therefore—to labor, to create—cannot be viewed in terms of that individual’s
‘‘personal property.’’ I cannot claim ‘‘ownership’’ of my self or my capacities
precisely because they require a social and cultural context before they can be
developed or expressed. In spite of her preference for ‘‘capabilities talk’’ rather
than the more contentious ‘‘rights talk,’’ Nussbaum concedes that ‘‘the best
way to think about rights is to see them ascombined capabilities’’ (Nussbaum
2000 , 98 ; emphasis original). Although Nussbaum does not put it this way, her
account may be viewed as a relational, embodied, and historically context-
ualized account of rights. Moreover, it is an account that shows why political
theory needs to go beyond the notion of self-ownership.
6RightsandCitizenship
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It was suggested in Section 1 that notions of the universal and the particular
are increasingly brought together in contemporary political life through
practices of citizenship. Rights are neither ‘‘natural entitlements’’ nor alien-
able bits of ‘‘personal property’’ but rather denote specific historical and
cultural ways of regulating human interactions. Conceived in this manner,
the notion of ‘‘human right’’ is not at odds with the materialist, historical,
and embodied approach, outlined above. However, it does suggest that if any
individual’s ‘‘human rights’’ are to be secure then the rights of all individuals
must also be secured. Human rights, to be effective, must be globally distrib-
uted. Some political theorists argue that the growing multidimensional
(ecological, economic, political) interdependence of all the cultures and
nations of the world, calls for a universal system of human rights to be
underwritten by cosmopolitan governance (e.g. Held 2002 ). However, if
this project is conceived in terms of the imposition of a fixed ‘‘list’’ of
‘‘universal rights’’ that must be implemented uniformly in every cultural
and political context, then it will fail (Gatens 2004 ). Such a plan would
directly contradict the previous analysis of the materiality of the body and
the powers through which it is constituted in specific times and places. It
acknowledges the ideal of achieving universal justice but fails to attend to the
variety of contexts in which justice may be realized. Moreover, ideals of global
justice run the risk of continuing a politics of Western cultural imperialism.
690 moira gatens