Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights (review)
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A new collection of essays edited by Dorothy L. Hodgson, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights, highlights the complexity involved in discussing gendered human rights issues in local and transnational contexts. Through the collection's emphasis on gender, contributors scrutinize both the supposed neutrality of international human rights discourses and the local gendered assumptions with which those discourses are received, adapted, or transformed. Diverse ethnographic perspectives firmly ground the authors' analyses and separate this book from comparable volumes. As such, Gender and Culture at the Limit of Rights makes a useful contribution to a field that would also include other works such as Manisha Desai and Nancy A. Naples' Women's Activism and Globalization and Mark Goodale and Sally Engle Merry's The Practice of Human Rights: Tracking Law Between the Global and Local.
The book is organized into three sections, the first of which examines gender and rights across different cultures and historical epochs. In "Gender, History, [End Page 604] and Human Rights," Pamela Scully outlines the colonial history behind the stereotypical concern for the passive, abused African woman often depicted in human rights campaigns. She argues that the international community's focus on these types of representations not only denies women agency but also does not consider the cultural and communal contexts in which claims for rights can be put forward. Concerning Zanzibar, Salma Maoulidi's essay details how state influence increased women's presence in the public sphere while also using the defense of culture to justify state control over women's bodies. In the final article from Part I, Sally Goldfarb shows how domestic violence laws in the United States, governed by the twin cultural principles of patriarchy and privacy, tend to criminalize abusers and offer limited outcomes for the abused. Her article is particularly insightful in that it offers multiple possibilities for enhancing domestic violence laws, depending on women's "intersectionality," or where they are situated according to factors such as gender, social class, cultural background, or sexual orientation.
Part II focuses more specifically on how rights are translated into the vernacular. The section begins with a useful essay by Peggy Levitt and Sally Engle Merry discussing the challenges of separating "culture" from "rights." Although international human rights law reflects cultural bias, its practitioners seldom recognize this, continuing to affirm an implicit dichotomy between the West/Rest that also mirrors long-held stereotypes of "civilized" and "backward." The authors discuss how global women's rights frameworks can come to be "vernacularized," or placed in local idioms as a way of gaining acceptance. Strategies include linking local movements to global ones, using new discourse in another language to discuss rights violations, and shaping global conceptions into locally appropriate terms.
In her essay, Lila Abu-Lughod examines what the concept of "Muslim women's rights" means for women in the first decade of the millennia in two places: Egypt and occupied Palestine. She shows how complex and multivaried this definition of "rights" can be, depending on where people are situated, and offers a particularly illustrative ethnographic example of an Egyptian village woman discussing her own sense of the places from which "rights" emanate. Caroline Yezer's chapter, significant for its focus on masculinity, shows how villagers in Peru remain nostalgic for the strict enforcement of macho gender norms by the military, despite a history of violent encounters.
The final article in this section, by Hodgson herself, highlights the disconnect between international target campaigns to end FGM and the actual desires of Maasai women activists in Tanzania, who assert that the rights they most desire are political and economic ones. Hodgson also points out how even human rights movements sponsored by "African women" are elite-driven and marginalize indigenous women as victims of their patriarchal culture.
Part III interrogates issues of gender embedded in local, rights-based movements. Lynn Stephen performs an event analysis of the teachers' strikes in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 2006, focusing specifically on indigenous women...
