Human too inhuman: gender, human rights and speeches in dispute

Abstract

The present work aims to analyze the tension between human rights and the processes of differentiated human production, to which sexual and gender dissidents are submitted for performatizing gender or sexuality beyond the normative frameworks that organize the necessary conditions for the acknowledgment. For this, our theoretical-methodological assumption is based on the ideas developed by the discourse theory of Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and Costas Douzinas. The study is divided into three sections: first, we examine the conditions that allowed the emergence of the modern legal subject of human rights; in the second, we analyze how sexual and gender identities are engendered, relating this process to the fabrication of humanity; finally, we study the possibilities of new articulations of humanity in the law. We conclude that, although human rights are instruments of subjection, the terms humanity and law are always in dispute, and there is room for the struggle for new ways of recognizing the human implicated in these rights and, therefore, sexual and gender dissidents can find in this ambiguous area a space of struggle against vulnerability and oppression.