One popular strategy of opposition to practices of female genital cutting (FCG) is rooted in the global feminist movement. Arguing that women’s rights are human rights, global feminists contend that practices of FGC are a culturally specific manifestation of gender-based oppression that violates a number of rights. Many African feminists resist a women’s rights approach. They argue that by focusing on gender as the primary axis of oppression affecting the African communities where FGC occurs, a women’s rights approach has misrepresented (...) African women as passive victims who need to be rescued from African men and has obscured the role of certain international institutions that have perpetuated the oppression of African women. In this paper, I defend these critiques by arguing that the use of a women’s rights framework to combat practices of female genital cutting among African communities has often been practically ineffective and morally inappropriate. (shrink)

The recent global movement for women's human rights has achieved considerable re-thinking of human rights as previously understood. Since many of women's rights violations occur in the private sphere of family life, and are justified by appeals to cultural or religious norms, both families and cultures (including their religious aspects) have come under critical scrutiny.

Recent decades of women's rights advocacy have produced numerous regional and international agreements for protecting women's security, including a UN convention that affirms the state's responsibility to protect key gender-specific rights, with no exceptions on the basis of culture or religion. At the same time, however, the focus on universal women's rights has enabled influential feminists in the United States to view women's rights in opposition to culture, and most often in opposition to other people's cultures. Not surprisingly, then, feminists (...) across the global South have criticized the universal-women's-rights agenda. This article reviews representative critical responses to universal-women's-rights advocacy. The author argues that, taken collectively, these critical responses do not reject the possibility of cross-cultural feminist advocacy but they do suggest the need for feminists in the United States and Europe to focus less on transferring rights across the obstacles of culture and more on how they can revise and expand their own understanding of women's rights in response to the struggles of other women, many of whom view women's rights as organic to their own cultures and as connected to broader social struggles. (shrink)

: Liberal rights theory can be used either to challenge or to support social hierarchies of power. Focusing on Ronald Dworkin's theory of rights and Catharine MacKinnon's feminist critique of liberalism, I identify a number of problems with the way that liberal theorists conceptualize rights. I argue that rights can be used to chal-lenge oppressive practices and structures only if they are defined and employed with an awareness and critique of social relations of power.

This essay examines why the recent recognition of human rights violations against women, as exemplified by Amnesty International's 1995 report on women, remains bound to the limitations of traditional approaches to human rights. The essay argues that despite Amnesty International's commitment to incorporating violations against women into its activities, it nevertheless upholds questionable assumptions about the gendered subject, gender relations within the family, and the relationship between the family and the state.

The critique of human rights has proliferated in critical legal thinking over recent years, making it clear that we can no longer uncritically approach human rights in their liberal form. In this article I assert that after the critique of rights one way human rights may be productively re-engaged in radical politics is by drawing from the radical democratic tradition. Radical democratic thought provides plausible resources to rework the shortcomings of liberal human rights, and allows human rights to be brought (...) within the purview of a wider political project adopting a critical approach to current relations of power. Building upon previous re-engagements with rights using radical democratic thought, I return to the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe to explore how human rights may be thought as an antagonistic hegemonic activity within a critical relation to power, a concept which is fundamentally futural, and may emerge as one site for work towards radical and plural democracy. I also assert, via Judith Butler’s model of cultural translation, that a radical democratic practice of human rights may be advanced which resonates with and builds upon already existing activism, thereby holding possibilities to persuade those who remain sceptical as to radical re-engagements with rights. (shrink)

This article analyses existing biases – whether due to misinterpretation, culture or politics – in the application of women’s rights under Islamic Shari’a law. The paper argues that though in its inception, one purpose of Islamic law may have aimed at elevating the status of women in pre-Islamic Arabia, biases in interpreting such teachings have failed to free women from discrimination and have even added “divinity” to their persistent subjugation. By examining two case studies – Saudi Arabia and Egypt – (...) the article shows that interpretative biases that differ in application from one country to the other further subject women to the selective application of rights. Dictated by norms, culture and tradition rather than a unified Islamic law, the paper shows how culture and politics have contributed to such biases under the pre-text of Islamic dictate. As such, it proposes a re-examination of “personal status” laws across the region in light of international human rights norms. (shrink)

This paper seeks to explore why women’s participation in the Jordanian workforce remains comparatively low—despite an increase in the number of employed women across many countries and regions. Focusing on the Jordanian private sector, where the greatest disparities lie, we assess the conformity between the provisions that regulate family-related rights in the workplace within national labour law and international law. From this examination, we conclude that whilst law offers the potential for significant positive change in the Jordanian labour market, and (...) notwithstanding the labour law reforms which took place between 2000 and 2020, the underlying structure of the existing laws is inimical to the goal of women’s full participation. Using a women’s rights perspective, we argue that, instead of piecemeal reform, the labour law sphere must be revised as a whole to better accommodate respect for women’s needs in the workplace. This change must be underpinned by family-friendly legislation, which, as our study shows, is a key factor in alleviating some of the major challenges facing women workers. (shrink)

This article reflects one scholar's attempt to locate herself within emerging ethical methodologies given a specific concern with cross-cultural women's moral praxis. The field of comparative ethics's debt to past debates over methodology is considered through a typology of three waves of methodological invention. The article goes on to describe a specific research focus on U.S. Catholic and Iranian Shii women that initiated a search for a distinct method. This method of comparative ethics, which focuses on the production of ethical (...) knowledge through the interaction of discursive logics of various moral agents, is described. The conclusion turns to how methodological invention can itself become a constructive project through the way it (1) locates the scholar in relation to her subject of study and (2) allows for isolation of tactics within specific moral discourses. (shrink)

Can we ever justly critique the norms and practices of another culture? When activists or policy-makers decide that one culture’s traditional practice is harmful and needs to be eradicated, does it matter whether they are members of that culture? Given the history of imperialism, many argue that any critique of another culture’s practices must be internal. Others argue that we can appeal to a universal standard of human well-being to determine whether or not a particular practice is legitimate or whether (...) it should be eradicated. In this paper, I use the FGC eradication campaigns of the 1980s to show that the internal/external divide is complicated by the inter-connectedness of these debates on the international level. As the line blurs between internal and external criticism and interventions, new questions emerge about the representativeness of global institutions. (shrink)

Can we ever justly critique the norms and practices of another culture? When activists or policy-makers decide that one culture’s traditional practice is harmful and needs to be eradicated, does it matter whether they are members of that culture? Given the history of imperialism, many argue that any critique of another culture’s practices must be internal. Others argue that we can appeal to a universal standard of human wellbeing to determine whether or not a particular practice is legitimate or whether (...) it should be eradicated. In this paper, I use the FGC eradication campaigns of the 1980s to show that the internal/external divide is complicated by the interconnectedness of these debates on the international level. As the line blurs between internal and external criticism and interventions, new questions emerge about the representativeness of global institutions. (shrink)