Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms (review)

Over the past decade, a growing body of work has brought humanities perspectives to human rights scholarship and challenged still widely-held assumptions that the task of advancing human rights is most fundamentally a matter of law and politics. Texts such as Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004), Anne Cubilié's Women Witnessing Terror: Testimony and the Cultural Politics of Human Rights (2005), and Joseph R. Slaughter's Human Rights, Inc.: The World Novel, Narrative Form and International Law (2007) have inaugurated a lively and expansive discussion about the work of culture and representation in human rights activism, not to mention its centrality in shaping the larger social imaginary within which this activism takes place. Wendy S. Hesford's provocative and important book Spectacular Rhetorics: Human Rights Visions, Recognitions, Feminisms adds further vitality to this discussion, as it shifts attention from the narrative to the visual axis and mounts a compelling argument about the significance of notions and practices of visibility and spectatorship in contemporary human rights work.

Hesford poses international human rights as a regime constitutively bound up with practices of vision and discourses of sight; she notes that "[t]he history of human rights can be told as a history of selective and differential visibility, which has positioned certain bodies, populations, and nations as objects of recognition and granted others the power and means to look and to confer recognition."¹ From this perspective, human rights activism—as it takes place across the "truth-telling genres" she surveys, from photography to documentary film and theater, testimony, and ethnography— becomes a "spectacular rhetoric" aimed at making formerly "invisible" subjects "visible" to the Western and often specifically American audience of rights holders.² Moments or "scenes" of this activism participate in and extend what Hesford calls the larger "human rights spectacle," not a single image or set of images but "the incorporation of subjects (individuals, communities, nations) through imaging technologies and discourses of vision and violation into the normative frameworks of a human rights internationalism based on United Nations (UN) documents and treaties."³ As Hesford deftly argues, being made visible through this process of incorporation is not all it is cracked up to be, because the human rights spectacle relies on structures of sight that may ultimately enable human rights abuses to continue (about which more below). Yet, she also rightly points out, "the human rights spectacle is not fully allied with abusive power" and activists can mine its very paradoxes and complications to open up new ways of seeing.⁴

How might the human rights spectacle perpetuate—or at the very least not fundamentally alter the structure of—violation? The basic argument to this end is set forth in Chapter One, "Human Rights Visions and Recognitions," a theoretical chapter that explains the "ocular epistemology" or visibility-based system of knowledge through which human rights developed and connects it with what is posed as the central problem of "recognition." Recognition, Hesford argues—and in dialogue with a sometimes-dizzying array of thinkers from the fields of politics, philosophy, literary theory, and performance studies—has been the paradigm through which human rights internationalism recruits and defines human subjects. In the context of human rights, it is tied to spectacular scenes of trauma and suffering, where the subject of human rights discourse becomes visible through her representation as a feminized victim with whom the spectator must sympathize or identify. The problem with this paradigm, Hesford argues, is that it often re-affirms the self of the Western, neoliberal spectator rather than enabling true (and materially based) response to the generally non-Western rights claimant. Hesford notes that the rights claimant's coding as "victim" further means that she is incorporated into the spectator's self—and into the framework of human rights—in a manner that constrains her agency and pegs her to a relation of inferiority. Phrased more...