ABSTRACT

In the international news and in social justice struggles here in the United States, we hear a lot about “human rights.” However, many people may not know its history. Human rights principles and discourses of the eighteenth century were revived in the context of the United Nations in response to the Nazi Holocaust. Many countries signed onto these principles, and since then human rights has grown and changed. In the last thirty years we have seen major developments in the ways that governments and nongovernmental organizations and advocates have turned to human rights in order to create gender and sexual equality and to protect sexual diversity around the world. Of course the controversies are many. In this conversation, we speak with a leading thinker and activist who has been involved with the struggle for gender and sexual rights, to ask her about the origins of, and possible futures for, sexual rights in the twenty-first century.