On Being a ‘Feminist Human’ in an Anti-rights Era

Agreed, dehumanization might seem an exaggerated concept based on the word ‘feminist human’ alone—after all, humanity should be a matter of fact. Every human is born with agency, the capacity to think, dream and direct their lives. This capacity to dream is encoded in our signifiers of modernity: somebody dreamt that humans would fly, somebody dreamt up electricity, somebody dreamt up the internet, which has made the world a global village, somebody dreamt up automated virtual assistants and artificial intelligence. Humanity and modernity go hand in hand. But let us take a moment to unpack these progressive signifiers of our modernity. Who is human when one faction of the world serves as the labouring bodies upon which this very modernity was built? Whose ways of knowing and loving were obliterated such that our modernity can be directly traced to the dominance of a ‘monohuman’—either through actual invention, appropriation or downright theft? Who pays the price for humanity and modernity? And when we begin to unpack each layer of humanity, who pays the price for men’s apical privilege, for the apical privilege of white women or straight people?