Gender, Sexuality, and Race
(This course was originally scheduled as ETHN 289 B00, Topics in Ethnic Studies)
(4 units / Wednesdays 10:00am-12:50pm / SSB 103)

This course seeks to examine how the concepts of law and human rights are deployed within the framework of globality. We will examine how the utilization of such concepts operate in the framing of projects within those nations that are characterized as either the "Third World", developing or 'failed' nation states. Drawing from a range of theorists the class will then consider how the transcendent vision of natural law and human rights are, as Douzinas (2007: 8) puts it, 'reversed, turning them into tools of public power and individual desire.' Students will then examine how the conjunction of human rights and the law has been deployed within the global project to marginalize, disenfranchise or even erase the presence of the racial "Other' and minority groups. The class will examine the manner in which juridical framings of human rights can create spaces where the modern universals need not, or cannot, go (such as Guantanamo Bay), the criminalisation of the marginal groups in society (young people in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro ) and the manner in which the definition of the citizen has been reconfigured in western liberal democracies in light of the focus upon security after September 11.