Gender, Human Rights, and the Global Locations of Liberalism
Gender, Human Rights, and the Global Locations of Liberalism
"Human rights" and "humanitarianism" have become the most recent terms for justifying Western intervention in non-Western societies. Whether addressed to problems of violence or of social inequality, these terms carry enormous possibilities for social transformation. But they also evoke notions of saving, civilizing, and modernizing the backward, an indication that the problems of earlier Western arguments for colonization remain unresolved. These terms also often portray ordinary people, especially women, as victims of their own beliefs and culture.
The institutionalization of the human rights discourse-and its appearance as a global form of rescue, redress, and protection-occurred in the period after the Second World War, in the aftermath of the Holocaust and with the end of imperial rule across Asia and Africa. The history of international treaties and conventions governing acts of exceptional cruelty and violence such as genocide and torture are well documented. The colonial genealogies of conceptions of the "human," however, are less clear, as are the troubled histories of rights, freedom, and equality as they developed in areas outside Europe and North America. Philosophies of freedom and equality, articulated during the eighteenth-century by Hegel, Montaigne, and Rousseau, developed in the context of projects of colonization and global expansion. The abolitionist discourses of the nineteenth-century drew their inspiration from evangelical conceptions of the equality of all human beings, countering arguments about racial inferiority and barbarism that supported the institution of slavery and colonial expansion.
In each of these instances, race, culture, and most importantly, religion, were characterized as impediments to modernization, deflecting attention away from the illiberal forms of governance characterizing imperial rule. The contemporary reverberations of these issues are especially salient in the post-9/11 context, with culturalist assumptions about Islam (and Muslims) and claims for liberating women on the rise, and with democracy exporting mandates re-invoking earlier paradigms of native barbarism. These new developments have thrown the presumed universality of human rights into crisis.
While the liberal philosophy of human rights is often taken for granted as exemplary, the reemerging appeal of grassroots socialism and the continuing appeal of Islamism offer competing answers to questions of injustice and violence. We thus question whether we can in fact accept the universality of these principles unequivocally and whether others do in fact experience it as the ideal mode of transnational civic engagement. These are among the issues we have grappled with in our research and during our two years directing the ISERP forum on Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism. Bringing in scholars whose work is transnational or regionally based, this workshop began meeting in January 2005 with additional support from the Institute for Research on Women and Gender.
With this forum, we attempt to spark discussion of these issues at Columbia and foreground the necessity of bringing a gendered perspective to the question of human rights and humanitarian intervention. Our aim is to encourage rigorous and comparative thinking about the centrality of gender to the global applications of the liberal tradition, whether in the colonial past, in the era of modernization, or in this new century of empire. An impetus for our explorations of the relevance and limits of rights-based activism, this workshop spawns new directions in our research and thinking and allows us to consider how anthropological and historical analysis can contribute to understanding "women's rights" as "human rights." This line of inquiry requires us to consider the challenges that area studies scholars and social and political theorists have been developing to the liberal underpinnings and institutional circuits of this form of politics.
In part, our own research acts as a springboard for discussion at workshop sessions. Our current research explores the histories and limits of humanitarianism by examining the specific case of women's rights and the idea of women's vulnerability. We explore how the discourse of rights applies to emerging technologies of violence and organizations of gender and sexual difference, and with what limits.
This year, Anupama Rao (with Steven Pierce) completed an edited volume entitled Discipline and the Other Body (Duke University Press, 2006), which addresses the relationship between culture, colonialism, and human rights discourse from a transnational perspective. Lila Abu-Lughod, while continuing to explore the relationship between memory and political violence in Palestine, began work on a book that addresses the topic of Muslim women's rights. A major question posed by the book is whether it is possible to talk about rights without framing the debate in terms of a "clash of civilizations." The book will also explore the ways in which arguments that are couched in the language of women's rights are sometimes undermined by the geopolitical and cultural fields in which they are mounted, despite the fact that they constitute a potent framework for justice and greater rights. By being attentive to the ways in which Muslim women's rights cannot be detached from their historically embedded contexts, the book will address crucial questions about feminist ethics and political activism.
In the past few decades, those concerned with gender equity have sought to extend the discourse of human rights to encompass women's rights and gender justice. Publicity about the rape and slaughter of women during genocidal violence in Bosnia, Gujarat, and Rwanda, sex-trafficking in Southeast Asia, genital cutting in Africa, honor killings in South Asia and the Middle East, and traditional marriage customs in the indigenous world have demanded the recognition of "women's rights as human rights." Particularly dominant today is the assumption that culture is a destructive force, a form of civic disability that sanctions gender-based violence. "Violence against women," often understood as a consequence of the inescapable force of religion and community, has thus become the mediating term in the translation-and transformation-of culture into violation and a key point of mobilization for transnational feminists.
Yet when feminists and others working in the international arena invoke notions of culture and frame the dilemmas of intervention in terms of the clash between so-called customary cultures or religious traditions and universal rights, they rarely make use of the theoretical tools from the social sciences and humanities to develop complex analyses of the systemic relationships among culture, religion, and social forms. Most importantly, they are rarely critical of the uneven geopolitical distribution of human/women's rights applications-what we could call its locations.
Some social thinkers note that both sides of the term "human rights" are ripe for critical rethinking: the universality implied by the "human"-and by extension "woman"-and, even more important, the liberalism that makes "rights" the language of choice today in the search for justice. Such inquiries have been taking many forms in the last decade: anthropologists and scholars with deep knowledge of particular regions and cultural traditions have been questioning the universalism of the concept of "the human;" and political and social theorists, particularly feminist theorists and postcolonial scholars, have been interrogating liberalism and secularism and asking what talk of "rights" and even "tolerance" might hide in terms of systemic inequality, structural violence, and imperial relations. Important new projects have formed around what a serious study of "illiberal" customary practices and religious traditions can contribute to relativizing liberalism and locating it historically and culturally.
The workshop on Gender and the Global Locations of Liberalism will resume meeting in the spring semester. From early work on emotion, poetry, and gender ideology in a Bedouin community in Egypt to more recent work on Egyptian soap operas and Palestinian national identification, violence, and memory, Lila Abu-Lughod's research is concerned with gender and culture in the Arab world. Anupama Rao focuses on the histories of gender, caste and nationalism in South Asia, historical anthropology, political theory, law, human rights, colonial and non-Western histories. As a direct outgrowth of workshop meetings, they are collaborating with faculty at the Universities of Oxford and Manchester around a critical examination of the theme of "gender and human rights." To learn more, contact Lila-Abu Lughod at la310@columbia.edu or Anupama Rao at ar2009@columbia.edu.
