This chapter looks at the proliferation and pluralization of the subject of human rights, in terms of identity and difference, in the twentieth century, with its inclusion of previously elided constituencies – women, LGBTQ individuals, persons with disabilities, migrants, and so on. The authors test the limits of this plurality by studying its imbrication with heteronormative notions of reproductive futurism, transnormativity, ableism, and neoliberal agency. The texts in consideration are three documentary films – Growing up Coy, Born in the Wrong Body: My Transgender Kidand Kids on the Edge: the Gender Clinic. This chapter seeks to understand the potentialities and limitations of transformative identity-based legal categories, and the children whose personal lives are derecognized within the systems of these categories, and also to ‘queer’ or ‘crip’ established human rights discourses which have their roots in heterosexist notions of ownership of one's body.

This chapter looks at two nexuses: law-and-literature and human-rights-and-literature. In her analysis of Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Testimony: the United States (1885-1915): Recitative (1978), the author brings the law-and-literature paradigm to bear on literary expression of human rights. She finds in the text overlapping ideations of the procedural and the performative, in its juridical and literary dimensions. On the one hand, the text serves to show the limitations of the law and its technologies such as the trial, which literary performance can help compensate for. On the other hand, Reznikoff's poem also proves the necessity for these technologies as organizing principles, especially in methods like citation and precedent, in order to battle the ever present risk of erasure.