The Politics of Paradox: A Reply to Wendy Brown

Abstract

What role should rights play in feminist efforts to end sexual oppression? The quest for legal rights has been central to feminist political movements in the U.S., as in other countries. It has also been controversial, because it is not clear that the language of rights is adequate to feminist objectives, or how far legal rights improve the lives of women. As Wendy Brown suggests, scepticism about rights is especially appropriate in light of the undesirable, unintended, but seemingly inescapable, consequences of feminist efforts either to use liberal rights on behalf of women, or to embody feminist criticisms of liberalism in rights.

While the substance of Brown’s critique of rights is, in many ways, familiar her insistence that these problems with rights are paradoxical is new. Although not persuaded that these problems are as paradoxical as Brown claims, or that seeing rights as paradoxes is as liberating as she implies, I will argue that her article highlights the importance of political judgement and strategy to rights discourse and practice. Too often we neglect such questions when thinking about rights, even as we insist that we wish to politicise rights, and the ways in which we describe and analyse them. As Brown shows, this neglect is not benign. So, though I worry that to see rights as paradoxes risks mystifying and reifying them, I will argue that it can help us to think critically about the relationship of law and politics, and imaginatively about the ways we might handle some familiar theoretical and practical problems.

Keywords: rights, wendy brown, paradoxes of rights, sexual equality, sexual injury, formal equality, substantive equality, sexual harassment, kimberlé crenshaw, catherine MacKinnon, Jeremy Waldron