Critical studies of dis/ablism have shown how the ability/disability binary operates as a central apparatus in the production of the ‘human’ (Campbell 2008; Goodley 2014): and thus, the non-human, the less-than-human, and liminal and devalued forms of humanity (Butler 1993). This process can be understood through the mutually constitutive relationship between ableism and disablism. The term disablism, whose genealogy can be traced to the British disabled people’s movement...
There are a wide variety of different critical responses to human rights, spanning over 250 years, from Olympe de Gouges’ feminist critique of the rights of men and Edmond Burke’s critique of abstract universalism; to the way the Haitian slave revolution shows the racial undertones of rights or Marx’s analysis of human rights as the rights of ‘egoistic man’. Increasingly after WWII, and particularly after the success of anticolonial struggle and US President Jimmy Carter’s new foreign policy,...