In this interdisciplinary, international collection of original essays, distinguished scholars, lawyers, and activists probe the complex relationship between gender, culture, and rights. The authors offer thoughtful, provocative case studies to suggest that the power of women's rights is also the source of its limits.
An interdisciplinary collection, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights examines the potential and limitations of the "women's rights as human rights" framework as a strategy for seeking gender justice. Drawing on detailed case studies from the United States, Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere, contributors to the volume explore the specific social histories, political struggles, cultural assumptions, and gender ideologies that have produced certain rights or reframed long-standing debates in the language of rights.
The essays address the gender-specific ways in which rights-based protocols have been analyzed, deployed, and legislated in the past and the present and the implications for women and men, adults and children in various social and geographical locations. Questions addressed include: What are the gendered assumptions and effects of the dominance of rights-based discourses for claims to social justice? What kinds of opportunities and limitations does such a "culture of rights" provide to seekers of justice, whether individuals or collectives, and how are these gendered? How and why do female bodies often become the site of contention in contexts pitting cultural against juridical perspectives?
The contributors speak to central issues in current scholarly and policy debates about gender, culture, and human rights from comparative disciplinary, historical, and geographical perspectives. By taking "gender," rather than just "women," seriously as a category of analysis, the chapters suggest that the very sources of the power of human rights discourses, specifically "women's rights as human rights" discourses, to produce social change are also the sources of its limitations.
Introduction: Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights
—Dorothy L. Hodgson
PART I. IMAGES AND INTERVENTIONS
1. Gender, History, and Human Rights
—Pamela Scully
2. Between Law and Culture: Contemplating Rights for Women in Zanzibar
—Salma Maoulidi
3. A Clash of Cultures: Women, Domestic Violence, and Law in the United States
—Sally F. Goldfarb
PART II. TRAVELS AND TRANSLATIONS
4. Making Women's Human Rights in the Vernacular: Navigating the Culture/Rights Divide
—Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry
5. The Active Social Life of "Muslim Women's Rights"
—Lila Abu-Lughod
6. How Not to Be a Machu Qari (Old Man): Human Rights, Machismo, and Military Nostalgia in Peru's Andes
—Caroline Yezer
7. "These Are Not Our Priorities": Maasai Women, Human Rights, and the Problem of Culture
—Dorothy L. Hodgson
PART III. MOBILIZATIONS AND MEDIATIONS
8. The Rights to Speak and to Be Heard: Women's Interpretations of Rights Discourses in the Oaxaca Social Movement
—Lynn Stephen
9. Muslim Women, Rights Discourse, and the Media in Kenya
—Ousseina D. Alidou
10. Fighting for Fatherhood and Family: Immigrant Detainees' Struggles for Rights
—Robyn M. Rodriguez
11. Defending Women, Defending Rights: Transnational Organizing in a Culture of Human Rights
—Mary Jane N. Real
Notes
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments