Reading “Rights of Desire” and “Rights of Opacity” in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace

This article argues that the novel Disgrace points toward a politics of illegiblity and opacity that aligns more readily with anti-identitarian queer theory instead of rights- and recognition-based human rights discourses. Through an extended consideration of the relation between national allegory, history, and legibility, I argue that the novel sustains two interpretations of the category of lesbian—first, the national allegorical reading that erases her rights of lesbian desire in the transmission of racialized and sexual historical debts and second, Lucy's refusal of legibility as a lesbian in the national narrative and legal structures.