Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl

'Long admired for her pioneering work on gender, neo-liberalism and human rights, in this volume Ratna Kapur builds on that scholarship to offer a bold and wide ranging set of arguments that will add immensely to the many current debates about human rights and their efficacy in this age of inequality. Kapur' s trenchant critique of rights and her vision of an alternative to the liberal concept of freedom offer strikingly original arguments that make this an indispensable volume for all who are interested in the future of human rights.'
- Tony Anghie, National University of Singapore and University of Utah, US

'Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl is located within the best of critical theory traditions - thinking and rethinking orthodoxies around sexuality, rights and freedoms. Kapur not only deploys a late Foucauldian rethinking of freedom, but inherits the very spirit of intellectual engagement - of ''shak(ing) up habitual ways of working and thinking, dissipate(ing) conventional familiarities, to reevaluate rules and institutions'' (Foucault). It is a compelling, provocative read that will make its readers rethink what they think they already know.'
- Brenda Cossman, University of Toronto, Canada

'Ratna Kapur is one of the most important international legal scholars working today. Gender, Alterity and Human Rights is brilliant, provocative and ground breaking - I cannot think of any other book published today that centers radically 'other' approaches to political and ethical agency as the epistemological anchor for analysis of international law. She advances this ambitious new ground by showing how dominant approaches to human rights and feminism are themselves invested in political subjectivities and agendas that seek to redeem international law and authorize global governance. With theoretical rigor and a radical sensibility, she quarries through material as diverse as human rights case law and Sufi poetry to excavate the plurality of ways in which freedom is envisioned, challenged and inhabited.'
- Vasuki Nesiah, New York University, US

Human rights are axiomatic with liberal freedom. This book builds on the critique of this mainstream and official position on human rights, drawing attention to how human rights have been deployed to advance political and cultural intents rather than bring about freedom for disenfranchised groups. Its approach is unique insofar as it focuses on queer, feminist and postcolonial human rights advocacy, exposing how such interventions have at times advanced neo-liberal agendas and new forms of imperialism, and enabled a carceral politics rather than producing freedom for their constituencies.

Through a focus on campaigns for same-sex marriage, ending violence against women, and the Islamic veil bans in liberal democracies, human rights emerge as forms of governance that operate through normative prescriptions, which bind even as they purport to free, and establish a hierarchy of the human subject: who is human and who is not; who qualifies for rights and who does not. This book argues that the futurity of human rights rests in a transformative engagement with non-liberal registers of freedom beyond the narrow confines of the liberal fishbowl.

This book will have a global appeal for students and academics concerned with international and human rights law, jurisprudence, critical legal theory, gender studies, postcolonial studies, feminist legal theory, queer theory, religious studies, and philosophy. It will appeal to political activists and policymakers in the global justice arena concerned with the freedom of disenfranchised groups, human rights, gender justice, and the rights sexual and religious minorities.

Ratna Kapur, Queen Mary University of London, UK