuses that occur within families and rejects the importance of queer forms of kinship and belonging. At the heart of these battles is the identity of the ‘normal’ nation-state, the reach of its domestic jurisdiction and control over the familial ordering that forms the basis of militarised national identity and loyalty.