Doing Transnational Feminism, Transforming Human Rights: The Emancipatory Possibilities Revisited

Abstract

This article contributes to cross-disciplinary engagement with the idea of transnationality through a discussion of transnational feminisms. In particular, it reviews and responds to some of the more critical readings of the women's human rights paradigm and its role in underpinning, or not, emancipatory transnational feminisms in a context of increasingly fragmenting globalisation. The author considers two broad categories of critical readings of transnational women's human rights: anti-universalist and praxis-oriented. This includes discussions of recent feminist articulations of the ‘cultural legitimacy thesis’ and ‘vernacularisation’ and of obstacles to contesting the oppressions of neo-liberal globalisation through human rights feminisms. Ultimately, the author argues that the emancipatory possibilities of human rights-oriented transnational feminisms reside in dialogic, solidarity-building feminist praxis tied to transnational processes of counter-hegemonic (re)interpretation and (re)claiming of human rights from previously excluded positions.

Decolonising Labour, Reclaiming Subaltern Epistemologies: Brazilian Domestic Workers and the International Struggle for Labour Rights

“…However, I argue that the case of domestic workers' rights is more than an act of vernacularisation or adaptation of a transnational rights framework (Kay 2011;Levitt and Merry 2009;Reilly 2011); instead, it is a case of what I call 'transnationalisation from below. ' Indeed, the term 'vernacularisation' refers to a process in which local movements adapt 'globally generated ideas' (Levitt and Merry 2009) to their particular context, whereas I contend that the case of domestic workers' rights shows a reverse dynamic: the globalisation -and adaptation into an international Convention -of locally generated discourses on labour rights and equality.…”

“…Thus, social actors in the global South are not passive receptors of rights imposed on them; they actively claim and negotiate rights, and transform human rights discourses into concrete local demands (Brinks et al 2015;Della Porta and Tarrow 2005;Dufour and Giraud 2007;Kay 2011). Discussions about the vernacularisation of rights have precisely focused on the ways in which the local and the global are interconnected (Levitt and Merry 2009;Reilly 2011). The term 'vernacularisation' refers to a process in which local movements adapt 'globally generated ideas' (Levitt and Merry 2009) to their particular context.…”

Thinking Globally, Interviewing Locally: Using an Intensive Interview Project to Teach Globalization and Social Change

“…It is difficult to assist students in developing a sense of agency and desire to act against injustice while simultaneously avoiding facile and uncritical assumptions about their power. Fortunately, globalization instruction can decenter the United States and other rich nations (Heald 2004; Reilly 2011). Students want to act but must first recognize that action is already happening, that people in poor countries are not merely passive recipients of outside help, thus forestalling the white-savior narrative (Deepak 2011; Desai 2007; Escobar 1995; Hughley 2012; Vargas 2003).…”

Human rights and the borders of the human

“…The challenge is whether over time the praxis of pursuing human rights enables approaches that are more open to different ways of shaping collective and individual life and to overlooked forms of suffering. Meeting this challenge would require not simply expanding the list of potential rights but a more self-reflective, dialogic and enquiring commitment to undoing entrenched patterns of violence (Reilly 2011;Brown M 2002).…”