Servant and Defender of the Commonwealth

Reconsidering legal capacity: radical critiques, governmentality and dividing practice

“…She sees the subject who is produced by new regulatory norms as always entrenched, as much as liberated, through the political recognition and acquisition of rights. 97 As she put it: '[R]ights are never developed "freely" but always within a discursive hence normative context'. 98 Similarly, Margrit Shildrick observes that legal subjects who attain civil or human rights are obliged to remake themselves consistent with the requirements of normativity: '[W]here that is not possible, she may be accorded special rights that decisively denote her failure [sic] to achieve the privileged standards, and that position her difference as an inadequacy'.…”