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115 q Chapter Four Women’s Rights and the Lure of Self-Determination in Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero In countries of the South the issue of human rights raises the question, How far can we talk of human rights without a new conception which extends them to the economic, social, cultural, racial and religious fields as well as to women and youth? —Nawal El Saadawi, 1992 Of all the controversies over human rights,those surrounding the status of women’s rights perhaps most vividly illumine how and why rights discourses are prone to overdetermination. Indeed, one need merely cite recent contentions about the veil to demonstrate the exceptionally , even explosively charged tenor that debates about women’s rights often assume, especially when they mutate into related disputes over secularism. To be sure, from one vantage point, the beleaguerment of women’s rights in many societies—within the North as well as the global South—is troubling and persistent. There is little doubt that advocacy for women’s rights represents one of the most important tasks on the human rights agenda.Yet appeals to women’s rights simultaneously provide a frequent pretext for international policing, one often cloaked in a rhetoric of postcolonial regression and lack. Women’s rights campaigns are especially susceptible to the neoimperial and paternalistic undercurrents that animate much contemporary human rights reportage. In turn, the polarizing thrust of these and other disagreements has led many theorists to take women’s rights as a prototypical “test case” for adjudicating the basic universality of the rights paradigm, or for interrogating rights as both a legal-philosophical construct and a discursive regime.1 For instance, Susan Moller Okin famously put the question in such terms by asking whether the precarity of women’s rights in many societies forces us to conclude that “multiculturalism is bad for women.”2 116 CHAPTER FOUR We might further examine these tensions to index why the disparate values subsumed within the logic of human rights frequently appear selfcanceling and internally contradictory. On the one hand, we have seen how liberal cartographies of the human define the subject in terms of reasoned self-determination, positing the autonomous and self-contained individual. On the other hand, human rights norms are equally understood to enshrine the right to cultural self-determination and thus to imagine the subject as embedded within a larger community. However, cultural rights have at times been impugned for prioritizing the collective over the individual in ways that dangerously subordinate the interests of women to the group’s needs. No doubt, this complaint comes to appear quite trenchant in light of how women’s lives and bodies have, over history and throughout the world, been policed under the assumption that they are repositories for a culture’s shared practices and beliefs.3 Indeed, it is precisely in response to such realities that theorists like Okin venture arguments that,however misleading,treat “culture” as virtually synonymous with patriarchy and the oppression of women—thereby capturing why anxieties about the cultural imperialism of human rights often appear newly salient when debates about women’s rights are on the table.4 Yet what these at times inflammatory conversations further illustrate are significant casualties that have accompanied the expanding currency of the international languages of human rights. The growing popularity of rights talk is partner to that idiom’s increasing malleability, entailing that the vocabulary of human rights can find itself deployed to justify competing ideological and political commitments at once. Such a syndrome has been particularly acute in relation to quarrels over women’s rights, wherein discourses of women’s rights both represent a crucial tool for auguring social and political advancement and evidence the frequently reactionary undertones of such concerns. Both the fragile status of women’s rights and the conflictual relationship between the individual and the collective preoccupy Nawal El Saadawi’s Woman at Point Zero. Yet El Saadawi also directs us to consider a historical moment before the languages of women’s rights incurred international preponderance and legitimacy. First published in Beirut in 1973, the original text of Woman at Point Zero was composed prior to the historic developments that fueled the women’s rights movement—and thus when the grammar of women’s progress and liberation was still mobile and in transition. While 1975 was declared International Women’s Year by the United Nations, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) was not adopted by its General...

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