Are Women Human?
In their essay, “Are women human? It’s not an academic question,” V. Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi begin to probe just what we mean when we use the words “women” and “human.” While it is a relatively elementary feminist critique, they argue, that what we now think of as “human rights” tends to be male-centered (i.e. male is considered the normative qualifier), less examined is the tacit acceptance of the gender binary – and all that comes with it – when we limit our critique of human rights law to these narrow terms.
For Peterson and Parisi, understanding human rights theory as heterosexist rather than merely androcentric allows a more holistic criticism of human rights as exclusionary and does so without implicitly agreeing to the norms as set forth by the dominant power structure. After all, to say that international human rights law are only concerned with “men’s rights” begs the question of how to define “men.” The very concept of “men” is deeply enveloped in what the authors view as the dominant interpretation forced upon society of “masculine vs. feminine,” which is something they understand as immersed with the institutionalization of the modern state.
What’s at stake, it seems, for the authors is primarily a broadening of the critique of international human rights law with an argument that is more in sync with the feminist view that rejects the dominant notions of gender. Rather than critiquing human rights law on the basis that it centers on men, the authors are hoping to challenge it with a lens that allows all the variations of gender to come into focus. The pitfalls of a critique that focuses exclusively on androcentrism are multi-layered as once this acceptance of the gender binary is taken for granted, theoretical boundaries are limited to the dominant narrative – the archetypal Man v. Woman which, again, has its origins in the very structures of the state machinery.
If instead, the authors suggest, we take a view that understands and critiques human rights law as heterosexist, we allow ourselves to set the terms of the debate to one which includes a wide spectrum of gender and which refuses to accept concepts of masculinity or femininity. This seems a fundamental place to begin, otherwise we are incapable of incorporating a view that comprehensively challenges the myths that our society enforces about how human beings “ought” to identify and behave.
