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Cultural Critique 54 (2003) 148-177



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Ghostly Rights

Samuel A. Chambers


This essay enters into a set of somewhat "abstract" philosophical debates through the terms in which they have been recently staged by leading thinkers in social and political theory. 1 But it does so in order to speak to very practical, some might even say banal, political matters. Therefore, I want to open this essay rather unconventionally by beginning not with the outline of those philosophical debates (I will come to them) but with a brief preface of sorts, one that looks at a completely hypothetical but thoroughly recognizable political example and attempts to read it in a number of specific and distinct ways.

As an employee of the State of Maryland I receive a relatively generous package of health care, retirement, and insurance benefits. These benefits can be shared with my legal spouse and with my dependents. In order to get them, however, the state asks in the former case for an official copy of a marriage license and in the latter for an official adoption or birth certificate. In making employee benefits contingent on these basic legal requirements, Maryland follows the majority of states (with a few key exceptions) in providing benefits only to straight married couples and their children. Let us assume that a group of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and even "gay-friendly" faculty at my college decide to challenge this policy by demanding from the college and thereby the State of Maryland the same benefits for lesbians, gays, and perhaps unmarried straights as those received by married couples.

In all likelihood, such a demand for domestic partner benefits will be presented in the language of rights. Indeed, the language of rights [End Page 148] has grown almost ubiquitous in liberal-democratic political regimes. Most political arguments these days (whether they be claims, demands, or protests) find themselves enmeshed at some point within one of the many overlapping and discontinuous discursive practices in which rights play a central role. In the case of my benefits example, this means that the challenge to the state's policy will likely call that policy into question on the grounds that it violates the rights of those that it excludes, or by arguing that it provides a right to benefits only to a narrowly specific segment of its employee population rather than distributing those rights equally. One of the central questions this paper asks is: how do we understand or interpret the call or demand for rights? In the case of this particular example, we can see (at least) four different ways of reading the demand for rights:

  1. Equality. The appeal to rights can be understood as precisely a demand for equal rights, such that the language of rights serves the purpose of expressing a fundamental argument about political equality. 2 Historically this has been the basic liberal understanding of rights as the guarantors of liberal freedom and equality.
  2. Special rights. The call for rights can be understood as a demand by a particular minority group to be granted protected status or to be treated in some special way that likely will prove prejudicial to the majority (here, in the case of greater overall costs to be borne by that majority). This reading emerges quite clearly from a large portion of the political right that wishes to challenge what may be seen as the continuation of the civil rights movement beyond its logical end (i.e., formal political equality).
  3. Ressentiment. The claim for rights can be understood not as a specifically political demand, but as a moralizing claim, which is based on a history of prior injury. This claim, quite paradoxically, serves not to contest a larger political battle but merely to instantiate in the law the very minority status of the group. This reading of rights has recently occupied a segment of radical thinkers on the left, committed to a critique and transformation of identity politics.
  4. Hegemonic articulation. The particular demand for health benefits can be seen as emerging out of the specific needs of a particular group (those who have no benefits), 3 but doing...

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