The UDHR’s welfare subject was a white male breadwinner, not a universal person

Evidence

Article 25 reveals the gendered social vision underpinning the declaration’s social and economic rights. This social vision resists easy dichotomies between questions of wealth redistribution, on the one hand, and juridical status and subordination on the basis of gender, race and sexuality, on the other. The ‘economy’ was not an autonomous realm divorced from the gendered and racial regimes in which labour is ordered, and in which wealth (and increasingly debt) are accumulated and handed down from one generation to the next. And the subject of social and economic rights was emphatically not an abstract, universal subject. Rather, race and gender marked the borders of entitlement, and designated this subject as a white, male, heterosexual, ‘breadwinner’ or head of a family. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 184

Categorization

• XREF: Intersects with the reader’s interest in human-rights discourse and its exclusions — resonates with critiques that rights regimes encode racial/gender hierarchies rather than abstract universality. — connects to: Neoliberal ‘individual freedom’ tacitly assumes a male breadwinner and unwaged domestic labor. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 199; 1940s drafters of the UDHR saw social rights as a working-class victory — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 149; The UDHR’s drafting was a pluralist debate, not a Western imposition. — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights…, 99
• SEED: Angle for an essay: ‘the implicit subject of rights declarations’ — tracing which bodies the welfare state was really designed to protect.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberal ‘individual freedom’ tacitly assumes a male breadwinner and unwaged domestic labor. #corroborates (0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 199
• 1940s drafters of the UDHR saw social rights as a working-class victory #complicates (0.80) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 149
• The UDHR’s drafting was a pluralist debate, not a Western imposition. #contradicts (0.72) — Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, 99