fAllison has 9 post(s)

As Lughod begins pointing out quite early in her piece, the entire approach towards Muslim women, particularly in Afghanistan post-9/11 wasn’t coming from an appropriate place. Mainstream US media doesn’t often stop to examine the women of a group (be it cultural, religious, geographic etcetera) unless the examination is fueled by some ethnocentric bias, or the examination is being put into media spaces by the government to help better serve their point. A misunderstanding of Islam was all that could be hoped for by shallow reporting on the way Muslim women live, of course by the light of US standards Muslim women seemed to be oppressed. Lughod points out that religious and cultural differences were being scapegoated as causes of terrorism, while mainstream US media ignored long-simmering political issues. Regardless of if a true study of Islam does or doesn’t bring up women’s rights issues, the Western narrative was create a narrative of oppressed Muslim women to justify a war in a Muslim region. Lughod points to the language used in Laura Bush’s speech that worked to not only divide the East and the West but to blur lines along issues women in Afghanistan were facing, again ignoring historical issues by pretending that malnutrition was an issue that had begun with terrorism (pg. 784). Laura Bush was trying to equate women’s rights with the war on terrorism, while her husband wasn’t equating women’s right’s with human rights, as we do in our class. Western history is full of stories of white men in power using women’s issues (real or constructed) to justify their own actions, actions that are usually damaging and undertaken with some other true purpose.

One of the major issues with Western constructions of Muslim female identities, and the meaning of veils and burqa’s is that it’s commonly assumed that burqa’s are something the Taliban imposed to oppress women, when actually it is a part of their religion. If wearing a veil was something we had grown up with within our culture we wouldn’t think twice about it. In debates about burqa’s and the uncomfortable heat I always think of the Hassidic Jewish men I see in Brooklyn – I sincerely doubt they enjoy being in full pants, long sleeved shirts, coats and hats in the middle of the New York summer, but no one calls their dress a sign of oppression. I really loved Lughod’s conclusion about forgetting all this vocational saving and veil debating and focusing on working against true and global injustice.

Sally Engle Merry describes the subjective “self” as constantly changing and evolving. We hold multiple different identities at any given moment, and sometimes those identities conflict. Human life is a process of trying on and keeping or shedding different subjectivities. The ability for a woman to take action against an abusive spouse, and to even consider taking on a new legal subjectivity, as an individual with rights, shows that there has been a shift in the way we look at the public and private spheres, and masculinity. However, the way the attempts at this rights-based subjectivity plays out makes evident how far we still have to go in terms of equality. Taking on a legal subjectivity, where the source of her identity is the state, is a big shift for a woman. It will likely be in conflict with powerful subjectivities that are supported by her family and community, for example mother.

Merry describes the way the legal system produces subjectivities as being similar to the way Judith Butler describes gender – it’s the performance that creates it. The interaction with the law creates new modes of power, which produces new subjectivities. I’m frankly having trouble finding the words to explain what Merry was saying here, but I think I understand it. The law produces the the subject, but then it is through the interaction with the law that that subjectivity is confirmed, is I believe what she is getting at.

Merry brings up gender because gender plays so strongly into a person’s legal subjectivity. Gender effects the way a person is treated when calling on law enforcement for help, and as Merry has proven through her study, interactions from that moment forward shape a woman’s subjectivity legal identity as a rights-bearing person. The way law enforcement speaks to her, how seriously her claim is taken, punishment for the offender, whether or not the offender is arrested, all of these things impact the woman’s ability to accept the new subjectivity. Unfortunately gender plays an even stronger role, a woman is not truly a victim in the eyes of the law unless she is practically a perfect person. She can never have done drugs, fought back, or endangered her children in any way. The taking on of the new legal subjectivity also generates a lot of pushback typically, not just from law enforcement but from people in her personal life, especially the man who’s power is challenged.

Resolution 1325 in essence provided a seat at the table for women and women’s rights issues on the global level. It brought women, from their issues to their skills and work for human rights into direct conversation with the UN Security Council. What’s so interesting about the Resolution is that it added women to the conversation in terms of both what women needed, and protections for women and girls but also what women were doing to help other women, and all other people as far as human rights, including what women who were providing aid needed to be protected and succeed. The key is involving women into the decision making on what women need. The Resolution was born out of many things, but particularly built momentum coming out of the Women and Armed Conflict Caucus, so it was never just about the more subtle issues in women’s rights but always centered in violent wartime violations of women and human rights.

I think the work that was put in by the NGO Working Group not only to introduce the ideas that became Resolution 1325, and to have it passed, but to implement it, to ensure that there was ongoing work to implement the Resolution’s tenants is so impressive and it speaks to the possible issues. One major one being something we’ve discussed in class, and that’s the idea that the UN is all talk. It’s fine to pass a resolution and it’s another to put effort as well as money into making that resolution a reality. A great answer to some of those issues was the creation by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom of the Peace Women Project, to create a resource to encourage cohesion and the spread of information through various women’s groups and efforts, as groups fought for different rights. It’s a reminder of Grewal and her ideas about the issues of a united women’s movement because of our separate experiences and needs.

I do think the passing of the Resolution and the continued work of implementation is important. Even just certain aspects of it, like sensitivity training for aid workers can make a world of difference in the lives of women and girls in war-torn areas. To me, having women involved in peace efforts and in the aid and treatment of women is such basic logic, but that might be part of my acceptance of human rights rhetoric. It just seems logical though. I think excluding women from leadership in those areas, and even from helping as far as aid in general is only further damaging to populations that are already undergoing trauma.

Gilmore describes both the US prison system and the surpluses as resulting from globalization and the “uneven development”(page 174) it causes. Though the prison system is also described as an economic and political response to both the uneven development and to moral panic.

The surpluses cross over many different aspects of our society – capital, labor, land, and the power of the state but what she is primarily pointing to is a surplus of production, it’s really the natural ebb and flow of an economy – at least a capitalistic one (I truly can’t speak on any other economies, having no experience or understanding of them).

One way the expanding prison system relates to the restructuring of the state, is the power grab by the Right in 1968, when the Right criminalized activists and activist groups individually in order to show control and progress towards order by making specific arrests. Gilmore describes this as “domestic war-making” on the part of the state (page 176) and literally means creating a racial and class war between state run police and militant activist groups, in fact militarizing the state against these groups.

These events had been set in motion earlier, at the end of WWII with the growth of the Department of War and the popularization of military Keynesianism, which meant in the most common terms that war made the country rich. The way rights were distributed at this time further entrenched the rights of the white male, particularly those in cities, while denying rights to workers, particularly agricultural workers, people of color, and women. In short, it reinforced capitalism. In the mean time and updated Keynesianism was working to decreases taxes on wealthy corporations and criminalize the welfare state.

The crisis Gilmore is describing is actually a culmination of several crises. The moral panic, the civil unrest revolving around civil rights, students and activists, racial tensions, criminalizing black communities, panic about single women and single mothers, power structures within the activism world, and economic panic on both the individual and corporate level. The new state that comes from this crises is the prison state – a surplus of defense against crime.

It really is striking that in a state as liberal as California the prison system has a budget close to that of the state university systems. Gilmore relates the prison system to a “big stick” used by the state to keep labor movements in check, and as operating behind a “wall of racism” (page 186). Demolishing the prison industrial complex is put foremost in her view, as a means of restructuring the state in a way that would be amenable to human rights activists.

Though I haven’t studied it extensively, what I have learned about gender (and its construction) comes from Judith Butler. Peterson and Parisi quote her early on, explaining that institutionalized heterosexism symbiotically creates and supports ideas of masculinity and femininity (and that masculine traits are exclusive to the male sex, and visa versa) and dictates the creation of gender through these ideas. Leaving any other configurations (transgendered or homosexual persons) outside of mainstream (normative) society. Heterosexism also normalizes the nuclear family, disguising the contract of marriage as a natural life progression outside of the political realm, and obscuring female (female sex, not female gender) agency. When human rights supports this socialized system, it is to support this founding block of the subjugation of women, and it supports this system by respecting what certain definitions of “private” and “family” and declaring human rights in the public realm.

To put it most simply, what I think Peterson and Parisi are arguing, when they say that we need to examine heterosexism to really explore gendered differences in human rights , is that the previous conversation has existed only within a box of heterosexism. Theorists have been examining sexism and other gendered differences without seeing gender as a construct. That is to say, without taking a step back to see the larger picture, and recognizing that many ideas and concepts that have been taken for granted as a natural way of being are in fact social constructs, and that we cannot unpack an issue like sexism without first unpacking why it is that we apply a gender to sex, and attempt to keep sex within a set of rules (i.e., a person of male sex is sexually attracted to women). Sex is so integral to the way that we think of “humans” (it is typically the first category we use when dividing groups), that is impossible to think of what human rights are, and who they serve without examining sex. But a thorough examination of how we examine sex requires breaking through our assumptions, the ideas we’ve assigned to sex. Those ideas happen to be heterosexism (though it could have happened other ways, similar to the current idea of what human rights are could have gone several different ways).

Peterson and Parisi take their argument a step further, as they move through different areas of theory (from political to social science) and examine how the works from each of these fields interacted to create this system. They are able to take feminist critiques of human rights and push them a step further. From a focus on androcentrism, deliberating the ways in which human rights have favored men, to heterosexism, we begin to look not just at the sexism in human rights, but the rules and structures that have put that sexism in place, and kept it there, rules that govern our society.

Samuel Moyn takes us through multiple points that describe the differences in the earlier “rights of man” theories and the contemporary “human rights theories. Foremost among his arguments is the relationship of the theories to politics and government, but before getting into that Moyn lays some groundwork. He encourages us to look at history with a more critical eye, and see that events and philosophies that we accept as obvious precursors, leading to one inevitable end that is human rights, are actually just part of the random facts of history, created by warring factions, personal desires and mistakes. That means that human rights is only one universal ideology, not the only one, despite it’s present ubiquity and acceptance,. It also indicates that we as humans likely will evolve and expand up on this theory or remove it altogether as another dominating moral thread comes into power. The true nature of the definition of human rights is further shown by tracing the individual histories of each right considered part of current dogma (using the UN Declaration). The different paths each right took didn’t necessarily interact or engage at all, and came from various instances, from fights for suffrage, to the civil rights movement. Moyn points out that social and economic rights are considered part of a newer group of rights to be considered, but reaching back to supposed precursors of human rights, pre-Enlightenment, it is easy to find examples of worries of socioeconomic inequality (one prime example being the Bible).

As we saw when discussing Enlightenment theorists (and as Moyn points out – their influences from Ancient Greece and Rome, to Stoicism, through various religions) the rights of man were structured through government. This is especially clear when considering both the American and French revolutions, whose concern with rights was wrapped up in their discontent with the monarchies. The rights of man were set up by these groups to be within the realm of the government – the government couldn’t infringe upon them (and, as in the original contract) was responsible for maintaining and protecting them. While the advent of the human rights movement really was a movement to transcend and go beyond governments, who were not adequately protecting rights. Human rights define themselves outside and above the government, as a universal right of all humans for simply existing, not due to their belonging to one or another nation, as with the rights of man.  The universality and “natural” qualities of these rights may seem similar, but as we discussed, “universal” meant something very different during the Enlightenment (and earlier) – it meant property owning white men.

What Brown is saying in her essay “The Most We Can Hope For…” reminds me a bit of Pateman from last week. Pateman was asking feminists to look outside the current power structure, and language to figure out what they wanted on their own terms and in their own terms. Brown is directing us to be as objective when talking about human rights activism.

Acts of activism don’t exist in a void, there are consequence for every action, and we can’t always know all the consequences and repercussions of the actions we take. In this way activism is inherently political, are we helping the current regime? Hurting it? Or are we refusing to help one group because of its other human rights violations? These are all political acts. Brown doesn’t want us to subscribe to any one ideology because of these types of agendas. She uses the great word “generic” (60) to explain that no subjugation or abuse is generic, and neither than is the response. We choose to act in certain ways and we can’t always know what will happen long-term. One analogy that I believe is relevant is that many people choose to be vegetarian because of all the issues surrounding factory farming, issues that are moral, environmental, humanist, economic and on. However, an increase in vegetable farming leads to an increase in pesticides in certain cases which has decreased the bird population in farming communities. This was a negative consequence of a well-intentioned deed. I’m not saying we should stop being vegetarians, just that there is a large picture.

Human rights work and our viewpoints on it are subjective, and influenced by our upbringing, our beliefs and society. Brown points out that our acts are influenced by dynamic contexts (for example political and economic context), and by this I think she means where we as activists are coming from. Missionaries believed they were doing good as well. When we choose a project because of our interests, we don’t offer support to a separate project, this is another way in which our activism is political.

I think what Brown is writing makes complete sense, we must be critical and constantly evaluate ourselves and the human rights movement. Just as we note that actions that made sense to our parents, from the small to the large, from serving the husband first to how they considered race, things are evolving in our time. We have to constantly be checking ourselves to be sure we are doing the most good. The argument reminds me of myself as a feminist, and the ways in which I need to continually check my privilege, which is hard and easy to forget or push back against, but if I just believe that I’m right, and trying to do good I’ll never grow. If I still maintained the beliefs I had even a year ago without recognizing new information the stagnation would make me and my beliefs obsolete.

The way I interpreted Carole Pateman’s argument is the original contract not only excludes women but also subjugates them. The ‘natural state’ is used to enable this imbalance of power in the original contract. Reminiscent of the idea of “moral autonomy” that we discussed last week, the natural difference and constructed definitions of gender allow men to declare themselves as having political right via their rational thought and entrance into contracts, while simultaneously excluding women.
While Pateman offers a few different interpretations of the original contract, the key interpretation proves that rather than creating political right, the original contract creates patriarchal right, using the contemporary definition of patriarchal rather than the archaic meaning (paternal rule). This interpretation states that people, in their natural state with their natural rights gave up those natural rights in exchange for protection from the government, transforming those rights civil rights, and creating a contract of agreement between the governors and the governed. From that point people enter into countless social contracts, from the employment contract to the marriage contract. The privilege granted to men in the marriage contract, and to men of power in all other contracts negates the idea of fully free political right. In fact, as Pateman argues, rather than transforming natural right into civil right in the original contract, men turn natural right into patriarchal right, including sexual right, over women. This distinction applies to all marginalized groups, but Pateman is primarily concerned with women, and though all women must contend with male power, she is focused on heterosexual women and their relationships with heterosexual men. When she touches on identity politics, it is almost exclusively through the lens of the heterosexual female.
As the original contract gives men political right over women, including access to women’s bodies, it involves not only the social contract but the sexual contract (including the marriage contract, which exists in both spheres). Because contract theorists have chosen not to question this distribution of power, they embed it within their history of modern society. Left unexamined, it enables these theorists to focus solely on the social contract, thus eliminating the sexual contract, and therefore the private sphere in which it partially exists from the conversation. However, as Pateman argues, the private sphere and public sphere exist only in the definition of each other, there is not one without the other. The same is true of the social and sexual contract which are interrelated as evidenced by their interaction within the marriage contract, the prostitution contract and even the employment contract, all of which favor men and give men power. Contracts involving women have mostly been relegated to the ignored private sphere, and considered apolitical. Arguing that body politics exist becomes tricky, as Pateman explains, because the current construct of ownership in one’s own body is rhetoric created by the contract theorists who uphold the power of men. Regardless, women are left out of the original contract (easily noted in the myriad ways women haven’t been given the title of “individual”) and subject to the powers men who subscribe to this theory would describe as the their natural right. Women are therefore left to the private sphere, a realm recognized by civil society, but not discussed, nor considered political. The private sphere being part of civil society, but not part of the civil, or public sphere. The private sphere is considered the “natural” and “feminine” sphere, and is connected to civil society not just through its connection to the public sphere, but through the sexual contract (Pateman, pg 11).

Hello! I’m Allison Fabian, and this is my first semester at CWE. I am returning to school after a few years off to help me move forward in my career. I chose to take “Women’s Rights as Human Rights” for several reasons. I’ve always been interested in human rights and feel strongly that equal human rights are essential to the society I would like to live in. Particularly in the current political climate it’s important to know not just contemporary human right’s issues, but to be able to give them historical context. Yes, I am looking to improve my talking points, but also to educate myself, so I can act in ways that align with my thinking. I am especially concerned with women’s rights. I am a proud intersectional feminist, and my first Women’s Studies class opened my eyes to the injustices women face, from the obvious to the subtle. I’m excited to learn from the differing perspectives in the class.

——————————————–

The standout document in the Introduction to Inventing Human Rights by Lynn Hunt is the US Declaration of Independence, and Hunt uses it as an anchor to offer an interesting study of the evolution of philosophies of human rights. Philosophies that were, at the time of the Enlightenment, spreading, with the US Declaration held as the standard. However, what really struck me was the importance of the language involved, and the ways that that language has changed. Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence of the unalienable rights of men, but used the phrase “natural rights” in his writings until adapting to the term “rights of man” in the late 1780s. The French had been using “rights of man” since the 1760s but the phrase “rights of man” wasn’t defined until 1789, when the marquis de Condorcet described them in his essay “On the Influence of the American Revolution on Europe”. Contemporarily, if any group was to write a manifesto it would absurd for them not to define their terms. Despite the perceived objectivity of a dictionary, words have subjective meanings and uses, that change and are redefined by those who use them.

The Declaration of Independence (and the writings that were inspired by it) described these unalienable rights of men as “self-evident”. The term strikes me as a bit egotistical- though there are other, more optimistic, ways to interpret the concept. For a group of wealthy, property-owning, white males to declare their rights to be “self-evident” is to say they all had an equal estimation of their inherent value and of the treatment they deserved. The lack of other voices in that conversation implies that these self-evident rights that Jefferson (followed by many others) wrote about, applied only to that privileged class.

The paradox of the self-evidence of rights is brought into the modern era with the UN Declaration of Human Rights, which abandons “rights of man” for “human rights”. The key issue that the language is changing to address is the universality of the defined rights. Logically, human rights would apply to all humans, thus being self-evident. How can something self-evident require discussion, and not be applied unilaterally? However, then as now, these rights are not universal, and therefore not self-evident as the “Whereas” that begins the UN Declaration implies they are. Hunt tackles this conflict in thinking by linking the concept of the self-evident rights of man with moral autonomy, citing the work of J. B. Schneewind. Moral autonomy requires not only the capacity to reason, but also the independence to think and act freely. The groups excluded from the self-evident rights of man by Enlightenment philosophers, groups like women, children, slaves, those without property, and so on, were excluded based on the philosophers’ belief that those groups lacked the competence for moral autonomy. This is the same logic, in different language, that is used to further disenfranchise already marginalized groups today, and what the UN is attempting to combat by updating to “human rights”. For a document like the UN Declaration to be fully inclusive, and for terms denoting the self-evidence of rights to be accurate, there needs to be a universal consensus that absolutely all humans are entitled, without question, to the rights laid out within the document. I believe, as Hunt also concludes, that the antidote to the prejudiced logic that complicates the universality of rights, is empathy, learned through experience and interaction.