Making rights and realities: How Australian human rights make gender, alcohol and other drugs

Australia is unique among Western nations in that it does not have a national bill of rights; in lieu, rights protections have proceeded in a piecemeal fashion, with some jurisdictions developing their own systems for rights protection. These systems involve parliaments ‘scrutinising’ proposed new laws for their compatibility with rights. These processes are sometimes theorised as constitutive, capable of bringing various material-discursive effects into being. For instance, whilst problems such as family and sexualised violence are said to pre-exist legislative and policy practices designed to combat them, alternative approaches can draw our attention to the way these phenomena are made in and through such processes themselves. Drawing on work from Moya Lloyd (“(Women’s) Human Rights: Paradoxes and Possibilities.” Review of International Studies 33 (1): 91–103) and Karen Zivi (Zivi, K. 2019. “Human Dignity and Human Rights: Lessons from the Fight for Marriage Equality in the United State”s.” In Critical Perspectives on Human Rights, edited by B. Schippers, 103–119. London: Rowman and Littlefield International, Zivi, K. 2012. Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.) on human rights as constituting norms, rules, conventions, and worlds, Law’s (Law, J. 2011. “Collateral Realities.” In The Politics of Knowledge, edited by F. Rubio, and P. Baert, 156–178. London: Routledge) work on collateral realities, and interviews (N = 30) conducted with key stakeholders involved in Australian rights scrutiny processes, we explore how articulations about human rights might shape connections between alcohol, other drugs, gender and social problems. Using a case-based approach, we focus on three accounts that generate relations between alcohol, drugs, gender, and bodies, and consider the possible implications for affected populations.