Merry – Assignment 09
In “Rights Talk and the Experience of Law: Implementing Women’s Human Rights to Protection from Violence,” Sally Engle Merry begins her article with a question pertaining to one’s understanding of their entitled or assumed rights and the problems that are associated with these rights, or lack thereof. The understanding and adoption of rights, according to Merry, needs legal intervention and protection by the law. However, this intervention by authorization only contributes to subjectivity and acknowledgement of existing subjectivity of those who need and want to acquire, understand, and fight for their rights.
“Rights-defined selves emerge from supportive encounters with police, prosecutors, judges, and probation officers. This empirical study shows how victims of violence against women come to take on rights consciousness,” (p. 343).
Subjectivities are produced through encounters with the legal system, according to her article, through various instances. For example, domestic violence specifically against women serve as a contribution to subjectivity. Although women may be in a dangerous and violent situation, they pick and choose when they want to assert, defend and reject their rights with inclusion of the law. This may be due to their splitting decision of wanting to claim their rights and security while simultaneously preserving their autonomy and role as a good wife. “They clearly fear retaliation by the batterer, but they also resist the shift in subjectivity required by the law,” (p. 345).
“Thus, an individual’s willingness to take on rights depends on her experience trying to assert them,” (p. 347). Merry shares that acting upon rights is dependent on an individual’s experience and understanding of rights in correspondence with their identity. In other words, if one believes that they are treated unjust and have the right to make a change, chances are that they will advocate and fight for that change. If rights are treated with insignificance, though, by law and the general population, the injustice in question may not be associated with rights and unjustness of rights. In either scenario, that individual is subjected to either go through some process of encounters with the legal system or is subjected to the dominant opinion of worth regarding the injustice felt by that individual.
According to Merry, encounters with the law cause women to switch up roles in accordance to the subjectivity at hand. Depending on the discourse and social practice at hand, women’s positions may switch from assertiveness to feeling out the waters of the situation they’re in and what they may want the outcome to be. Consciously adopting rights, then, requires shifts in behavior and subjectivity that correspond with an individual’s understanding and experience, their seriousness regarding implication of rights, and what is not worth reinforcing.
