In the introduction, I suggest that one important sense in which democracy and human rights need to be globalized is in fact to reinterpret them as applying to a variety of contexts outside the strictly political and to understand them in terms of more diversified cultural frameworks. Along these lines, in Chapter 1, I introduce the idea of bringing democracy closer to home in the consideration of care; and, in Chapter 2, I propose that human rights and other universalist norms need to be pluralized by taking into account the variety of cultures and historical formations, but in a way that preserves their critical edge.

In this second part of this work, I turn more fully to the task of personalizing and pluralizing the conceptions of democracy and human rights. In particular, I explore here some of the relations of democracy and politics more generally to the idea of embodiment; then I go on in Chapter 4 to consider interrelations between democracy, race, and racism. In Chapter 5, I take up the idea of cultural identity, analyze it from the perspective of social ontology, and consider its import for democratic decisions and for the difficult question of the recognition of group rights. Subsequently, in Chapter 6, I turn to the issue of women's human rights and consider the transformations in human rights that this personalization requires.

Our question here, then, is the important, although often neglected, one of the significance of the body for politics.