| Summary/Abstract |
Critics of contemporary liberalism question whether the expansion of human and social rights can deliver radical social change. Drawing on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this article challenges this view by analysing how the discourse of rights has been critically redeployed by a radical Homeless Workers’ Movement – the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST). The MTST’s strategic use of a discursive framework of social rights problematises existing scholarship which fails to account for the ways in which activists rework and redeploy ideas of rights in practice. In particular, the article demonstrates the centrality of rights discourse to the formation of radical political subjectivities and the emancipatory goals pursued by the MTST. This counter-hegemonic politics of rights re-signifies liberal discourse, exceeding its conventional juridical boundaries: it creates politicisation in occupations, and it constitutes a strategy of counter-conducts vis-à-vis neoliberal governmentality.
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