Assignment 05
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.
