ANTINA VON SCHNITZLER The New School Performing dignity: Human rights, citizenship, and the techno-politics of law in South Africa ABSTRACT Since the end of apartheid, rights-based languages of human dignity have often been central to articulating state obligation and making claims on the state in South Africa. In this article, I explore this moral–legal politics by focusing on a legal case brought against the City of Johannesburg by five Soweto residents on the basis of their constitutionally guaranteed right to water. Examining the epistemologies and evidentiary practices on which it was built, the debates and protests that surrounded it, and the residents’ informal articulations of their discontents, I use the legal case as a lens to explore how the political terrain has been transformed in South Africa in the context of this rise of human rights and the law as languages and modalities of politics. Thus, I explore how citizenship—as a set of techniques, imaginaries, and practices—is refashioned via languages of humanity, and I highlight the ambivalent ethical and political effects of this shift. [human rights, citizenship, neoliberalism, law, techno-politics, expertise, water, South Africa] I n May 2011, shortly before the nationwide local elections, South African newspapers announced “The Toilet Election” (see Mail and Guardian 2011b). The announcement—transmitted via headlines posted alongside roads and displayed on front pages—came in the aftermath of a drawn-out dispute in the Western Cape province between the locally ruling Democratic Alliance (DA) and the opposition African National Congress (ANC). For weeks, the ANC had accused the DA- controlled City of Cape Town of building toilets without enclosures in the township of Khayelitsha. The construction was part of a larger “site and service” scheme in which residents are provided with a plot of land and in- frastructure connections but are expected to build their own housing. In this case, the toilet walls were to be added by residents themselves. In arti- cles illustrated by photographs of the exposed toilets in the midst of empty plots, political commentators lamented the “image of a woman sitting on a toilet without an enclosure” as an “indignity” demonstrating the “lack of compassion” in postapartheid South Africa (Grobler and Montsho 2011). Shortlythereafter, the Cape Town High Court ruled that the city had vio- lated the residents’ constitutional right to have their dignity protected and ordered officials to build enclosures for the toilets. Grudgingly accepting the judgment, DA leader Helen Zille argued in defense that “it was pre- cisely because we believe communal toilets impinge on the dignity of peo- ple that the city sought to extend sanitation services to every household within available budgets” (Mail and Guardian 2011a). Commentators would later describe the open toilet debacle as an “election stunt,” especially since it turned out that unenclosed toilets had also been installed in ANC-ruled municipalities. Yet the public spec- tacle and the moral anxieties it prompted ultimately pointed to larger questions; here, in the language of rights, dignity, and populist electoral gamble, a woman exposed on an open toilet became a metonym for the disappointments of the postapartheid condition. Indeed, the toilet debate and the way it was framed by the courts and the media demonstrated with AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 336–350, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2014 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12079