Reading Response, vi. Need rights?

I enjoyed our articles for this week over all of the others. We got to use our methodological toolbox to probe some important material. I especially took a lot of time with Nash, almost as much as a Wagner opera. Our commitments to moving away from essentialism yielded a deep erosion of [...]

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Gender Violence and Political Repression.

When I was reading articles by Henderson and Bunch, I noticed a connection between Gender Violence and Political Repression. I think that gendered violence against women are a lot of times the result of political repressions. Henderson states that women are born in a culture of violence against themselves. This repression occurs even more in [...]

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Kate Nash’s vision of "deconstructive equality"

I was impressed by Nash’s attempt to come up with a poststucturalist conception of equality that retains the feminist emphases on anti-essentialism and anti-foundationalism. Her focus on treatment (praxis) rather than conceptual normativity echoes some of what we’ve been reading regarding women’s lived experiences of discrimination and oppression. But I’m unsure of her argument that [...]

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Short Summaries and Comment

Gender Violence A Development and Human IssueBunch and Carrillo
Crimes against women are not recognized as civil or political emergency, although if the same crimes were committed to other groups, they would be considered emergencies. Recently there have been attempts to include women’s experiences into the concept of human rights. Bunch and Carrillo [...]

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Security Rights, Subsistence Rights, and Liberties (Summary)

There has been a proliferation of international human rights. Issues that have been investigated empirically are those that have explained cross-national variations in the realization of 3 empirically recognized human entitlements: i. security rights, ii. Subsistence rights, or basic human needs, and iii. Civil and political liberties. Theorists have thought about how these rights relate [...]

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The Political Repression of Women (Summary)

Repression is the violation of personal integrity rights. It is implicit in much of the repression literature that most victims are male (Henderson 2004: 1031). While makes suffer repression, and even sexual abuse, women not only experience the same violence that men encounter but they also overwhelmingly suffer sexual violence, often as a systematic [...]

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Human Rights for women: an argument for ‘deconstructive equality’

Kate Nash argues that post structuralists should support human rights for women as part of a long term strategy aimed at achieving gender equality. Feminists may reject liberal rights as liberal law was not crafted with women in mind (p 415). Nash argues that despite critiques of universalism, human rights need not be rejected, not [...]

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Transnationalizing Women’s Health Movements (summary & comment)

I’m going to attempt to summarize this article, but It seems like there are a lot of main topics being addressed here, so feel free to add on…
I pulled out of it that women’s rights are separate from human rights and there is a great sense of urgency to intertwine the two. Also that what [...]

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Transnationalizing Women’s Health Movements (Summary and Comment)

Women’s movements are far from homogenous; the interesting question is how movements become transnationalized (p 2). Women in the south expanded the struggle for women’s reproductive rights that began in the north (p 3). Women’s reproductive health must be placed within the more comprehensive human development framework; we cannot view the choice between women’s reproductive [...]

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Just Asking

I read this news report and had a (blasphemous?) thought……….could we imagine George Bush being put on trial at the ICC for the rising tide of civilian deaths in the countries that the US has deployed its military against? If so, what would the world have to look like for that to be an option? [...]

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