The Routledge Companion To Literature And Human Rights

Greg A. Mullins

Early in 1990 a fresh usage of the word “queer” entered scholarly and activist lexicons in the United States and traveled globally along the two vectors we are familiar with today: “queer” can stand in as a shorthand for an alphabet soup of gender and sexual identities such as LGBT or LGBTTIQ (Facchini 2005; Stein 2012); or it can contest the stability of identity categories by drawing attention to the socially constructed and contingent character of any social identity, be it sexual, gendered, transgendered, racial, national, religious, etc. In this regard, intersectional analyses and queer of color critique are particularly helpful (Somerville 2000; Eng, Halberstam, and Muñoz 2005; Ferguson 2003). In the former usage, queer rights as human rights follow the path blazed by the strand of global feminism that established women’s rights as human rights (Bunch 1990; Peters and Wolper 1995; Sunder Rajan 2003; Merry 2006). In the latter usage, “queer” challenges liberal notions of international human rights insofar as it invites deep skepticism about the coherence and stability of the liberal and neoliberal subject of human rights (Duggan 2003; Spade 2011). The title of this chapter is phrased as an interrogative to signal two sets of questions: which meaning of “queer” are we talking about when we talk about queer rights, and can (or should) we even think in terms of human rights given the searching critique of liberalism offered via queer theory and especially via queer theory invested in postcolonial and intersectional analyses?

The former of the two definitions of “queer” is probably the most favored usage in the United States in the early twenty-first century, and this usage has been adapted in both Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts elsewhere in the world. It tends to travel internationally together with “pride,” as in pride day or pride parade. As umbrellas of identity, affect, and politics, liberal/progressive uses of “queer” and “pride” can work to homogenize gender and sexuality globally, and to obscure the imperializing force of this homogenization. To be sure, “queer” can appear less awkward and more unified than an expanding and contracting acronym, but in the second and more critical usage, the utility of the term extends beyond the convenience of concision. To name gender identity categories (such as trans* and transgender) and sexual orientation categories (such as bisexual, lesbian, and gay) as “queer” underscores the stigma suffered by persons with non-normative genders and sexualities. In other words, binary gender systems and societies that highly value heterosexuality shame persons who do not have one of the two socially acceptable “sexes” and scorn anyone who sexually desires someone of the so-called “same sex.” The word “queer” has not only been rescued from its past as an insult; the stigma, shame, and scorn projected in pejorative deployments of the term have been redeployed by a generation of activists who have used them as tools to construct heterogeneous approaches to a politics of gender and sexuality (Warner 2000; Stein 2012).

Some political actors attempt to pry apart the identity umbrella usage of “queer” from its deployment in a critique of normativity. However, in many contexts the two significations collapse into each other, and in that collapse generate a mystifying forcefulness in the term. As the notion of “queer rights” travels about the globe, and as scholars pick it up as a critical category worth making use of in literary criticism and theory, the question of what, exactly, “queer” signifies is virtually as fraught as the question of what “rights” signify. As we attempt to unpack the burdens and prospects these words offer us in combination, we might usefully frame our inquiries within an overarching question: what are the times, the places, and the conditions under which gender and sexuality are compelled to speak the language of human rights? This is as much an historical question as it is a theoretical and practical one.

The scholarship currently available to us is especially robust in warning of the dangers if we do not proceed with historical and theoretical precision. Indebted, broadly speaking, to postcolonial critique, this scholarship focuses its concerns on the mutually reinforcing pressures of imperialism and modernity as exercised and discovered in cultural politics. That human rights discourse has long been conducted within the circuits of Euro-modern empire is widely known and amply cited elsewhere in this volume. Critical work on queer rights builds on this body of critique by focusing our attention on the political effects of claiming certain liberties and temporalities of gender and sexuality as emblems of western modernity. The brevity of the current chapter calls for a specific frame, given that an effort to produce a global survey of queer rights would fill an entire volume. For the present purpose, focusing on US imperialisms both taps into a vibrant body of scholarship and sketches vectors of power that may also be traced elsewhere. In the context of the US and its global resource wars, we have witnessed advances in rights for queers at home (such as marriage and adoption; Eng 2010) that correlate, in Jasbir Puar’s analysis, to the production of a racialized other (Muslim, Arab, Sikh) who is cast as sexually deviant and who is asked to take on the burden of stigmatized sexuality (2007). In this analysis, the human rights of polite, normative, patriotic subjects of neoliberalism in the United States are secured at the expense of not only the human rights but often the very lives of people who stand, symbolically or materially, in the path of American empire. In the United States and in the West more broadly, “progress” made in advancing queer rights is made legible through a discourse of temporality that assigns modernity to the West and backwardness to the rest of the world. The point is not that activists for queer human rights based in the West are pawns of the Pentagon, but rather that activism for queer rights operates within structures of state violence, war, and global hegemony that obscure the ways in which temporalities are constituted.

To be sure, critique has been directed specifically against the so-called “gay international,” that network of activists, foundations, NGOs, and state institutions that perceives gender and sexuality through the constraints of a Eurocentric model of identity, rights-based political advocacy, and “progress” (Massad 2002; Williams 2010). Also to be sure, any given activist or advocacy organization may be more or less self-aware that any given set of political tactics or strategies risks imposing incommensurate political models in ways that might foster the subject of rights without necessarily fostering respect for human rights. At the same time, drawing our attention to temporality, sexuality, gender, and state violence opens new avenues for inquiry and politics (Butler 2009; Reddy 2011) and does so not only within a Euro-American frame. For example, recent work coming out of literature departments takes up the discourse of queer rights as human rights in Africa, the Caribbean, and China (Hoad 2007; Mullins 2007; Liu 2012).

No less crucial than a critical understanding of the temporalities that lead gender and sexuality to speak the language of human rights is a critical understanding of the cultural formations of specific genders and sexualities. Only the most unreconstructed universalist would attempt to impose a single meaning of gender or of sexuality on all the world’s cultures. The demand for cultural specificity is axiomatic. However, this same demand poses the danger of placing upon gender and sexuality (and literature) the burden of bearing culture as such. Consider, for example, women’s rights as human rights. Women are expected to become bearers of culture in a wide array of scenarios played out in the name of human rights, including struggles over the right to education, the right to sexual health and reproductive freedom, the right to political participation, the right to freedom from violence, the right to privacy, and the right to marry and divorce the person of one’s choice. In each of these areas of rights concerns, and in many more, women are made to represent culture in a battle that typically pits tradition against modernity. Witness claims and counterclaims about women’s bodies, about the types of clothing women should wear to “fit into” or “express” a culture, and the so-called moral imperative to “rescue” women from either modernity or tradition (Ahmed 1993; Mahmood 2005; Merry 2006). Consider transgender rights, and the weight of culture that trans* women in particular are expected to bear, at times to shore up the boundaries of a binary gender system (Najambadi 2013) and at other times to cross those boundaries (Kulick 1998). Consider the mapping of heterosexuality onto nationalism that has construed men who have sex with men, women who have sex with women, and trans* people who have sex with anyone to be traitors to the nation and to national culture.

To be sure, activists working on justice, equity, nondiscrimination, and social transformation for women, trans* people, and queer people work in specific cultural contexts and are well-advised to tread lightly when working transnationally. But deep knowledge of local contexts and mindful solidarity cannot of themselves unglue the legal, moral, and societal frameworks that paint gender and sexuality into a corner of culture. For example, virtually every claim that adults have the right to marry the person of their choice will be met, somewhere, with a counterclaim that marriage is a deeply cultural tradition, and that culture trumps marriage equality. Advocates for sexual and gender rights typically respond in one of two ways. At times, they assert that international standards trump local culture, not the other way around. (This approach tends to produce disadvantageous reaction and blow back, quite aside from replicating imperial structures of power.) Alternatively, they keep the argument on the field of culture, insist that culture is neither static nor monolithic, contend that conservatives are not gatekeepers of culture, and point out that in any given culture, fairness and justice trump prejudice and hatefulness. I risk oversimplifying the extraordinarily complex work of human rights work, but this schematic generalization allows us to glimpse the way in which activists make it possible to construct universal human rights over time by working within and through specific cultural formations (Merry 2006).

Gender and sexuality share this affinity with literature: all of them are called upon to represent the universal via the particular. Literature is often asked to speak “for” a culture and “about” a culture. Scholars, critics, theorists, teachers, and students of human rights literature might wish to make literature, or gender, or sexuality speak “for” or “about” culture, but we might generatively ask ourselves what is to be gained or lost by doing so, and whose interests those demands serve. Given the paradoxes that trouble our capacity to read culture, gender, sexuality, and rights, and given the pervasive imposition of Euro-modern imperial temporalities on queer rights activism, one could reasonably discard as hopeless any efforts to conceive of queer rights as anything other than always already compromised by powers hostile to the aims of an antinormative queer politics. However, the language of queer rights as human rights continues to be attractive to many people, in many places, across a range of political projects and ideological allegiances. If only because of the sheer popularity of the language, scholarship on queer rights is vibrant and growing, including in relation to literature, film, and allied arts.

In the context of the United States, it is possible to sketch very quickly some of the forces that have led queerness to speak the language of human rights by noting the appearance of “human rights” in the names of two historically significant political organizations. Queer rights were conceived in the language of human rights before the discourse of international human rights as we know it today even began to be negotiated via the United Nations. One of the very earliest efforts to organize a political movement to advance the interests of sexual and gender minorities in the United States was a short-lived organization (1924–25) conceived by Henry Gerber and named the Society for Human Rights (Stein 2012: 37–40). The best-funded political advocacy organization working for LGBT people in the United States today is the Human Rights Campaign (founded as a political action committee in 1980; Endean 2006). Two organizations cannot define the complexity of activism for sexual and gender rights in this or in any country, but some words on these two do provide a telling survey of the contours of the language of queer human rights in the United States.

The work Henry Gerber and associates undertook in Chicago in 1924 was, in a very specific sense, cosmopolitan: he named the organization after a German homophile organization he encountered in Weimar Berlin. The Society for Human Rights invoked the “human” as an affirmation of the humanity of people we would now call LGBT or queer, and a call for inclusion. Neither the federal nor the Illinois constitutions afforded Gerber protection; on the contrary, the law criminalized his sexuality. He had no standing as a sexual citizen, and, in fact, when his federal employer (the Post Office) caught wind of his organization, he was fired without recourse. In 1924, Gerber had not even a ghost of a chance of securing civil rights to, for example, sexual privacy or nondiscrimination in employment. Hence the gesture toward human rights in the sense that these are rights that elude citizens of any state.

The name given the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) offers quite a different story. Founded in 1980 and headquartered in Washington, DC, HRC chartered its name following the 1970s boom in global human rights discourse. Arguably, HRC is not insensitive to the international discourse of human rights, and the organization supports international causes, even while maintaining a domestic focus. Nonetheless, HRC has from the outset focused its energies on winning mainstream acceptance and legal protections for homonormative gays and lesbians, not on pursuing a human rights agenda per se. The founder of HRC, Steve Endean, explains that he named the organization for marketing reasons. He wished to avoid confusion with an existing organization, the Gay Rights National Lobby; he believed that wealthy donors would be more likely to contribute to an organization that did not mention gays in its name; and he intended to funnel campaign contributions to candidates for political office who needed the cover that a blandly named “human rights organization” could afford (Endean 2006: 89). In short, the “human rights” in the Human Rights Campaign were “thought” of as a matter of strategy and public relations.

However, Endean could not have devised this strategy had the language of human rights not been made available to him through a diffuse and imprecise discourse of rights in the United States. This discourse springs from many sources, including African American freedom struggles and, from the mid-twentieth century forward, efforts by states and municipalities to provide institutional mechanisms for addressing and redressing racial discrimination. For reasons too complex to detail in the present chapter, these agencies began to name themselves human rights commissions. This language of human rights was only very loosely related to developments in international law. Two observations about these agencies: as their mandates expanded in the 1960s, they increasingly articulated their work as antidiscrimination rather than group or race relations, and antidiscrimination was increasingly understood as a matter of individual rights. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, when sexual rights and gender rights began to be folded into the oversight of these agencies, they were wrapped in one of the many paradoxes of human rights: efforts by states and municipalities to effect structural social change were pursued under a banner of the human that only recognized individual rights. Ironically, structural analysis of harm to social groups informed the creation of these agencies, but the agencies pursued their work within a wider liberal and increasingly neoliberal ideology that obscured structural analysis with its focus on individual harm.

It is in this context that the Human Rights Campaign established its name in 1980, and in this context that it has secured impressive legislative and judicial victories, including a string of recent advances for marriage equality. It is also in this context that HRC has been heavily criticized by queer and trans* political actors on the left, who understand the universalizing mantle of the “human” at HRC to extend only as far as affluence, whiteness, and homonormativity will permit (Duggan 2003). To these critiques I would add the observation that HRC emerged out of a wider current in American political life that, since about 1960, has pursued individual rights to nondiscrimination – what many might call civil rights – under the name of human rights. Literature written by and about queer people in the United States in the latter half of the twentieth century is saturated with concerns about sexual and gender identity, community formation, discrimination, and personal transformation. If these concerns are the concerns of queer rights as human rights, then the United States has produced a rich literature in the field. But late-twentieth-century queer American literature is rarely read as “human rights literature.” To do so, readers would need to follow one of two paths: either accept the language of status-based discrimination and individual rights as it has unfolded in the United States as the language of human rights as such, or develop a postliberal analysis of both human rights and queer rights. Postcolonial, intersectional, and queer of color critiques offer trenchant analyses of the capacity of liberal human rights politics to reinforce structures of empire, racism, and queer exclusion. At the same time, the question raised by the title of this chapter remains in force, as the language of “human rights” continues mobile and mutable, and the double signification of “queer” continues to mystify the grounds of its own enunciation.