Castan Centre for Human Rights Law

"Human Rights and Gender Politics "

Maila Stivens
University of Melbourne

My paper is concerned with, how, at the end of the most violent of centuries, feminists worldwide moved strongly to lay claim to and expand the idea of human rights: the slogan 'women's rights are human rights' has become a central claim of the global women's movement for nearly the last decade; feminist theorists have argued for an explicit inclusion of women and gender into human rights tenets; and United Nations forums have become central sites of a new global feminist 'counter public', providing unprecedented avenues for feminist initiatives and action. As an anthropologist I am interested in some specific dimensions of these developments, especially the relationship between theoretical understandings of human rights and the social practices of 'struggles from below'.

Clearly something extremely interesting and important is going on here. The women's rights are human rights campaigns are part of what is nothing less than a juggernaut global movement of groups explicitly claiming their struggle to be a human rights struggle. These include the children's's rights movement, lesbian and gay rights, disability rights, ecological rights, the rights of the ageing, land rights and so on: But why now, and what are the implications of this rush to rights claims, especially given the problems in actualising such claims? My paper addresses these developments, drawing on some work I have done in relation to these issues in Asia and the Pacific. (See my introduction to a book I have co-edited, Human Rights and Gender Politics Routledge, Stivens, 2000).

In the book, we look at a number of feminist, 'womanist' and other struggles and contests relating to women and gender in the region which have involved human rights claims. These include the contests around population policies in the PRC, the campaigns seeking compensation for the so-called comfort women, the instabilities around the idea of women's rights in India, the issues around writing about the May 1998 rapes in Indonesia, the hanging of Flor Contemplacion in Singapore, the lesbian and gay rights movement in SE Asia, the ambivalences about feminism of Salvadoran refugees in Australia, and struggles around domestic violence in the Pacific.

The contributors were all excited by the growth of the global 'women's human rights project', but were also concerned about a series of critical and complex issues it posed for feminists and human rights activists in the region and beyond: as mainly anthropologists, media studies persons and political scientists, we were interested to ask some pretty basic questions:

o How and why did this space for gender politics open up?
o Why have feminists at this point been homing in on human rights discourse as a preeminent global space for feminist politics?
o And why now?
o Why are so many feminists keen to claim a place alongside other human rights projects?
o What are the consequences of the development of this new global space?
o And what happens to both the feminist and human rights projects when feminists adopt the concept of 'human rights' as the core claim of a global feminist politics?
o What are the implications of this rush to make rights claims, indeed to reclaim the utopian 'human' within social movements where identity politics for example had been carrying the day?

One important result of the expansion of the human rights project has been that many of the concerns that women have put to the fore in the last three decades of feminist action worldwide have been recast as human rights issues (as in Katarina Tomasevski's 1993 volume on human rights and many following).

This raises a further important question: Why we are now seeing a renewed resort to an apparently universalising discourse of human rights, just when many feminist intellectuals and activists alike had become acutely aware of the diversity and complexities of women's politics of difference? The last two decades have seen a profound cultural critique by writers like Partha Chatterjee of the exclusions inherent in western liberal versions of universalism (1986, 1993). In a sense, such critiques of the imperialising, racialising, and genderising of universalisms dissolved some of the opposition between the supposed abstract universalism of human rights claims and the cultural relativism of culturalist, particularist counter claims. But it can be argued that they did so at the cost of being able to hold on to purer and more abstract notions of human rights.

How do we then resolve the tensions between, on the one hand a gender politics increasingly located within the 'women's-rights-are-human-rights' frame and the postmodern and postcolonial uncertainties and fragmentations that contemporary feminisms have so strongly acknowledged? Are we seeing a shift within feminist discourse away from a postmodern neoromanticism, overly concerned with culture, text and meaning? (Benhabib 1992; Ebert 1996). If so, are these renewed, reimagined claims on human rights more generally operating as a global rallying point of activists and intellectuals stricken by the political and intellectual collapse of the Left worldwide? Are they thus a way for such activists to sidestep some of the difficult issues raised by 'third-world' women and others challenging a single feminist voice, (albeit within the new conjunctures posed by globalisation?) Or can it be seen as part of attempts to move beyond simplistic dichotomies between 'postmodern' and 'universal'? (cf. Fraser 1997). [This would place it within recent quests for reconstituted 'universals' within feminisms and other social movements, which some recent thinkers have termed 'transversals' (cf Yuval-Davis 1997).]

Global Publics

It is clear, first, that the strategic use of UN forums, especially the women's and the Human Rights conferences, as critical global arenas by feminists has been spectacularly successful in providing an unprecedented promotion of women's rights, interests and activism over the last twenty years, spurred on by the Vienna Conference and specific issue like former Yugoslavia. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also made important interventions, dating from the late eighties, with very active Women's Rights projects.

While claims for women's rights have had a complex and uneasy relationship with other areas of rights discourse since the development of human rights discourse in Europe, contemporary claims have a clear strategic aim. As Friedman notes, 'women's human rights advocates have come to recognise the power of the international human rights framework, which lends legitimacy to political demands' (1995: 19), is accepted by most governments and brings with it established protocols'. Recent dramatic developments in global communications have also played a significant part, with internet links especially forming important networking opportunities.

I find it useful to term the enlarged and globalised sphere of feminist action around women's human rights a global feminist public, following the Habermasian terminology about 'publics' employed by feminist writers like Seyla Benhabib (1992) and Nancy Fraser (1997). According to Fraser, the idea of a 'public' implies an arena of global citizen discourse within the nation-state, 'a theatre of modern societies in which political participation is enacted through the medium of talk' (Fraser 1997: 70).

In my view, these recent successes of the women's movement have been inseparable from globalisation itself (a process I see as a highly gendered one, see Stivens 1998a). Saskia Sassen, one of the leading theorists of globalisation, has foreseen an emerging human rights regime replacing nation-based citizenship (1996), but we might well be somewhat sceptical about this, wondering what institutions would enforce human rights in this new order (I see especial difficulties with ideas of a global civil society or community which are emerging in some of this literature, see discussion in Falk, 1993, Stivens 2000.).

Obviously, geopolitical tensions continue to be acute within the global feminist public itself, as feminist debates about first and third world feminisms over the last fifteen or more years have shown. And the hypocritical politicking of many nation-states around issue of human rights add infinite complexities. Yet the optimism of many feminists after Beijing that these tensions were dissolving within the new strategic global feminist public may not be so easily swept aside. Bina Agarwal observed after the1995 Beijing Women's Conference that

[m]any northern women today are finding common ground with southern women on economic issues and wanting to be part of commonly-defined strategies, including agitating against transnational corporations. This is not to argue that the North-South gap has disappeared. But among women's groups there is growing recognition of the importance of forging strategic links. One could say romantic sisterhood is giving way to strategic sisterhood for confronting the global crisis of economy and polity.

(Agarwal 1995, cited in Ong, 1996: 3

Anne Brunet also argued at the Vienna Tribunal that the recent moves to understand women's rights as human rights were nothing less than the 'mainstreaming of feminism'. But Aihwa Ong rather dismissively claimed that the women's rights/human rights project is simply a northern women's invention which has been foisted on the unwitting women of the south (1996). In my view, however, this is a gross oversimplification of extremely complex geopolitics, sexual politics and democratisation processes. One might, of course, reject this version while acknowledging the force of more subtle arguments that such universalist claims are ultimately fatally compromised by their embeddedness in the 'western ' enlightenment project.

Yet even the most ambivalent of the activists in the case studies in our book are far from sharing in any straightforward manner Aihwa Ong's dismissive verdict. Indeed, many view such arguments as suspiciously similar to the arguments made by their own, to varying degrees, authoritarian governments. They explicitly reject such dichotomising, making clear claims in terms of a shared humanity that has many roots in global discourse and practice, and in a long history of global ideas about rights, justice and democracy. This history includes the legacy of Christianising missions, for all their close links to imperialism, anticolonial nationalisms and liberation struggles, and engagements with contemporary liberal modernity. Some women's human rights activists distance themselves from specifically feminist struggles: but many do not, making considerable strategic use of the multiple and complex links they have to the global feminist public. These links are very variable, as I note, ranging from the most tenuous fragile links between small local NGOS and the UN in some small Pacific states to the far more complex and multilayered large-scale Indian women's movement (see Stivens 2000). A point to be emphasised here, however, is that women's struggles are not simply drawing on these long-circulating ideas - these women are engaged in a process of producing new understandings of such modernist notions as democracy and rights, a process of redefinition and reimagining of the very notion of rights.

Conclusion:

The core feminist argument that human rights law has concentrated on 'public' agents, whereas violence and other abuses against women are often perpetrated by 'private' agents has been a powerful force in opening up human rights discourse and producing the global feminist public. The emerging human rights regime provides grounds for both optimism and pessimism for those engaged in struggles around gender politics. From an anthropological viewpoint, however, there are a series of critical difficulties with the concept 'human rights' and the terms of the debates, particularly a series of dualisms: these include:

o the shifting and elusive nature of human rights discourse;
o the oscillations between between 'ethics' and 'politics';
o the problems surrounding liberal ideas of rights in particular;
o and the claims on the term made by a range of actors, including the left, liberals and authoritarian prime ministers and presidents.

The problematic subsumption of gender politics in all its final complexities into a human rights framework leaves the fate of both the human rights and the feminist projects somewhat unclear. Moreover, enlarging the scope of 'human rights' by dissolving the public/private divide runs the risk of embedding the very public/private divide that feminists have found so problematic.An especial problem is the liberal category of rights, although as I have suggested, some activists argue that the women's human rights project is radically redefining the idea of rights, allowing it to escape from its liberal heritage.

Women activists find themselves enmeshed in a complex politics of meaning around the ideas of tradition and modernity, in which women and gender occupy starring roles. In such contexts, women have perforce been forced to draw on the awkwardnesses of second-wave feminist theories of social change and their oscillations between civilising projects and communitarian romanticism.

There is a degree of resolution to some of the principal questions in a core argument that I am making here: that one can transcend some of the polarities of the debates about universalism versus particularism and cultural relativism by looking at the ways in which claims to rights are embedded in highly specific local contexts and struggles. A number of theorists argue that we are not dealing with one global version of modernity, but multiple, divergent modernities within a globalising whole. I see such modernities as throwing up their own specific, situated politics, including feminist and 'womanist' politics. This supports the idea that human rights claims in the region cannot simply be written off as straightforwardly western liberal universalist and modernist imports: recent campaigns have been locally produced and locally reinvented in a dialogue with a long history of global ideas about human rights and democracy, to which they have long made important contributions.

It is clear nonetheless that new global forces are dissolving some of the dualisms within human rights discourse between 'rights' and 'cultural relativism' for example, and are producing new versions of claims about modern/postmodern identities which are being promulgated within global forums. But it is also possible that a consciousness of globalisation and the profound changes accompanying these processes may be precipitating the renewed claims made on a universal discourse of human rights and indeed utopian reclamations of the 'human'. There are clear advantages to politicking through international coalitions and structures within the new world order. Globalisation makes any simple opposition between 'western' and 'third-world' women problematic, both theoretically and in practice; it seems likely in any case that contests around such divisions have been less pronounced since the Beijing Women's Conference, although not all feminists share this view. Struggles have been forming around new axes, such as emerging divisions among Muslim women representatives at Beijing about women's rights within the Islamic world: these overrode the older opposition between 'Muslim' women as some reductionist category, and the Rest.

The tensions surrounding the politics of difference within feminist theory are also an issue. The feminist theorists Barbara Marshall (1994), Seyla Benhabib (1992) and Pauline Johnson (1994) have all argued that in spite of its very thorough and necessary critique of mainstream humanist ideals, feminism itself remains strongly committed to humanist values. As a political movement, feminism continues to use egalitarian rhetoric as the basis of most of its political demands. Thus feminism is wedded to the modern by virtue of its rootedness in the space opened up by rights discourse and by the ideals of the bourgeois public, but at the same time, its commitment to difference and diversity and its sceptical stance towards Reason calls forth the postmodern. (Marshall 1994: 148)

The rootedness of feminisms in the modern (and perhaps the neo-modern) is transparent in the recent workings of the global feminist public, both globally and locally. The slogan of unity in diversity may be dismissed by some as too pat, but it can also be a highly optimistic basis for a new feminist political practice which is increasingly a matter of alliances rather than of unified struggle around a universally shared interest or identity (Fraser and Nicholson 1990: 35). This formulation renders less acute some of the difficulties around human rights struggles. Globalisation theorists' predictions of apocalyptic change have been understood usually to portend increasing economic difficulties for women. But clearly those committed to ethically-grounded politics may also find much to be optimistic about. It is possible, for example, that the supposed crisis of the nation--state and the development of multiplying, divergent modernities outside the Euro-American social sphere, but within the new global order, are in fact facilitating the development of new transnational, ethically-grounded political coalitions, including feminist coalitions. These coalitions may well be based in what Nira-Yuval-Davis (1997) and others have recently seen as transversal politics -- the reconstitution of new versions of universalisms that transcend some of the old difficulties with difference by engaging. As Yuval-Davis argues, transversal politics aims to be an alternative to the universalism/relativism dichotomy at the heart of the modernist/postmodernist feminist debate; it is based on dialogue and debate that take into account the different positioning of women (1997: 125).iYuval-Davis, N. (1997) Gender and Nation, London: Sage.

There is a wider question here of course - about when and under what conditions such universalistic claims arise. The resort to reinvented or reconstituted universalism,-- and a turn to the utopian and the 'human' - is arguably closely linked to a growing consciousness of the many dimensions of globalisation and the perceived strategic advantages of politicking through international coalitions and structures within the new world order. It is clear that the diverse groups engaged in human rights struggles around issues of women and gender in the Asia-Pacific region are all playing very important and energetic parts in changing that order.

Endnotes

i Differentiating between social identities and social values, transversal politics 'assumes that... "epistemological communities", which share common value systems, can exist across differential positionings and identities' (Yuval-Davis 1997: 131). 'Concretely this means that all feminist (and other democratic) politics should be viewed as a form of coalition politics in which the differences among women are recognized and given a voice' (ibid: 126).

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