The Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson is widely understood to be responsible for the revoking of reproductive rights in the United States in 2022. This essay asks how to respond to events construed as rights-loss, through closer attention to their “productive” effects, their stimulation of retroactive and anticipatory meanings and occlusions, and the complex, multiple, and contradictory governmental techniques of power with which they bind. How can we analyze the violence of rights-loss in terms that are consistent with long-standing critiques of rights discourse? How can we reorient the framework of rights-loss towards a more capacious understanding of “revocability?” A revised lexicon is suggested for interpreting its milieu, including “not rights,” “buffering rights,” “exception,” and the desecuritizing rights of (de)capacitation and “allowability.” The essay further interrogates international references to Dobbs as a marker of regress with a critical focus on exceptionalist discourse surrounding France’s constitutional protection of abortion as a recourse in 2025.
Penelope Deutscher (Wed,) studied this question.