‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices, global feminism, and human rights regimes in transnationality<sup>1</sup>

Grewal, Inderpal

doi:10.1080/13621029908420719

Cited by 124 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Feminist human rights research critically explores the applicability of international human rights guarantees, while remaining attentive to the particular local social contexts from which human rights issues and potential solutions arise (Grewal 1999;Manderson 2004;Merry 2006). Thus transnational feminist inquiry both brings to light, and works alongside, the longstanding tension between the universal and the particular in human rights debates by 're-engaging the local' (Coomaraswamy 2002) and by attending to the cultural and representational politics of human rights deployments (Hesford and Kozol 2005;Newdick 2005).…”

Section: State-centricity and Universalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights

Collins

Falcón

Lodhia

et al. 2010

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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Section: State-centricity and Universalismmentioning

confidence: 99%

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights

Collins

Falcón

Lodhia

et al. 2010

International Feminist Journal of Politics

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“…It is, as I and others have shown, often through the language of human rights and gender equality that empire is accomplished today (Grewal 1999;Razack 2004b;Rajagopal 2003). The West is understood as culturally committed to the values of the enlightenment while the non-West remains incompletely modern at best, or hostile to modernity at worst.…”

mentioning

confidence: 95%

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

Razack

2007

Feminist Legal Stud

107

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The normative figure in Western feminism remains the liberal autonomous individual of modernity. 'Other' women are those who have their freedom to choose restricted. Typically, 'other' women are those burdened by culture and hindered by their communities from entering modernity. If we remain in the terrain of thinking about women as vulnerable or imperilled, and some women as particularly imperilled, as we generally do of Muslim women, we remain squarely within the framework of patriarchy understood as abstracted from all other systems. A modernity/premodernity distinction will continue to invade any projects intending to help Muslim women. This paper shows the persistence of the modernity/premodernity distinction in contemporary debates around applying Sharia law to the settlement of family law disputes under the Arbitration Act in Ontario, Canada. I argue below that in their concern to curtail conservative and patriarchal forces within the Muslim community, Canadian feminists (both Muslim and Non-Muslim) utilized frameworks that installed a secular/religious divide that functions as a colour line, marking the difference between the modern, enlightened West, and tribal, religious Muslims. I suggest that feminist responses might have helped to sustain a new form of governmentality, one in which the productive power of the imperilled Muslim woman functions to keep in line Muslim communities at the same time that it defuses more radical feminist and anti-racist critique of conservative religious forces. I end by exploring how this effect could have been restricted.

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“…However, despite 'freedom of religion' also being a cornerstone of this tradition, because religion is frequently implicated in endorsing subordinate roles for women relative to men and/or harmful cultural practices, equality and rights feminism tends to view religion primarily as a threat. Much criticism has been levelled against this brand of feminist thinking as inevitably western-centric and neoimperialist (Grewal, 1999;Razak, 2008). Susan Okin's essay 'Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women ' (1999), for example, is often cited (somewhat unfairly) as epitomizing this unreconstructed, universalist position; wherein the experience and worldview of white, western, middle class and, ostensibly, secular women is falsely universalized as the norm of 'modern emancipated womanhood'.…”

Section: Western Centric Treatments Of Religionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-Secular Age

Reilly¹

2011

Feminist Review

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The need to re-examine established ways of thinking about secularism and its relationship to feminism has arisen in the context of the confluence of a number of developments including: the increasing dominance of the 'clash of civilizations' thesis; the expansion of postmodern critiques of Enlightenment rationality to encompass questions of religion; and sustained critiques of the 'secularization thesis'. Conflicts between the claims of women's equality and the claims of religion are welldocumented vis-à-vis all major religions and across all regions. The ongoing moral panic about the presence of Islam in Europe, marked by a preoccupation with policing Muslim women's dress, reminds us of the centrality of women and gender power relations in the interrelation of religion, culture and the state. Added to postmodern and other critiques of the secular-religious binary, most sociological research now contradicts the equation of modernization with secularization. This article focuses on the challenges that these developments pose to politically oriented feminist thinking and practice. It argues that non-oppressive feminist responses require a new critical engagement with secularism as a normative principle in democratic, multicultural societies. To inform this process, the author maps and links discussions across different fields of feminist scholarship, in the sociology of religion and in political theory. She organizes the main philosophical traditions and fault lines that form the intellectual terrain at the intersection of feminism, religion and politics in two broad groups: feminist critiques of the Enlightenment critique of religion; and feminist scholarship at the critical edges of the Enlightenment tradition. The author argues that notwithstanding the fragmented nature of feminist debates in this area, common ground is emerging across different politically oriented approaches: all emphasize 'democracy' and the values that underpin it as the larger discursive frame in which the principle of secularism can be redefined with emancipatory intent in a neosecular age.

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‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices, global feminism, and human rights regimes in transnationality¹

Cited by 124 publications

References 8 publications

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-Secular Age

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‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices, global feminism, and human rights regimes in transnationality1

Cited by 124 publications

References 8 publications

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights

The ‘Sharia Law Debate’ in Ontario: The Modernity/Premodernity Distinction in Legal Efforts to Protect Women from Culture

Rethinking the Interplay of Feminism and Secularism in a Neo-Secular Age

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About

‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices, global feminism, and human rights regimes in transnationality¹