fTyesha has 8 post(s)

In her essay “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving?” Abu-Lughod uses various past and present examples of colonialism to explain how there’s an “Western obsession” with Muslim women. Laura Bush’s address to the public following the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 prompted Abu-Lughod to pose the question: why was there a consistent resort to knowing the cultural meaning, specifically the women and Islam, or knowing the meaning a religious ritual in order to understand the attacks on the World Trade Center? In her essay she uses an example from the French colonization of Algeria where there was a demonstration gathering held where the French women would ceremoniously unveil the women of Algeria in front of a crowd. The was done to show that Algeria was in agreement with the French. Abu-Lughod’s point is, why is the unveiling of Muslim women an hot topic for the West? The Taliban does force women to wear the burqa in Afghanistan but the issues for women in that region are deeper than the veil. She emphasizes that the Taliban did not invent the burqa and it is not a symbol for women’s oppression. I like that Abu-Lughod explained the veil by calling it a “mobile home” (2002:785). The veil symbolizes the separations of men’s and women’s spheres and associated women with family and home, not where strangers lie. Each form of veiling symbolizes participating in a different community and moral life in which family and home is held to the highest standard.

Abu-Lughod tells us to forego all “veils and vocations of saving others” (2002:789) and urges us to have a more productive approach to humanitarian efforts. Instead of focusing on the minuscule details of the lives of Muslim women, specifically the forced wearing of the burqa, to focus on the bigger picture at hand: creating a more just place for the entire world. Muslim women suffer from malnutrition, poverty and lack of opportunity to gain an education, but this is not solely a “third world” problem. These sorts of oppressive conditions can be found in most areas of he world. We should focus more on our input to the conditions of the world and our attitudes towards them. Abu-Lughod stresses that when you claim you are saving someone you are implying that you are saving them from something while simultaneously saving them to something, so we should respect each others differences when including oneself in humanitarian efforts.

In the essay “Nongovernmental organizations role in the Buildup and Implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325”, Hill, Aboitiz and Poehlman-Doumbouy raise many topics on the issue of women and children post-conflict situations. In their essay they document the account of numerous meetings held globally that touch on these issues. The Security Council discussed the development, equality, peace and the need for women’s involvement in post- conflict situations. The Women and Armed Conflict Caucus made several recommendations to the the Security Council: to create a report of requirements on the protection of women and girls in conflict and increase the participation of women in all peace keeping efforts, have an an advisor for gender issues on the Security Council and ensure that they include conflicts on all security, peace and gender issues, employ a broader range of nonviolent conflict intervention and prevention with equal parts of men and women, encourage on site trainings on human rights especially in regards to women, and lastly, establish procedures for drawing on the experiences, resources and expertise of people in civil society on the matters of peacekeeping, conflict and security, specifically women’s organizations. It was agreed upon to pursue only two of these recommendations. After that, there were much more enthusiastic efforts to have women’s issues take front and center in the next batch of meetings. The public gallery of the Security Council chamber was filled with women and they were happy to finally have a say on their perspectives of war and peace in that chamber, something that has happened in over forty speeches there. Several member organization have don’t their part in the implementation of Resolution 1325: Women’s Caucus for Gender Justice held hearings in regards to the Japanese military sexual slaver and other various crimes against “comfort women” during World War 2. These crimes include war over women’s bodies and using women’s bodies as war weapons. The NGO Working Group on Women, Peace, and Security did a lot of work to put the Resolution 1325 out into the world. Meetings and training sessions were held to teach people how to implement the resolution. The Resolution went on international alert where over 100,000 signatures were collected from over 140 countries that derived from women, their organizations and civil society groups working on peace including to end the impunity for crimes against women. The Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children, Protection, and Participation Project carried out an assessment in regard to the protection responsibilities of women refugees and other gender equality issues.

In her work “Globallization and US prison Growth: from Military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism”, Ruth Wilson Gilmore takes us through the capitalization of the US crime crisis of the 80’s and 90’s and the explosion in growth of the US prison system. She uses California as the basis of her work. Crime at this time was getting out of hand, mainly due to the increase of drug use and dealing, gang activity, racism, and the changes in employment opportunities that, in turn, led to property crimes. This creates a cycle of complexities, contradictions, and a lose-lose situation for the people. She discusses crisis and surplus, where there is capital made from the crisis of crime.

Since Nixon’s “law and order” platform during his campaign, there has been a rising moral panic amongst society over criminality and crime. Since the piece was published more than 2 million people were incarcerated. Nixon campaign had generated an increase of 1.4 million people added to the prison population. This population mainly consisted of African Americans and Latinos, which was two-thirds of the population. Another demographic of the accumulated prison population was the fact that the population also consists of the workless poor or the working poor. With the widespread of drug use and trading running rampant in communities predominantly consisting of people of color, this also brought gang activity that established drug markets. In addition, with the structural changes in the job market, employment opportunities changed and this left people without a source of income, thus having them turn to a life of crime in survival mode. At this time in history, it seemed as if society has created this overlapping cycle of crises to generate prisoners instead of creating outlets to reduce crime. This crisis and surplus cycle spanned across three decades.

In regards to surplus, by creating more prisons, capital for the state increases in the form cheap labor, finance capital, and land. In her work, she doesn’t really mention specifically how prisons generate capital by having super prisons built and filled to max capacity with prisoners. She does emphasize the point that the state does pay it’s way buy selling off its assets such as prisons and public utilities. With the tax revolt of 1978, in rural areas, there was a cut in schools, employment in agriculture and social programs that left a surplus in land that these prisons would be built on eventually.

In Silvia Frederici’s work “The Caliban and the Witch” she describes, in various points, how in the transition of feudalism to capitalism between the 13th and 17th centuries, the degradation of women became prominent. It all began when the communal lands and open field systems were closed off and became privatized, so the cooperation of the labor of agriculture was affected. Individual contracts of labor became more favorable than collective ones, thus producing inequalities in wage earnings and spiking an increase in vagabonds. This greatly affected families, which disintegrated, and most predominantly, women. Even elderly women were affected, no longer being able to be supported by their children, having to steal, and borrow to survive.

As the enclosures (privatization of mass areas of land) began to spread, women suffered the most. It became difficult for women to become vagabonds because misogyny was growing and they would ofter succumb to male violence. Women were also less able to do much on account of children and pregnancy. Women could not become soldiers nor help out the army in other ways because they were expelled from following the armies as they have done before. Furthermore, women were not included in occupations for wage and when they were it was reduced to one-thirds of the reduced wage men made. Many women turned to prostitution as a means of survival for themselves and children.

In the later part of the 17th century, to aid in the rapid decline of the population there were laws that were passed that upheld marriage and penalized celibacy. This was where witch hunting was born, where women would be criminalized for exercising control over their own bodies and not using it for the sole purpose of repopulating. Any form of birth control would be demonized: celibacy, contraception, abortion and infanticide, and severe punishments ensued. In France, women were sentence to death if pregnancies and births were not registered and/or if infants died before baptism. During this time, women were executed in large numbers.
Also during this time, woman’s labor was deemed non-work and their bodies were seen as a natural resource. With the continued privatization of land, came a new sexual division of labor. Women were forced and used only for reproductive purposes. Through women there was capital to be made by producing a constant supply of workers. Women were subjected to a double dependency: on employers and on men.

In their work “Are women human?” Peterson and Parisi first define heterosexism in their own way (because it’s true meaning is discrimination or prejudice by heterosexuals against homosexuals, which was incorporated into the piece as well at some point) which is to incorporate heterosexuality into a structured and formalized system, as the only norm for sexuality, and relations socially.

If you take the structure of family, in a patriarchy, it is the woman’s job to rear the children. Women are inherently deemed as the oppressed one to be dominated over by the males. The text discussed a “mother tongue” where through cultural transmissions one learns the world view, symbols, rituals, who is doing what labor, etc, which naturalizes heterosexism. Through this experience is where gender hierarchy is learned. The family is a microcosm of society; it is where social interested is developed, frustrated or thwarted.

In state making, the state circumscribed the female in every aspect in general. Their sexual behavior, their rights reproductively and its promotion was governed. The existing human rights are implicitly men’s rights. Thus, this leaves the woman having to be more like a man if she is to be on the receiving end of these rights. Women are more vulnerable in he private sphere and he states have made sure to kind of stick their hands into that realm as well, through their promotion of heterosexuality.

Women’s experiences and women’s issues are excluded from the law making processes because, within the patriarchy, the laws were made dominated by men. Thus the creation of human rights have been based on the experiences, bodies and perceptions of men. There is an artificial distinction between public-private spheres: home is where the woman dominates and public is where is the males dominate.

Laws have also made women’s honest contribution to society invisible. Women are seen are reproductive instead of productive in the eyes of the law. Women perform two thirds of the worlds labor but only receive the percent of the income to do so. The text expresses that since women’s identities are tied to their socially constructed roles as caregiver, emotional supporter, mother, their value as a earner of wage are not validated in the eyes of he law. Women are so undervalued in the workplace that even if the workplace is deemed unfit to work in for the woman (i.e. sexual harassment), nothing is done about it under the full extent of the law.

In Brown’s essay, “The Most We Can Hope For……Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism she makes several points about how human rights activism is not just for the innocent and powerless. She quotes the work of Michael Ignatieff to break down three key points: human rights is important because its a tool for people to use to help themselves, that rights are political and civil freedoms that are necessary for the attainment of economic and social security, and lastly, that human rights are a “shared vocabulary”(455) from which mankind can flourish.

For the first point, she acknowledges that human rights is a proclimation of individual empowerment. I agree with her about human rights not being pure defense of the powerless and innocent because there is strong moral desire to inforce these rights. There is nothing weak about this. I like that she quoted Ignatieff saying something along the lines of: when an individual obtains agency, they have an inherent right to choose what they live or die for. It is our right to choose the things that defines us. The text also states that in choosing what to live and die for is not in the way of any historical, economical and political contraints, it just is.

Next, for the second point, Brown claims that rights are political and civil freedoms that are necessary for certain securities. In a civil society, having human rights is only the precursor to obtaining everything else that is necessay to indiviualism within a society. There was a quote by Ignatieff given that expressed what Brown was trying to convey: that without the freedom to give opinions or speak and assemble, paired with the freedom of property, humans can not gather themselves to struggle for social and economic security. In other words, baring human rights alone is not enough to survive within a society.

Lastly, for the third point, Brown claims that if we were to achieve moral equality that there would be contention. There was a question asked: that if were were to have these rights where one chooses to live their lives as they see fit, which gives them an individual power, who is to say that there wouldn’t be conflict? Rights, as a universal moral vocabulary, has no say in how we should live together. Rights alone doesn’t aid in the governing of people. Human rights are the basis from which there is a shield from certain injustices.

Carole Pateman describes that its is a masculine attribute for civil freedom and it depends on patriarchal right (pg.2). It is my interpretation that she means because the contract is written by men, women weren’t considered as an individual to add into it. Pateman claims that women naturally have no freedom nor are born free. My guess is that women are incorporated into a civil society, but only by their husbands. Pateman discusses how women are included in the sexual and marriage contract but not the civil society contract. It seems that if woman are only identifiable by their husbands. So in a way they are in civil society just indirectly, more as a subordinate than an individual.

Pateman states that no one can at the same time be a citizen and human property. So where do women lie? There lies some sort of exploitation here. In the text it states that workers and wives can be exploited because they are both are subordinates under the employment and marriage contract. It’s as though women are constituted as property and not an individual. The text states that even sons are given rights in a civil society due to their birth right into the patriarchy.

Pateman discussed that women aren’t left out in the state of nature because it would defeat the purpose of the sexual contract. She claims that there is a ”private sphere” within the context of the civil society that is separate from civil society. Woman are included in the private sphere and men are included in the civil sphere. The sexual contract that women are included in exists in the state of nature and has nothing to do with civil society. Men are allowed to pass back and forth through the sphere and this is due to the law of the sex-right through the patriarchal civil society.

Pateman further discusses how in the book ”History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault in the seventeen century men had taken charge of women’s lives and bodies through a new discipline and mechanism of subordination. The difference between sexual and political difference is a key component to civil society. Men governing women’s lives and bodies seems to be the proper order of nature. She argues that since men are the natural overseers of women, patriarchy is seen as a private matter that can only be conquered if the public policies and laws treated women as equals to men.

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Hello everyone! My name is Tyesha Marius and I’m a psychology major. My goal Is to become a school psychologist in a special needs school. I’m interested in learning about women’s rights and issues because I would like to become more aware of issues that concern me. The rights of women are an ever changing thing and I would like to learn more about the changes. I’m particularly not a fan of these changes being dominated by males, but that’s another story.

In the introduction to Lynn Hunt’s “Inventing Human Rights”, Hunt highlights some key documents in history that were used in formulating the human rights we have today. She begins with the Declaration of Independence and how its inclusions of human rights seemingly didn’t apply to all humans. It left out slaves, people without property, some religious minorities, freed blacks, and women. I liked the fact that she said “human rights required three interlocking qualities” (p.20): it must be universal, equal and natural. She continues to say human rights are only valid in a political setting or a society. Which I would have to agree with.

​Next, she discussed what “ human rights” meant to the French and English in the 18th century, before the Declaration of Independence. I seemed to have too general a use. They were trying to figure out what this phrase would mean outside of political use. To some French Catholic priests this meant running around naked, being in touch with nature as close as possible. Various terms such as “rights of man”, “rights of humanity” and “natural rights” seemingly floated around in plays by Rousseau and other intelligent works. ​

​Then, she continues to discuss how human rights became self evident in the eighteenth century. A contemporary moral philosopher has shed some light on self evidence. He claimed that normal people are able to able to equally self-govern. But, in that era, not many were considered to have the capacity to self-govern. Children, servants, slaves, the insane, the property-less and actually women lacked the independence to be deemed morally autonomous. Women were only identifiable by their fathers or husbands.

​Furthermore she brings forth the work of political scientist Benedict Anderson, who thinks that there is a “imagined empathy” (pg.32) that is the foundation of human rights over nationalism. Emerging experiences and awareness of self at that time were changing the basis of what was to be the rights of man.