Introduction

Human Rights in Precarious Times

On June 17, 1992, Ngawang Sangdrol, a fifteen-year-old member of the Garu Nunnery in Tibet, was arrested and imprisoned for shouting pro-independence slogans at a demonstration in Lhasa. This was not her first time in prison. Two years earlier, on August 21, 1990, at age thirteen, she was arrested and detained on a similar charge at the Norbu Lingka (the former summer palace of the Dalai Lama). At the time she was one of the world’s youngest political prisoners. Upon her second arrest, Sangdrol was sent to Drapchi prison, which is notorious for its poor conditions, torture, and other forms of abuse. Her initial sentence of three years was extended multiple times for alleged protests in prison to a total of twenty-one years (consolidated from twenty-three years)—another landmark for her, this time as the female Tibetan political prisoner with the longest sentence.¹ The centerpiece of the charges against her was her participation with thirteen others in illicitly recording protest songs in their cells on a smuggled tape recorder. Known in the international human rights campaigns upon their behalf as the Drapchi 14 or the singing nuns of Drapchi prison, their case gained momentum when one of the four cassette tapes they had secretly recorded avoided confiscation and was smuggled out of prison under a pile of compost, where it then embarked on its own covert journey out of the country and into the office of the Tibet Information Network, a human rights organization based in London.²

The Lhasa City Intermediate People’s Court Criminal Sentencing Document No. 42 (1993), which detailed the judicial response to the nuns’ recordings, charged them with the “crime of counter-revolutionary propaganda and incitement” and significantly extended their prison sentences, in addition to suspending their political rights for one to three years after their releases. The sentencing document also argued that the women “should be severely punished according to the law” because they have “refused to be reformed” through labor and because their “attitude toward confession was abominable.”³ As she has testified many times, including before the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Terrorism, Non-Proliferation, and Human Rights, Sangdrol experienced severe physical and mental torture during her imprisonments, including “different types of electric batons and prods, pipes, canes of different size and the use of the ‘airplane’ hanging system” and prolonged stays in solitary confinement.⁴ After serving eleven years of her sentence, Sangdrol was released to the home of her sister in Lhasa, and on March 28, 2003, she arrived in the US for medical treatment. In 2011, she became a US citizen, and she has continued to share her story in order to protest human rights abuses in Tibet.

Told in this way, Sangdrol’s story reads as an exemplary human rights narrative. It details the subject’s remarkable journey from protest to torture to the denial of political rights to full citizenship (and, correspondingly, from childhood to adulthood), made possible by the transnational circuit of free expression (through the traveling cassette) and human rights discourses (through the campaigns of numerous nongovernmental organizations as well as the work of the US Congress and the United Nations).⁵ And of course in crucial ways that is accurate. However, in reconfirming Sangdrol as the liberal subject of human rights, this narrative fails to disclose more complex operations of human rights and the subject who bears them. I sketch some of those complexities below in order to offer an initial map to this book’s broad concerns with the vulnerable subject and the temporality of human rights.

I have written elsewhere about the singing nuns and the crucial role that the Dui Hua Foundation and its Executive Director John Kamm played in securing Sangdrol’s release and passage to the US.⁶ To highlight a key point, in a wide-ranging profile for The New York Times Magazine in 2002, Kamm discussed his notably successful approach, which employs the techniques he developed as a corporate sales executive and President of the Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, to cement relationships and build deals for human rights with Chinese partners: “‘I manufacture and sell prisoner lists,’ he says. ‘I know a sale is made when I hear about a release.’”⁷ It is easy to critique such language as a particularly striking example of what Upendra Baxi has decried as “the trade-related, market-friendly human rights paradigm.”⁸ One example of how this paradigm transforms the subject into an object of exchange may be that Sangdrol only learned that she would be transferred out of Lhasa in a preliminary, vague meeting with government officials (where she was assured “everything will be fine”) and then, some time later, when a car arrived at her sister’s home and Sangdrol was told she would be leaving the country immediately. She has recounted how, “[w]hen the time came to leave, I could not speak. We both knew we would never see each other again until Tibet is free.”⁹ Sangdrol travelled under high security to Beijing where she was transferred to the care of the US Department of State and boarded a flight to Washington, DC. Although Sangdrol expresses only gratitude for the tremendous efforts of so many people and organizations that were undertaken to gain her release and safety, she did not determine the unfolding of those efforts, nor her destination.

Although not referencing the Drapchi 14 in particular, Pheng Cheah argues against reading a human rights case such as Sangdrol’s in terms of a US versus China ideological struggle, stating, “The two poles of that binary opposition are complicitous. The fight is between different models of capitalist accumulation attempting to assert economic hegemony.”¹⁰ Human rights norms mask this struggle and allow debates over cultural difference to substitute for those that might generate alternative approaches to justice, alternatives not conceptually grounded in the figure of the liberal subject and played out according to the neoliberal and geopolitical priorities of hegemonic states. I do not wish to collapse the differences between US and Chinese human rights records—predatory sovereignty targets specific populations and persons in calibrated, differentiated ways; however, the imbrications of human rights and capitalist development that Cheah details highlight the transnational forces of neoliberalism and securitization in shaping normative human rights.

Two aspects of the interrelationship among human rights, neoliberalism, and securitization provide the foundations for my project. First, as has been ably demonstrated by numerous legal, political, and cultural theorists and historians, the development and distribution of normative human rights is inseparable from European imperialism as a history of capitalist accumulation and its legacies. The Preamble of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (UDHR) makes clear that the UDHR’s principles (and those of the ensuing covenants that further define and secure those principles), while ostensibly timeless and universal, are grounded in a linear historical narrative of modernity-as-progress which will be realized through the liberal subject, the nation–state, and the international order of states provided by the UN. The historical underpinnings of this world order are evident throughout the UDHR, including in its early reference to the atrocities of World War II in an echo of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wartime “Four Freedoms” speech. With the clause, “Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the UDHR produces the very subjects (“the common people”) in the image of Roosevelt’s earlier US wartime audience, on whose behalf the document speaks.¹¹ And the clause positions the bearers of human rights as the historical subjects of a world order that the UDHR promises to help build. Critics of normative human rights rightly argue that such a “‘progress narrative,’ the transformation of a victim to a survivor and then to an activist,”¹² masks human rights as an exclusionary, imperializing form of governmentality that re-produces its own ideal subjects. To address this problem, I read for the heterotemporality of human rights events and their representation: their structural roots, lasting legacies, and the different temporal entanglements, to borrow from Achille Mbembe, in which the bearers of egregious wrongs understand their own experiences, desires, and possible futures. The heterotemporality of human rights insists that a legal judgment, financial settlement, healed wound, or oath of citizenship provides only a partial measure of the path toward justice, which itself must remain open-ended and negotiable.

Heterotemporality quickly becomes visible when the focus of attention shifts from the chronological and teleological human rights success story of Sangdrol’s release, citizenship, and continued activism to her expression of heterogeneous temporalities in her testimony and in the songs the nuns wrote and sang. The temporal rhythms of an electric shock or a beating, the ensuing blackout and gradual recovery—of a hunger strike or solitary confinement; of losing track of time while trying secretly to repeat 1,000 prayers each day in prison; of singing of the Dalai Lama’s current incarnation to the four-beat rhythm of a Chinese pop song; of a day behind iron bars in relation to, metaphorically, an imagined future of never-ending Tibetan independence when “the sun/From beneath the clouds shall appear”¹³; of the songs’ initial recordings versus their subsequent playings; of exile; of living in the aftermath of prolonged torture, when its physical and mental effects still reverberate daily—none of these temporalities (physical, spiritual, emotional, political) can be sublimated to nor concluded by an oath of citizenship or the triumphalist narrative of the rescued human rights subject. That the experience of heterotemporality is a constitutive feature of embodied and sentient life speaks to the need for human rights discourses that can reflect those differences and the heterogeneous forms of justice toward which they lean.

This leads to my second main concern: that heterotemporality defines intervals through which many different subject positions emerge and become visible. It discloses the false opposition between the bare life of the victim, on the one hand, and the liberal subject, on the other. The heterotemporality of material and social life demands close attention to specific contexts and is at odds with the notion that human rights can transform the vulnerable subject—read as embodied, weak, passive, perhaps deficient, and open to harm—into the liberal subject of modernity through the magical combination of freedom and security. The inclusion in the UDHR of Roosevelt’s rhetoric of positive and negative freedoms—freedom of speech and worship; freedom from fear and want—invokes a complex relationship between vulnerability on the one hand and security-as-freedom on the other in normative human rights. This relationship ties security and freedom to the sovereignty of the state and the individual, liberal subject. As Joseph Slaughter has demonstrated in his reading of legal personhood, “the development of human rights law becomes a story of the arrival of the individual human being on the world stage as a subject of international rights and duties, a subject constituted by international law with a kind of inviolable and inalienable individual, or personal sovereignty.”¹⁴ That this subject can only ever be a fictional one, albeit one whose legal standing has material effects, is manifest in the paradoxes that attend it. For example, Kamm’s message that “human rights groups around the world have worked tirelessly on behalf of Ngawang Sangdrol’s behalf for many years, and will take comfort and pride” in her release,¹⁵ reflects the paradoxes inherent in the equation of rights as freedom. The reckoning that makes rights and freedom equivalencies does so by masking those human rights groups’ geopolitical and biopolitical forms of governmentality that necessarily delimit freedom in order to manufacture it elsewhere, in the future, and in pre-determined forms. In other words, it was only as an object of exchange between superpowers—mediated by the discourses that human rights groups and state parties share of economic and geopolitical calculations of risk, profit, and securitization—that Sangdrol could be re-produced as the free, secure(d) subject of rights in the US.

Inderpal Grewal summarizes the effects of this process in her definition of human rights as “a regime of truth disseminated through transnational connectivities which came to power as a mode of transnational governmentality producing technologies of welfare alongside modes of disciplinary and sovereign power.”¹⁶ Her extensive critiques of human rights illuminate the operations of this regime of truth according the neoliberal principles of the privatization of risk, opportunity, and freedom that subtend many egregious violations; and her critiques demonstrate how claims for women’s rights in particular reinforce neoliberal ideologies by equating freedom with choice as the desired outcome for the sovereign subject. Choice as the ultimate expression of freedom cements the relationship between consumerism, security, and sovereignty. I draw on Grewal’s definition in this book in order to better understand human rights’ “technologies of welfare alongside modes of disciplinary and sovereign power.” To do so, however, I read human rights in ways of which she might not fully approve—not as a regime of truth so much as a mode of operation whereby contingent norms function materially and discursively to define violations, produce subjects, and structure particular claims toward justice, yet whose bodies, histories, and effects are never pre-determined and always exceed the normative terms through which they emerge. In addition, I broaden the ideological context of human rights to include neoliberalism in concert with securitization, located in the private–state networks devoted to border security, incarceration, moral policing, and militarized humanitarian intervention in the name of human rights.

Many contemporary political, legal, and cultural critics echo Grewal to argue that human rights constitute a regime that is implicitly imperialist and too often sanctions violence in the name of paternalistic care. I take a somewhat different approach, which is to examine the different ways in which human rights in specific contexts function to open up or foreclose particular paths toward justice, recognize or exclude particular subjects, and delimit or render possible various futures. Stephen Hopgood has recently characterized normative human rights as a “global structure of laws, courts, norms, and organizations that raise money, write reports, run international campaigns, open local offices, lobby governments, and claim to speak with a singular authority in the name of humanity as a whole.”¹⁷ Certainly economic and political interests form the skeleton of that structure; however, my focus is on the operations of that “claim to speak” (and, in chapter five, following Nicholas Mirzoeff, of that right to look)—with the discourses, silences, speakers, audiences, forms and genres in the name of a social imaginary of human rights as self-evident—which I argue is never singular or static. Comprising that claim to speak and right to look are first the normative human rights discourses generated by the various entities Hopgood cites. These are the international and national declarations and legal conventions as well as human rights reports, humanitarian appeals, and journalistic reportage (both visual and verbal) that together work to frame and document violations and to engender a response to them.

Within that matrix, human rights principles and laws provide the infrastructure through which claims and claimants are articulated. Reading human rights as neither a panacea nor a curse, I follow Marianne Constable’s insistence that legal speech acts should be considered discursively rather than as a set of rules in order to understand how they provide shared, evolving conceptual norms of social life. She argues, “In a world of law as language, that is, the authority and so-called sovereignty of the state is as much a matter of ‘juris-diction’ as of power of violence.”¹⁸ This does not mean that the law avoids violence, nor that it unilaterally defines a social norm, but that “[a]s persuasive utterances, the legal speech acts of representatives of official law as well as the claims of their critics are performative and passionate, designed to evoke in their respective hearers a shared sense of obligation that is not only conventionally performed but also a matter of desire.”¹⁹ Legal discourse provides, in other words, a shared occasion, grammar, and vocabulary for negotiating what should be, according to the legal principles, a set of shared concerns. Even these occasions are not singular, but “take place incompletely against a background of imperfect—incomplete, habitual, overlapping, often routine, yet interruptible—ways of speaking or of knowing our language and the world. Such imperfection refers not only to the open-endedness of a future perfect temporal structure but also to the relations of speakers and hearers.”²⁰ These “imperfections” are magnified in human rights contexts where there are often disputes concerning sovereignty and international legal jurisdiction or between conflicting human rights principles. Despite this continual process of deferral, legal claims are powerful, whether or not they are successful, according to Constable, in that “they appeal to a ‘law’ that they affirm as a speaker’s and hearer’s jointly owned law to demand the recognition that belongs to what they assert.”²¹ Here, too, I add the caveat that human rights legal disputes can hinge on the negotiation between parties of which legal principles apply and what the material referents of those principles are. Given that the law’s promise can only be realized in the form of future action, the law’s temporal dimensions must necessarily be extended from the linearity of precedent, the moment of a present judgment, or the timeless claim of universality to include the heterotemporal frameworks of speakers and hearers. The law becomes a prism through which these heterotemporalities are negotiated, while at the same time the law—as a discourse—is subject to change through the pressures of these same negotiations.

The other normative human rights discourses of reportage and of human rights and humanitarian appeals join the conversation through their own generic norms, and each chapter in this book examines a subset of these discourses in order to understand how their “technologies” (to borrow again from Grewal) produce specific human rights events and outcomes: subjects, causes, claims, and responses. These discourses formulate a “configuration of the common experience of the sensible,” in Jacques Rancière’s words, in that news accounts, human rights reporting, humanitarian appeals, and legal cases are the primary ways in which stories of violations enter the public sphere. In this sense, normative rights discourses generate what I refer to here as the social imaginary, which is not imaginary in opposition to the real, but rather calls upon the imagination to garner meaning and to imbue that meaning with passion and concern. Although these normative discourses speak to different audiences and call upon different forms of research (e.g., legal, medical, scientific) and argumentation, in many ways, they reinforce one another to define particular human rights violations and the subjects who perpetrate and bear them. Critiques of human rights as a mode of governance that re-produces the exclusionary logics of neoliberal capital accumulation and securitization point to the ways in which these definitions often replicate the ostensible bifurcation between the liberal subject of human rights and its other: the abject victim, or what Giorgio Agamben refers to as bare life. As opposed to unmasking the hegemonic operations of human rights or reading for resistance to those operations, this book seeks to dismantle the bifurcation of the liberal subject versus bare life through an analysis of the heterotemporalities and subject positions that emerge through and in relation to rights discourses.

The social imaginary of human rights often produces its most powerful effects through the manufacture and circulation of images and discourses of suffering that are grounded in “the logic of cultural recognition”—those identity-based categories through which the liberal subject and its others are coded.²² This is the logic through which Sangdrol, for instance, becomes legible in particularly easily commodifiable categories as a legally immature or unqualified, religious, long-suffering, non-threatening, Third World female victim whose saving reconfirms the right-ness, the moral superiority of human rights governmentality. However, as I demonstrate throughout this book, reading closely and interdisciplinarily discloses that the subjects of human rights are never so easily recognizable and categorizable, nor are the discourses of human rights so univocal or all encompassing. Rather than seek to expand the range of identities recognizable within human rights frameworks, I focus on the discursive and material operations of human rights through which its subjects emerge. Thus, although there is no intrinsic, causal relationship between different discourses of human rights, this is book is indebted to Rancière’s argument that cultural production can powerfully shape the social imaginary and, crucially, can make its operations available to scrutiny. Although literature and visual culture can, of course, just as easily reproduce and intensify recognizable categories of identity, I am interested here in how fiction and visual culture can facilitate an analytical shift from identity to forms of subjectivity and legal personhood that might found other juridico–political claims.

“Art,” in Rancière’s term, in its manifest tension between form and content, materiality, contemplation, and affect, can stage a “dissensus” in what is given—what is visible and what it means. He defines dissensus in terms of “an organization of the sensible where there is neither a reality concealed behind appearances nor a single regime of presentation and interpretation of the given imposing its obviousness on all.”²³ Dissensus does not refer, in other words, to the work of unmasking false claims or resistance against oppression from pre-existing positions. Instead, Rancière maps a different approach to dissensus that refers to those shifts in perspective, in the relationships between “things and meanings,”²⁴ in what is imaginable that signals the emergence of new political subjects, discourses, and interpretations. Central to the staging of dissensus, he argues, is the work of “fiction”: that “re-framing of the ‘real,’ or the framing of a dissensus, [that] is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance, the individual and the collective.”²⁵ Although I would not argue that aesthetic production always and necessarily works in these ways or that it is a privileged discourse for examining human rights, I find that the process of closely reading (as opposed to reading for some overt political argument) literary and visual culture in the context of other human rights discourses can reveal the operations of human rights’ technologies of governance as well as potential alternatives, in that “fiction” can disclose “that every situation can be cracked open from the inside, reconfigured in a different regime of perception and signification.”²⁶

To that end, each chapter of this book brings conventional human rights discourses together with a constellation of visual and literary cultural texts in order to examine the normative subjects and times of human rights in five different contexts: the use of child soldiers in contemporary failed states; Zimbabwe’s post–independence targeting of civilian populations in the Gukurahundi of the mid–1980s and its legacy of political impunity; toxicity and spectacle after the Union Carbide explosion of 1984 in Bhopal, India; the medical humanitarian work of Médecins Sans Frontières in various locations from 1983 to the present; and the contemporary aftermath of Indonesia’s 1965–66 mass murders against Communists and suspected Communist sympathizers. Reading human rights as a broadly constructed discursive formation, with substantive and material effects, brings to the forefront the production of heterogeneous subjects and temporalities, both of which expand claims for justice. My analysis of how these varied texts produce particular social imaginaries of a given human rights issue or event reveals at once the intrinsic heterogeneity of the social imaginary and, correspondingly, how the social imaginary might give rise to the political negotiation that Rancière describes in terms of dissensus.

For Rancière, dissensus is precisely the interval or faultline in the social imaginary in which political subjectivization—the emergence of subject positions that alter the terms of the social imaginary or the given—occurs. I draw on Rancière’s theory of subjectivization because it so carefully articulates an alternative to identity-based approaches to rights that ultimately remain tied to the logics of bifurcation and exclusion. For Rancière, politics refers to the process that “makes visible that which had no reason to be seen,” and it is the realm that comes into being in concert with its subjects. In other words, a political subject does not refer to an a priori identity or the idealized figure of the liberal subject; rather it designates “the operator of a particular mode of [subjectivization …] through which politics has its existence.”²⁷ The political subject, emerging through the process of subjectivization which dissensus makes possible, is therefore always contingently located at the nexus of differentiated perspectives and discourses.

Reading at the nexus of these perspectives and discourses, then, yields the central claims of my argument. First, that reading for the heterotemporality of human rights events and discourses insists on justice as an open-ended, future-oriented process of negotiation that can incorporate intergenerational claims, varying scopes of suffering and responsibility, and is not bound to a singular definition of modern progress. Heterotemporality, in other words, demands the consideration of varying scales of the time and space, or chronotope, of atrocity. Moreover, human rights, their promises and failures notwithstanding, offer one among many approaches in the pursuit of justice, and my readings examine those contexts when human rights are efficacious, are pressed to become more capacious, or simply fail to meet the needs and desires of political subjects. Second, that the heterotemporality of human rights also makes visible a proliferation of human rights subjects and claims beyond the false division between the liberal subject and the victim. My readings aim to dismantle the logic of the liberal subject of rights, citizenship, and law versus bare life that can, following Agamben, be sacrificed without political consequence. The ideal of liberal subjectivity is only and “at best” differentially available to particular classes of persons, defined according to hierarchized categories of identity, and it depends upon a mind/body duality that denies the embodiment of the subject which human rights aim to address. Moreover, neither citizenship nor rights can make the body whole nor render the subject bounded and stable in meaning.

The other pole of the binary opposition is similarly untenable. As Angela Naimou has clearly demonstrated in her deconstruction of Agamben’s theory, his conceptualization fails to acknowledge that “[w]hat lies between the ideal citizen and bare life is an enormous range of particular legal identities.”²⁸ Building on Colin Dayan’s theories of negative legal personhood, Naimou emphasizes that that construction is neither singular nor devoid of political meaning. Rather, the law produces specific subject positions through which it distributes harm and precariousness: “[It] is not an absence of personhood or the failure of law to recognize personhood; rather, it is a form of personhood paradoxically constructed in the law as that which is negated or incapacitated by the law.”²⁹ Because I am interested in the capacity (or lack thereof) of human rights to countenance and to respond to the subject’s embodied suffering and juridico–political standing, I turn to recent feminist theories of vulnerability and precarity to frame my analyses of subjectivization and human rights. These theories challenge some of the ideological foundations of human rights even as they seek to capture some of the promise of human rights. My readings reveal the paradoxical ways in which vulnerability theory can at once dislodge the liberal subject from the center of rights discourse, even as the theory risks reproducing debilitating narratives of victimhood. However, I also analyze cases wherein the sufferers of human rights abuses deploy their own vulnerabilities, in a process I refer to as self-precaritization, in order to initiate new, powerful human rights claims.

Before examining in more detail the theories of vulnerability that inform this project, I want to return one last time to Sangdrol’s story in order to demonstrate the intrinsic politicization of bare life and to insist that these questions of representation, legal personhood, and subjectivity are not solely theoretical. Agamben describes the production of bare life—the state of abjection one step removed from death; the state of being of one who is devoid of value, who therefore cannot be sacrificed—as the “originary activity of sovereignty.”³⁰ Sangdrol’s treatment in prison would seem to exemplify that condition. Physically diminutive, young, and female, surviving years of brutal torture when many did not, Sangdrol was subject to the death-world, in Agamben’s terms, created by the sovereign will of the state. To give but one of many possible examples, regarding a beating for allegedly instigating a disturbance during a visit by a European Union delegation, one of Sangdrol’s cellmates testified:

Ani Sangdrol was in the worst condition. It was like she was dead, she had lost consciousness. They didn’t have any proof against Ani-la, they beat her out of a grudge. Ani Sangdrol couldn’t stand up. [They] said “Rigchog, stand up,” but she could not. Rigchog is what they call Sangdrol. We thought that she was dead, and so did the tutrang [chief female prison official of that unit], who said, “Don’t hit [her].” Then Pema Butri [the nuns’ notorious female guard] came forward and struck [her] again with her belt. [Sangdrol] suddenly regained consciousness, and Pema Butri said, “I thought you had died, but you still didn’t die. You! Stand up!” We [were forbidden] to move. We had to wait a long time for her to stand up. When she did she was bleeding heavily, blood was streaming from her like water. […] They had trampled upon her body. There were so many people beating [her] that we couldn’t see her when she had fallen down. She wasn’t even able to lift up her head afterwards.³¹

And yet … the human rights report on the operations of her cellblock, Rukhag 3, details Sangdrol and other prisoners’ many ostensible infractions—each garnering additional physical punishments—such as an untidy bed, refusing to stand when a prison official entered the cell, refusing to sing a patriotic propaganda song, and of course the recording of their own songs as well. Each was received as a form of political protest and, as the sentencing document cited above notes, “their attitude toward confession was abominable.” Sangdrol and her cellmates adamantly protested their conditions and the attempts at indoctrination; however, I want to avoid reading her political subjectivization solely in terms of resistance—the kind of reading of resistance as agency that unwittingly calls forth the liberal subject as its protagonist. Throughout their time in prison, the nuns clearly tried to aid one another whenever possible. During one particularly vicious beating, for example, a cellmate threw herself over Sangdrol to protect her from further blows, and Sangdrol attributes her survival in large measure to the women’s solidarity and care. In this sense, their mutual care to stay alive stages dissensus simply by refusing the totalizing power of sovereignty, building collective networks of care that remake that refusal into the stuff of survival.

More generally, prisoners of conscience constitute a challenge to state sovereignty precisely by speaking out against it. In his careful analysis of political prisoners’ parrhesia, or fearless speech, Gerard Hauser analyzes how, by refusing to ask permission to speak, and by their willingness to risk death in doing so, prisoners of conscience “precipitat[e] a crisis: [their speech] raises the possibility of defying the state’s sovereign capacity to decree the homo sacer and thereby reduce the citizen to bare life. [… It] disrupts the biopolitical equation of sovereignty, exposes the limits of state power, and asserts that sovereignty can be challenged and possibly redefined.”³² Sangdrol’s public protests at age thirteen and fifteen offered this challenge, but what happens once inside the prison, where torture and abuse provide the ideological and material manifestation of the state’s violent sovereignty? Hauser analyzes the vernacular speech and practices of political prisoners who assert human rights claims without human rights normative discourses and, in doing so, produce a “searing critique of the sovereign’s power.”³³ What he calls the moral vernacular includes overt protests in prison as well as the many different quotidian ways in which prisoners express their political agency. For Hauser, Sangdrol’s examples above, from the refusal to stand for a visiting official to the protest song to the nuns’ attempt to keep one another alive through acts of “ordinary virtues,” are all constitutive of the vernacular of human rights and political resistance of prisoners of conscience.³⁴

There is also another factor at work here, however, that locates dissensus outside of a conventional search for the subject’s agency. This other dimension of politicization becomes visible through the testimony above when the tutrang tells the guard, “Don’t hit [her],” either in fear that another blow would kill Sangdrol or that it would constitute some kind of excess or defilement. But why the restraint? “Don’t hit [her]” reveals the paradox at the heart of Rukhag 3 and in the theory of the state of exception and bare life more broadly. In that moment, the command to cease a violent performance that is routinely enacted, even if violated by Pema Butri’s next blow, reveals the kind of brief interval Rancière describes in which ideology fractures. On the one hand, the beatings and other forms of abuse have been systematized. It is possible to trace their patterns and practices in the context of prison leadership and daily events, the country’s legal codes, and the reactions of the prisoners. The beatings demonstrated the state’s control over Sangdrol’s death-world by reducing her to a seemingly lifeless body, perhaps available politically only for mourning by her compatriots; however, in attempting to stay the next blow, the death-blow, the prison chief also seems to recognize that Sangdrol’s bare life and her death, if it were at that moment, both carry political meaning: alive and resistant, Sangdrol engages in an ideological contest in which the state attempts to convert her. However, her death in those circumstances would mean that the contest has ended and the state has lost. Thus, the careful calibration by even sadistic prison guards and officials of how to keep the prisoner alive yet without speech reveals the intrinsic political subjectivization of bare life and, with it, the limits of sovereignty. “Stand up!” Pema Butri commands, in order to begin the contest again. Her command signifies paradoxically the limits of her power. The state demonstrates its capacity to reduce the citizen to bare life; however, that bare life is never without political significance because the prisoner has already spoken out, and that speech extends the time of political subjectivization into the future, even if its expression goes on to take different forms that may or may not figure as “resistance.”

On occasion, when addressing the cause of prisoner abuse and Tibetan autonomy, Sangdrol will sing one of the Drapchi 14 songs to a public audience. Although she sings as a citizen and an activist, those appellations cannot convey her complex negotiation of security and loss of homeland and family, resiliency, and the lasting effects of torture, the precarity of life in the US, or the difficulty of having endured so much for a political goal that seems so far away. Sangdrol sings on behalf of justice yet undone, in words her non-Tibetan speaking audiences will not understand, and it is that powerful and moving voice that I try to understand by looking beyond both the victim and the liberal subject to the vulnerable subject of human rights.

The Vulnerable Subject of Human Rights

As many theorists, historians, and philosophers have shown, the liberal subject as the ideal bearer of human rights makes visible the gap between legal personhood (the sovereign subject who is invested with legal standing as a form of property) and the human being (species member). Whereas human rights are ostensibly inherent in the embodied human being, according to the UDHR, rights can only exist in relation to the person before law in actual legal cases. As Jens David Ohlin demonstrates in “Is the Concept of the Person Necessary for Human Rights?” an entity is “a person because we ascribe human rights to it,” not the other way around.³⁵ Normative human rights thus accomplish a sleight of hand that erases embodiment at the moment of its supposed protection. This is the logic of dis-embodied legal personhood that subtends corporate free speech in the form of political campaign contributions in decisions such as Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission (2010) or the successful efforts of John Kamm to trade prisoners as commodities among sovereign states. The gap between legal personhood and the human being that the liberal subject fails to bridge has two particularly damaging effects that concern this project: it makes possible the de-coupling of human rights from human embodiment or, conversely, the distribution of rights (and therefore production of the legal persons who bear them) according to hierarchies of a priori identities. Elizabeth Anker provides a formidable critique of liberalism for its production at once of the claim to universality as well as of persons’ unequal standing before the law. She summarizes that within the liberal tradition of human rights, “[T]he body is generally idealized through the invention of its integrity, reduced to calculations of identity and likeness, or treated as a mere nuisance.”³⁶ Although I pursue a different line of argument than Anker does, I take her critique as a point of departure, adding to it a critique of the narrative of modern progress that is also implicit in the liberal subject’s historical trajectory and that delimits what counts as justice accordingly.

Anker draws on phenomenology, through the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in order to restore considerations of embodiment and embodied suffering to the otherwise anemic conceptualization of the liberal subject. Phenomenology for Anker offers a response to liberalism’s failure to “register the manifold and dense energies that compose corporeal experience, denying how they together actuate human selfhood, facilitate judgment and decision making, enliven collective life, and purvey multifaceted kinds of meaning.”³⁷ She turns to literary fiction to explore the imagination of these energies and their effects. Thus, she reads for the ways in which authors reinvigorate human rights through a more capacious imagination of the embodied, phenomenological experience of the subject who bears them. My insistence on embodiment as a central condition of the human rights subject comes not from perceptive faculties but, instead, from the social imaginary—the production of particularly embodied subjects whose meanings derive from, though are not wholly constrained by, the contexts in which they arise.

To consider embodiment as constitutive of subjectivity, while maintaining a distinction between embodiment and fixed bodily or cultural identification, I take as a starting point the idea that the subject is always variously constituted within a matrix of norms, rather than in binary opposition to the Other. To do so, I draw at times on rhetorical approaches to a human rights event that illuminate contextualized forms of recognition; however, I am interested predominantly in the imaginative grounding of the event and the effects outside of fixed identities, that the social imaginary might generate. Wendy Hesford develops a rhetorical approach to this problem in Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms and some of her subsequent essays. Hesford calls into question “the normative frameworks that govern subject formation and the scenes of suffering, as well as the recognition scenes in human rights discourse.”³⁸ As her emphasis on recognition and the scenes of suffering indicates, her focus is on the ways in which human rights discourses operate forcefully and often problematically through identificatory processes. These processes depend upon and reinforce conventional categories (e.g., what Teju Cole has described recently as the white-savior industrial complex).³⁹ As Hesford details through her analysis of the Hegelian master–slave relationship that informs models of subjectivity and identification predicated on the opposition of self and other, such a model depends upon the “attributes of recognition [that] reinforce[e] the very identity categories that human rights claims contest.”⁴⁰

Rancière makes a related, if more abstract, argument in his critique of Hannah Arendt and Agamben’s theories of the opposition between political and bare life. For both Hesford and Rancière, those binary oppositions do not hold up to scrutiny, even though they powerfully affect the distributions of human rights and the recognition of their bearers. The politics of recognition that operate through identity categories facilitate the slide from human rights claims to humanitarian gestures, from the politics of the sufferer to the generosity of the spectator. That slide both depoliticizes and devalues human rights, as those who have rights have them precisely because they do not need them. As Rancière writes pointedly, within such a model rights “seem to be of no use. And when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights.”⁴¹ Whereas Rancière argues for dissensus as the mode of reading that can disrupt those conventions, Hesford takes a rhetorical approach (as does Hauser with respect to prisoners of conscience) to analyze representations of human rights in visual culture for the ways in which they reproduce or offer alternatives to conventional patterns of recognition and identification, particularly in relation to the familiar figures of the victim and agent.⁴² Her readings of visual culture in terms of contextualized rhetorical events makes possible her significant expansion of what it means to witness, in order to “move beyond recognition in human rights discourse”⁴³ and to consider that discourse’s other, more capacious operations.

I share these calls for attending to the embodiment of the human rights subject and the need to read contextually for the political subjectivization of heterogeneous subjects; however, I advance these arguments in other directions. I turn to feminist theories of vulnerability and precarity for their explicit attempts to formulate an alternative to the liberal subject of human rights, an understanding of subjectivity as always, necessarily, humanly and materially embodied as well as “embedded,” to borrow from Anna Grear, in a social matrix. Although vulnerability theory is a broad field, three particular strands of it have crucial bearing on my project: legal theories of vulnerability developed by Martha Albert Fineman and Anna Grear, Judith Butler’s philosophical approach to precarious life, and Isabell Lorey’s careful categorization as a political scientist of different forms of precarity. My goal is not to assert an argument for a vulnerability approach to human rights so much as to examine the ways in which the theorization of vulnerable and precarious subjects can open up human rights discourses to new forms of political subjectivization and their negotiation of new futures.

For Fineman, founder and director of the Feminism and Legal Theory Project as well as Emory University Law’s Vulnerability and the Human Condition Initiative, vulnerability theory began as a “stealthily disguised human rights discourse”⁴⁴ in a US context, although she has since shifted to focus on the necessary resources to foster human resilience rather than rights. As opposed to an approach to frame a subject’s claims against an abusive state, Fineman’s goal is to provide the legal lineaments of a more responsive state. In an essay that condenses much of her foundational writing on the vulnerable subject of the law, she defines vulnerability in terms of the human conditions of corporeality and sociality that necessitate interdependency. Vulnerability is embodied and imminent, yet differentiated and particular, and it illuminates and calls for various forms of social interdependence. Seeking to counteract the tendency for valuing the care that attends biological dependency (in infancy and old age, for example) and stigmatizing other forms of dependency (as a failure of personal responsibility), Fineman defines “derivative dependency” to underscore the ways in which interdependency is at once “dependent on resources” and “socially imposed.”⁴⁵ Her vulnerability thesis shifts responsibility for derivative dependency from the individual who chooses to care for others (and thus bears sole responsibility and costs for that choice) to the state and the institutions it regulates and shapes. The vulnerable subject therefore demands a “‘responsive state’—a state that recognizes that it and the institutions it brings into being through law are the means and mechanisms whereby individuals accumulate the resilience or resources that they need to confront the social, material, and practical implications of vulnerability.”⁴⁶ Although Fineman’s emphasis on resilience refocuses attention on the subject’s capacities as opposed to the state’s duties, the language of derivative dependency also calls to mind the history of the concept in rationalizations of colonial power (as Judith Butler also points out with reference to Albert Memmi’s Dependency⁴⁷). More generally, critics of a vulnerability approach underscore how its language, only exacerbated by the coupling of vulnerability and dependency, facilitates paternalizing, imperializing, and securitizing modes of governmentality. Kate Brown goes so far as to argue that “far from being innocuous, the concept of ‘vulnerability’ is so loaded with political, moral, and practical implications that it is potentially damaging to the pursuit of social justice.”⁴⁸ Both Gregory Bankoff and Rebecca Dingo also point to the ways in which the designations of vulnerable populations can be “transcoded,” as Dingo writes, to serve the ends of sovereign power.⁴⁹ These dangers are compounded by calls for a responsive state, unless they are accompanied by a deep interrogation of how states function in predatory as well as supportive ways in relation to the subjects they regulate.

Notwithstanding these significant concerns, I find in Fineman’s approach a careful attempt to rethink vulnerable populations apart from identity categories. She notes that vulnerable populations defined according to specific identities have three troubling implications: first, such definitions imply that there are other identities that are invulnerable, thereby stigmatizing vulnerability; second, they mask differentiations within identity groups; and third, “[i]dentity categories have become proxies for problems such as poverty or the failure of public educational systems.”⁵⁰ Vulnerability theory is founded on the recognition of vulnerability as a shared condition, thereby erasing its stigma and shifting the focus to its biopolitical and geopolitical distribution. Whereas her approach as I understand it provides an argument for a strong social welfare state, it does little to inform political responses to state-sponsored human rights abuses except to say they are unethical. In addition, she pays little attention to biopolitical power in all of its dimensions, instead recoding biopolitical governmentality in potentially positive terms. Her argument raises the crucial question that Lauren Berlant poses of what it might mean to shift a discussion of human rights from “an idiom of power to an idiom of care as grounds for what needs to change to better suture the social.”⁵¹ Although the rationale for the shift is predicated on re-conceptualizing human shared vulnerability and intercorporeality, as opposed to autonomy, it nonetheless works in parallel to the shift from human rights to humanitarianism that Rancière critiques for evacuating politics at the moment it becomes necessary.

My turn to vulnerability approaches to human rights is motivated by the desire to think through how they might formulate alternatives as well as how they risk re-instantiating the victim as the liberal subject of egregious wrongs. How can political subjectivization emerge through vulnerability as opposed to in opposition to vulnerability? Anna Grear has provided some of the most careful thinking about how the vulnerable subject is always already at the center of normative human rights and, therefore, in need of a reoriented rights discourse that acknowledges its subject. In doing so, she foregrounds conditions of advanced corporate capitalism and its effects on political and legal subjectivity, thereby re-opening space for recognition of the political agency of vulnerable, living subjects (although Slaughter points out that the corporatization of human rights is an integral part of their history, rather than a new development). For Grear, the rich potential of vulnerability theory for international human rights is as a response to the fiction of legal personhood grounded in liberal subjectivity, and she reads the articles of the UDHR for the ways in which they presuppose a subject who is inherently vulnerable precisely because of the physical and material conditions of corporeal and social existence.⁵² Grear takes as her starting point the material, embodied subject, underscoring (like Anker) the subject’s phenomenological experience and physical and social porosity to the conditions of existence, including the subject’s interrelationships with others. Locating the vulnerable in opposition to the liberal subject at the heart of human rights also expands rights norms to address transpecies claims to “co-flourishing” and against “co-symptomatic injustices,” which she defines as a kind of dysfunctional relationality that “highlights the perverse dynamics and capitalist etiology of the radical and immanent unevenness now affecting populations of embodied vulnerable bodies.”⁵³

Although I am less interested in recovering the phenomenology of the subject than understanding how it functions in the social imaginary, I find key aspects of Grear’s conceptual apparatus crucial to thinking through vulnerability in a way that resists the collapse into victimhood. Among these is her insistence that discussions of the vulnerable subject always consider the specific, individuated ways in which subjectivity is embodied and embedded (located contextually in a socio–political matrix) as well as her notion of co-flourishing. Although co-flourishing might include a legal judgment or redistributive justice, it emphasizes the relationality of subjects as they negotiate a shared future. The focus on embodied and embedded subjectivity and co-flourishing offers important interventions to address the liabilities of liberal subjectivity. Among them, that the mind/body duality of the liberal subject is untenable in that embodiment highlights “that a radical interrelationality both inaugurates and constitutes our existence in a multitude of rich ways, at the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ levels,” and that interrelationality is contingent and mutable.⁵⁴ Also, Grear’s formulation of the subject reads vulnerability as constitutive (neither positive, nor negative), as opposed to as an aberration to the subject’s ideal, inviolable, autonomous existence. This is a kind of non-teleological universality or universality in reverse: the vulnerable subject is only universal in the sense that the conditions of its vulnerability are always specific to a given historical, social, and geopolitical context.

Not only does Grear want to revalue vulnerability as that which makes human beings susceptible to illness and harm as well as passions and desires, or, in sum, social beings, but her approach also eliminates the liberal subject (traditionally citizened, propertied, literate, white, and male) as the ideal toward which human rights lean. In its place, she posits flourishing and co-flourishing as goals, which would demand political negotiation across, I would argue, a heterotemporal framework. In an important extension of Fineman’s argument, Grear locates these goals, and the ethical responsibility and responsivity that attend them, not just in the state, but also among “all those co-symptomatically advantaged by the globalised context.”⁵⁵ This argument points toward the need for theorizing coalition-building and alliances on behalf of co-flourishing that lie outside the nation–state and transnational structure of normative human rights institutions—with continued emphasis on the national sovereignties being linked. It suggests the need for attention to analogous structures of harm and violation in the context of the specific range of subject positions to which they each give rise. Although not yet fully articulated, this dimension of her argument calls for political solidarities that can mediate between individuated lived experiences of co-symptomatic injustice and the means and negotiated ends of distributive justice.

Much of the theoretical work that addresses structural injustice takes up the language of precarity as opposed to vulnerability. If vulnerability is constitutive (albeit differentiated and contingent), precarity points to the biopolitical and geopolitical distributions of risk and dispossession. My analysis depends upon both terms in that they foreground two distinct but interrelated dimensions of human rights. In her theoretical and philosophical approach, Judith Butler analyzes precariousness, although she shares with Grear a definition of the subject in terms of the twinned factors of its material embodiment (which Butler reads primarily in terms of one’s exposure to suffering and grief) and sociality. Initially writing in response to the violence of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the so-called War on Terror, and the global recession of 2008, Butler foregrounds grievability as the “presupposition for the life that matters.”⁵⁶ In order to examine how life is inherently yet differentially precarious, Butler analyzes which lives are grievable, the frames that render them legible as such, and the corresponding distribution of mourning for those lives. These analyses expose the bio-political production of grievability that renders life differentially valuable and thus expendable. However, Butler curiously returns again and again in Precarious Life to the image of the newborn infant to signify the “condition of primary vulnerability.”⁵⁷ There is, then, a tension in the work between her analysis of the bio- and geopolitical production of precarious life and her consideration of the solitary newborn, whose magical appearance seems to make sense only in reference to an originary separation between bare life and social, political life. The essays that comprise Precarious Life ground her analysis in Levinasian ethics and theories of sovereignty and governmentality. From Levinas, Butler derives a foundational ethical obligation that is grounded in the relationship between the self and the Other (configured by Levinas through the trope of the face); it is a relationship that exists a priori context and identification and that becomes recognizable (at which point it would become individuated and politicized) in the discursive situation, in that “language arrives as an address we do not will.”⁵⁸ The face or the address thus becomes key to the ethical process of humanization, and Butler reads the discourses surrounding those targeted in the War on Terror, for example, for the ways in which “the face is, in every instance, defaced, and that this is one of the representational and philosophical consequences of war itself.”⁵⁹ Butler finds a parallel production of the bifurcation of the subject and its radical other in her analyses of Guantánamo Bay in the context of Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the state of exception. In her reading of the Guantánamo detainees as evidence of the “reanimation of sovereignty in cases of indefinite detention and the military tribunals,”⁶⁰ she notes that the synchronized forces of sovereignty and governmentality that produce the detainees as inhabitants of bare life also threaten to extend the state of exception indefinitely and unto others. Frames of War expands her initial argument to include a deeper consideration of temporalities of grief—of the ways grievability also references the imagination of the future in the mourning of life that should have been lived longer or at all.⁶¹

In both works, Butler issues a passionate call for the role of cultural criticism in recognizing the humanity of those placed outside the frame of grievability—a goal my project shares. However, this call also raises concern because of the way it is formulated. Butler’s precarious subjects seem too easily divisible into those who grieve and can be grieved and those who are or are not grievable; those already political subjects and those like the detainee, the unmourned, and the abandoned newborn who only register as bare life, if they register at all within what is visible. In addition, although Butler’s attention to grievability provided a powerful intervention into the patriotic nationalism of post–9/11 US discourse (in the particular historical moment of her books’ releases), it also coded precarity and vulnerability predominantly in terms of suffering and injurability. Indeed, the difference between grievable and grieving life, on the one hand, and bare life, on the other, seems to lie in the space between social and purely physical life—wherein precarity is “that politically-induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death”⁶² and vulnerability is signified by the newborn. This is precisely the bifurcation I seek to undo both because of its elision of all that lies between those poles and because it figures bare life as universally apolitical.

In her extensive review of the philosophical dimensions of vulnerability, Erinn Gilson likewise argues that vulnerability as a critical concept is hampered politically by its association with weakness, lack, passivity, and injury⁶³ (those characteristics that transform vulnerable subjects into victims)—all of which seem to point to the possibility of their opposites: strength, coherence and completion, inviolability, and agency. Gilson finds in Butler’s work a nuanced discussion of the relationship between vulnerability and social norms as well as of the differentiations of precarity; however, Gilson poses the question of “whether vulnerability can be an ethical resource if there is a privileged relationship between vulnerability and violence. If vulnerability is always bound up with violence, as it seems to be in Butler’s work, can we conceive of vulnerability apart from violence?”⁶⁴ If, in other words, there were an intrinsic link between vulnerability and violence, then the response would presumably be conditioned primarily by fear, anger, or avoidance. Moya Lloyd offers a related critique in questioning the “ontological assumptions that ground [Butler’s] ethics,” assumptions which obscure the relationship between ethics and politics.⁶⁵ Lloyd notes that in Butler’s turn to Levinas, she moves from his apolitical grounding of the ethical encounter in the abstraction of the face (without identity and without will) to the specific, politicized readings of faces in the images of the other from the War on Terror. Together Gilson’s and Lloyd’s critiques also raise the question of whether subjectivity and selfhood arise from an inherently contestational, antagonistic relationship to the Other in Butler’s thinking.

More recently, in “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” Butler emphasizes the social and relational dimensions of precarity in order to address how precarity can be mobilized politically. Moving from the focus on mourning and grievability in Precarious Life and Frames of War, the more recent essay emphasizes vulnerability as “a mode of relationality” that necessitates dependency.⁶⁶ Whereas Fineman locates her analysis of derivative dependency in the institutions, including the family, produced and regulated through governmentality, Butler maintains a focus on the individual subject by referencing one’s biological dependency during infancy and old age. To move from corporeal vulnerability and dependency to politics means that politics must take as its aim the “infrastructural conditions for human action.”⁶⁷ Here she outlines a foundational challenge of vulnerability for a feminist politics. Although one form of feminist action seeks legal and state protection for specific vulnerable populations, such initiatives, as Fineman also discusses, may implicitly strengthen the association of a given group as inherently (rather than structurally) vulnerable, and, thus, in need of paternalistic care as opposed to rights. Butler defines the problem as follows: “how to make the feminist claim effectively that such institutions are crucial to sustaining lives at the same time that feminists resist modes of paternalism that re-instate and naturalize relations of inequality.”⁶⁸ Vulnerability, she notes, “works in two ways, to target a population and to protect it.”⁶⁹ Making feminist claims effectively thus necessitates the constant vigilance of how theories of vulnerability might reinforce notions of victimhood and careful attention to vulnerability as a political effect as opposed to a biological condition tied to identity, and such claims implicitly argue against the “juridification of the feminist project”—the idea that only law can determine its goals, successes, and failures—and instead recognize heterogeneous and “extra-legal” forms of political engagement.⁷⁰

Isabell Lorey builds upon Butler’s work in Frames of War in order to differentiate the ways in which vulnerability and precarity manifest in the political. Lorey distinguishes three dimensions of precariousness that might be summarized as “insecurity and vulnerability, destabilization, and endangerment.”⁷¹ Although she is not writing about human rights in particular, her schema provides a helpful mapping of human rights’ various effects, including as an instrument of domination. For Lorey, precariousness refers to a common corporeal vulnerability that is “always relational” and “involves an ineluctable endangerment of bodies that cannot be prevented, not only because they are mortal, but also specifically because they are social.” In this conceptualization, the vulnerable and materially embodied subject’s meaning is garnered through its “socio-ontological” positioning. That positioning, in turn, is linked to her second term, precarity (destabilization) as “a category of order”—it is the “hierarchization of ‘being-with’, which accompanies processes of Othering,” and it is a differentiated product of “political and legal regulations that are specifically supposed to protect against general, existential precariousness.” These effects are visible in the gap between the liberal subject and the human being, discussed above, that human rights attempt to suture. The failure of that suture—the heterogeneous forms of both positive and negative legal personhood that the law generates, as well as hierarchies according to “body” and “culture”—evidence how liberal governmentality designed to safeguard the subject produces different categories of legal subjectivity. Finally, she uses governmental precarization (endangerment) to denote “destabilization through wage labor, but also a destabilization of ways of living and hence bodies.”⁷² These distinctions are crucial to Lorey’s two-fold argument that, first, governmental precarization is distinct from the kind of inequalities produced by precarity (e.g., through the conceptual apparatus of human rights) and, second and most crucially, that precarization has become normalized within governmentality: “Precarious living and working conditions are currently being normalized at a structural level and have thus become a fundamental instrument of governing.”⁷³ This feature of precarious life arises in the mobilization of human rights in service of the securitization of state and corporate interests at the expense of specific populations.

Although she presents her conceptual logic in conversation with Butler’s, Lorey’s focus on governmentality as opposed to subjectivity along with her differentiations of vulnerability and precarity contribute to my understanding of human rights as at once a discourse and part of a mode of biopolitical and geopolitical governmentality that functions in concert with neoliberal and securitization objectives. Without replicating the logic of binary opposition between politics and bare life or self and Other, her approach makes visible a more complex imbrication of vulnerability and security than may first appear. For instance, in the UDHR, Article 3 guarantees that “[e]very-one has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” The rhetorical force of life and liberty echoes the US Declaration of Independence; however, the inclusion of security incorporates other histories. In her analysis of the UDHR, Grear, following Johannes Morsink’s analysis, reads the document as a whole as a response to the atrocities of the Nazi holocaust and Article 3 in particular in terms of “Nazi practices, including euthanasia […] and the deprivation of liberty under Nazi law.”⁷⁴ Mary Ann Glendon’s historical account of the drafting emphasizes instead the six days of debate in the Third Committee of the General Assembly over whether or not Article 3 should include an amendment proposed by the Soviet Union to ban capital punishment.⁷⁵ In both cases, security is tied to the protection of life from the political forces that would end it, thereby coupling security and vulnerability in the logic of rights and positioning universal human rights above the laws of the state.

Although the inclusion of liberty may stem from Nazi law as Grear indicates, Lorey’s analytical framework also illuminates other effects of that coupling. As discussed above, the combination of freedom and security, particularly when freedom is equated with a consumerist notion of choice, facilitates a mode of self-regulation that is crucial to the function of the liberal state and capital accumulation. In the current neoliberal context, however, Lorey argues that this relationship shifts, and “freedom and insecurity form the new couple of neoliberal governmentality: freedom is not principally limited by the state, the state does not principally fight against insecurity, but rather both become the ideological precondition for governmental precarization.”⁷⁶ In other words, as neoliberalism works to privatize risk and opportunity, freedom and insecurity are likewise seen as private responsibilities, even though they are differentially available and distributed through modes of governmentality in which precarization has become normalized. One example of this trend might be the argument in favor of the US government’s surveillance of private phone records, even as metadata, because only those who have done something “wrong” have cause for concern. This trend is also evident in the explosion of global security studies, the privatization of security networks (and the private-public human-security partnerships Paul Amar details in The Security Archipelago), and the relatively new field of biosecurity. As the Comaroffs argue in relation to the designation of HIV/AIDS as a security issue, biosecurity studies produce “new kinds of political subjectivity and sociality in the emergence of new patterns of integration, exclusion, prosperity, and immiseration on an ever more planetary scale.”⁷⁷

The imbrication of freedom and insecurity within the governmental production and distribution of precarity leads me to one additional goal of this project: to de-couple vulnerability and security in human rights discourses. Within normative human rights, vulnerability and security as opposites that are nonetheless bound together reproduces the dichotomy between the victim and the liberal subject-as-citizen, as well as the teleological narrative of human rights. To consider alternatives to this formulation that speak to heterogeneous subjects and temporalities of human rights, I read for an open-ended range of viable, livable responses to the combinatory effects of vulnerability and endangerment that define them. The suffering of egregious wrongs yields diverse, complex, and sometimes contradictory, affective, political, and epistemic effects, not all of which demand security and securitization as a response. In other words, the project of separating vulnerability from victimhood requires an understanding of politics as “not a sphere, but a process”⁷⁸ whose path toward justice cannot be pre-determined but must be negotiated by the political subjects who undertake it.

Terminology and Structure

Throughout this book, I retain the terms vulnerability and precarity or precaritization in order to call upon specific aspects of their complicated theoretical roots. Vulnerability pertains foremost to the subject who is always and already materially and humanly embodied; socially and relationally embedded; and contingently located in geo-spatial and heterotemporal contexts. In a discussion of human rights, vulnerability—as opposed to Lorey’s use of precariousness and precarity—retains the sense of embodied suffering that is crucial to restoring corporeal existence to the subject of human rights. Vulnerability also more clearly references the limitations of the theory that informs this project: the ways in which human rights seem to require the production of victims in order, paradoxically, to found a claim. Finally, I hope the use of vulnerability continually reminds the reader that human rights discourses are always susceptible to and often constitutive of operations that target populations for harm as well as for legal redress and aid. I use the terms precarity and precaritization in reference to the differential targeting and distribution of risk and harm through neoliberal and securitized governmentality, whether undertaken by states, a transnational network of human rights actors, or other human–security networks.

Chapter one begins with the building blocks of conventional human rights: the liberal subject, the nation-state, and the UN-sponsored framework of human rights. I look at the child soldier as a paradigmatic, if paradoxical, human rights subject, who is at once victim and perpetrator, in fiction of contemporary Nigerian authors Uzodinma Iweala and Chris Abani and in relation to international human rights law. Whereas the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and its Optional Protocol enshrine a particular vision of an ideal childhood which the law seeks to recuperate after atrocity, child soldiers represented as specters—and, in Butler’s sense, as “spectrally human”—in the novels underscore the limitations of the law and of the vision of childhood it codifies, without disavowing the protections the law affords. As opposed to reading the child soldier solely as a vulnerable subject to be rescued (a conclusion that makes vulnerability complicit with victimization, while simultaneously eliding the claims of those harmed by child soldiers), I examine how child soldiers are at once produced by and themselves produce conditions of vulnerability that exceed the law’s capacity to respond. The anachronistic claims on the reader by the protagonists that haunt these novels also traverse normative frames around the time and space of justice. Haunting occurs within the temporal entanglements that Achille Mbembe argues define postcolonial sites, and which are reflected in the constellation of discourses brought into conversation in this chapter. Although the theoretical emphasis upon haunting might appear to elide the question of embodiment, I show that it is precisely the work of the texts to link their subjects’ troubling lingering, even unto and after death, to larger conditions of embodied vulnerability and material existence. Although Iweala attempts to imagine the embodied experience of a fictional child soldier as an alternative to the abstract subject of the law, the logic of the novel’s form ultimately reinforces the psycho–social model of redress presented in the CRC. Abani’s novella is a riskier text in formal and aesthetic terms, and those risks point to the limits of the prevailing fiction of legal personhood as well as the challenge of political subjectivization that might found an alternative.

Chapter two focuses on human rights reporting and fiction of Zimbabwe’s Gukurahundi, the state-sponsored intranational violence of 1983–1987, just after Zimbabwe achieved independence and black majority rule. Reading the human rights report on the atrocities together with three contemporary novels, Chenjerai Hove’s Shadows, James Kilgore’s We Are All Zimbabweans Now, and Yvonne Vera’s The Stone Virgins, I examine how these different human rights genres—reportage and fiction—define precarious communities and vulnerable subjects; and I analyze their efforts to link precarity to political community. The official rhetoric features a narrative of necessary civilian sacrifices on behalf of national security that is in keeping with Mugabe’s linear, patriarchal, nationalist historiography and autocratic rule. Through a deconstructive reading of the archive and the process of archivization, I argue that the human rights report, Breaking the Silence/Gukurahundi in Zimbabwe, seeks, first, to define a precarious community that was victim to predations of the state and deserves legal standing and, second, to contribute to a counter history of Mugabe’s long rule. The novels similarly disturb the archive, but to different ends. Whereas Hove’s Shadows gives voice to imagined victims of the violence (substituting the data of the human rights report with characterization of a largely depoliticized community), Kilgore focuses on the political necessity of a counter history. Vera’s novel critiques the gendered building blocks of Mugabe’s nationalism and gestures toward an open-ended, heterogeneous future of belonging and co-flourishing that lies outside of the language of human rights. The figure of the historian in Kilgore’s and Vera’s novels, in particular, demonstrate the authors’ careful consideration of historiography as well as the stories that cannot be told through its conventions.

Chapters three and four move my readings historically and geographically from newly postcolonial contexts to the globalization of capital and humanitarianism from the 1980s to the present. Chapter three analyzes competing discourses of toxicity, victimhood, and personhood that inform representations of the Bhopal Union Carbide explosion in 1984 and the ongoing advocacy efforts that have followed. After providing some of the legal, political, and historical context for both the Union Carbide plant and catastrophe (contexts that invoke varying temporal and spatial scales of representation and responsibility), I turn to Raghu Rai’s photograph of the Bhopali child’s burial for how it epitomizes the dominant narrative of distant and random suffering that circulates especially in international media. Mediatized and journalistic portrayals of the catastrophe continue to shape its meanings, and the fiction I address in this chapter implicitly acknowledges that importance through the use of journalist characters and reference to Rai’s photograph. Rai’s photography yields the overexposed, spectacularized image of a pure victim; however, it also raises the question of how even such an image can generate a multiplicity of discursive interventions into that same dominant narrative. The photograph provides a link among three literary fictions of Bhopal: Meaghan Delahunt’s The Red Book, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Mahasweta Devi’s novella Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha. I analyze each of these texts for how they construct distinct “civic epistemologies” (Sheila Jasanoff) of Bhopal—those modes of understanding the disaster that arise from its social imaginary as well as from the various forms of expertise that inform the political, economic, and medical responses to it. Although claims for continuing liability for the toxic effects of the explosion itself and its intergenerational environmental impact foreground competing circles of responsibility, I attend, too, to the ways in which these debates are scripted through gendered bodies and modes of identification as opposed to particular subject positions. And I conclude with a brief discussion of the role of gas-affected women activists in Bhopal, whom the fictions, perhaps not surprisingly, exclude.

Chapter four analyzes the ways in which Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) understands its work through the concepts of humanitarian space and témoignage (witnessing as a form of advocacy) in order to expose the impossibility of conceptualizing representations of bare life outside a complex political sphere. Whereas Agamben argues that sovereignty produces bare life and citizenship, I demonstrate that even in depictions of egregious suffering that results from state violence, heterogeneous subject positions are visible. I analyze these depictions through re-purposed photo/graphic narratives of MSF projects from 1984 to 2005. Although originally developed to generate fundraising and witnessing appeals and to accompany journalistic accounts of particular human rights events, images by Sebastião Salgado (The Sahel: The End of the Road), Ron Haviv, Gary Knight, Antonin Kratochvil, Joachim Ladefoged, James Nachtwey (Forgotten War: Democratic Republic of the Congo), and Didier Lefèvre (The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan With Doctors Without Borders) address broader audiences and deliver more complex representations as they are transformed into photo/graphic narrative books. Guy Delisle’s Burma Chronicles, whose cartoon–style graphic narrative is far removed from documentary realism, provides the clearest window into MSF’s process of self-critique in negotiating the medical and political demands of its work. By redistributing what is seen and what is given, in Rancière’s sense, the visual depiction of vulnerability in each of these texts each opens up the field of political subjectivization to new subjects and invites considerations of the political that stand apart from conventional notions of agency.

Whereas Chapters one through four consider literature and visual culture in relation to normative human rights discourses that include legal conventions, human rights reports, and journalism, my project concludes by taking up the relationship between film and the official discourse of silence that often surrounds atrocity committed by the state upon its inhabitants—atrocity that is decades-old but contemporarily resonant. In Chapter five, I develop the critical concept of vertigo as another alternative to the aesthetics of identification in the context of Joshua Oppenheimer’s two films, The Act of Killing (2012) and The Look of Silence (2014). The non-fiction films do not conform to documentary conventions; however, they do address the lasting effects of Indonesia’s 1965–66 purge of hundreds of thousands of Communists and suspected sympathizers that brought President Suharto’s New Order government to power. Drawing on Nicholas Mirzoeff’s theorization of visuality and the right to look as the operations that construct a social imaginary and disrupt or alter it, I analyze how the films generate a sense of vertigo among viewers and the films’ character–participants through the complex, dangerous work of flamboyant performativity and self-precaritization. Vertigo, therefore, does not refer to the destabilizations through direct experience of atrocity, as addressed in psychoanalytic approaches to trauma theory, but to the possibility of radically destabilizing the narratives that sustain political sovereignty. Mirzoeff argues that the “performative claim of a right to look where none exists puts a countervisuality into play.”⁷⁹ Building from this insight, I examine the disruptive work of the films in the context of official silence or euphemism surrounding the purge—that is, how the films reveal the violence inherent in silence and provide the condition for new forms of political subjectivization to emerge.

Together, the chapters that follow emphasize the interplay of literary and visual rhetorics with the normative human rights discourses of law, human rights reports, reportage, humanitarian appeals, and even silence; and that interplay offers a reminder that human rights are dynamic and subject to change as well as always in dialogue with other forms of representation. My argument and analyses place the embodied human subject at the center of a human rights discourse that is oriented toward the condition of shared vulnerability as opposed to the fantasy of inviolable security. This re-centering of human rights discourse—cultural, legal, civil, and political—in terms of vulnerability at once narrows the focus of human rights to human beings, as opposed to other animals and/or corporate actors, and deepens its potential alliances with alternative discourses of social justice. By demonstrating that human rights are rooted in the vulnerable, embodied subject whose historical and social particularities largely determine his or her capacity to be harmed as well as to be the author of claims, my readings identify at once the tendency of human rights to collapse vulnerability into victimhood as well as the possibility for a more capacious understanding of political subjectivity and, thus, of justice for the future.

Notes

1. Sangdrol’s fellow nun, Phuntsog Nyidron, achieved this designation for serving a sixteen-year sentence stemming from the same charges.

2. The Tibet Information Network produced an extensive report on Rukhag 3: The Nuns of Drapchi Prison (2000), by Steven D. Marshall; however, the organization closed in 2005 for lack of funds. Each of the nuns has, of course, a unique story, and not all of the nuns survived their experiences in prison. I focus on Sangdrol here because I know her well; I also draw on personal interviews conducted in 2007 with two of the other “singing nuns” as well as in 2010 with several of Sangdrol’s friends and relatives outside the US.

3. Lhasa City Intermediate People’s Court, (1993) Lhasa Sentence No. 42, translated by the International Campaign for Tibet (ICT) and published as “‘Song of Sadness’ from Drapchi prison: the official Chinese Verdict on the Drapchi ‘singing nuns,’” ICT.

4. Sangdrol, “Statement of Ngawang Sangdrol.”

5. The United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions assessed her case in November 1995 and issued a formal protest to the Chinese government.

6. Schultheis, “Reading Tibet: Area Studies, Postcoloniality, and Tibetan Self-Determination.”

7. John Kamm, quoted in Tina Rosenberg, “John Kamm’s Third Way,” The New York Times Sunday Magazine, 3 March 2002. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/03/magazine/john-kamm-s-third-way.html?pagewanted=1.

8. Baxi, The Future of Human Rights, xxiii (original emphasis).

9. Personal interview, 3 March 2008.

10. Cheah, Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights, 148.

11. Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948.

12. Chowdhury, Transnationalism Reversed: Women Organizing against Gendered Violence in Bangladesh, xvi.

13. Drapchi 14, “Seeing Nothing But the Sky.”

14. Slaughter, “However Incompletely, Human,” 278.

15. John Kamm, “Statement on the Release of Ngawang Sangdrol,” Dui Hua, 17 October 2002. http://duihua.org/wp/?page_id=1935.

16. Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms, 125.

17. Hopgood, The Endtimes of Human Rights, ix.

18. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 135.

19. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 103–4.

20. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 104.

21. Constable, Our Word is Our Bond, 76.

22. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms, 195.

23. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 48–49.

24. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 141.

25. Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, 140, 141.

26. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 49.

27. Rancière, “Ten Theses on Politics.”

28. Naimou, Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures and the Debris of Legal Personhood, 33.

29. Naimou, Salvage Work, 36.

30. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 83.

31. Norzin Wangmo, quoted in Marshall, Rukhag 3: The Nuns of Drapchi Prison, 47.

32. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience: Moral Vernaculars of Political Agency, 12.

33. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience, 14.

34. Hauser, Prisoners of Conscience, 238.

35. Ohlin, “Is the Concept of the Person Necessary for Human Rights?” 248–9.

36. Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature, 25, 26.

37. Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 33.

38. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 46.

39. Cole, “The White-Savior Industrial Complex.”

40. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 24.

41. Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” 307.

42. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 25.

43. Hesford, Spectacular Rhetorics, 51.

44. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 13.

45. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 18.

46. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 19.

47. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 113.

48. K. Brown, “‘Vulnerability’: Handle with Care,” 314.

49. Bankoff, “Rendering the World Unsafe: ‘Vulnerability’ as Western Discourse” and Dingo, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing.

50. Fineman, “Equality, Autonomy, and the Vulnerable Subject in Law and Politics,” 15.

51. Berlant in Puar et al, “Precarity Talk,” 166.

52. See Grear, Redirecting Human Rights: Facing the Challenge of Corporate Legal Humanity, chapter 7.

53. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57, 55.

54. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 57 as well as Grear, Redirecting Human Rights, chapter 6.

55. Grear, “Vulnerability, Advanced Global Capitalism and Co-symptomatic Injustice: Locating the Vulnerable Subject,” 58.

56. Butler, Frames of War, 14.

57. Butler, Precarious Life, 31.

58. Butler, Precarious Life, 139.

59. Butler, Precarious Life, 143.

60. Butler, Precarious Life, 66.

61. Butler, Frames of War, 15.

62. Butler, Frames of War, 25.

63. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability: A Feminist Analysis of Social Life and Practice, 5.

64. Gilson, The Ethics of Vulnerability, 63.

65. Lloyd, “Towards a cultural politics of vulnerability: Precarious lives and ungrievable deaths,” 92.

66. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 103.

67. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 104.

68. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 110.

69. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 111.

70. Butler, “Bodily Vulnerability, Coalitions, and Street Politics,” 112, 110.

71. Lorey, State of Insecurity, 10.

72. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.”

73. Lorey, State of Insecurity, 63.

74. Grear, Redirecting Human Rights, 147.

75. Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 148–52.

76. Lorey, “Governmental Precarization.”

77. Comaroff and Comaroff, Theory from the South, 176.

78. Rancière, “Who Is the Subject of the Rights of Man?” 305.

79. Mirzoeff, The Right to Look, 24.