Taking Better Account: Contemporary Slavery, Gendered Narratives, and the Feminization of Struggle

Women are taking leading roles in redefining social concepts and global policy issues in areas such as development, democracy, human rights, world security, and the environment. This means not just looking at what have been called "women's issues"—a ghetto, or separate sphere that remains on the margins of society—but rather moving women from the margins to the center by questioning the most fundamental concepts of our social order so that they take better account of women's lives. ¹

Not just "victims" but perpetrators and responders, too, are characters whose stories and personal details convey the gendered character of human rights reporting. Accepting this fact and considering that male responders and perpetrators feature in human rights narratives more often than female, it also follows that male as well as female gender constructs are encoded in human rights narratives. These principles—that gender is a salient dimension of the construction of all three figures in Makau Mutua's triumvirate of "saint, savage and victim," and that preconceptions about masculinity as well as femininity give texture and emotional depth to human rights representations—are the starting point for my reading of the gender of human rights narratives. ²

A feminist reading, following Charlotte Bunch's words in the epigraph, means not just looking at "women's issues" but questioning fundamental aspects of the social order. Are there aspects of the global social order that, when taken for granted within human rights discourse, work in tandem with assumed aspects of small-scale social orders to relegate women and derogated minorities to silence and passivity? I present evidence that such exclusionary effects are real but operate subtly—blanket critique of human rights is not what I seek and it is not my point to style human rights the handmaiden of a new imperialism. Without gainsaying errors of commission, the focus deserves to be just as much on errors of omission.

By examining narratives of rescue that dominate antislavery discourse today, I make the case that rescue stories are guided by a masculinist politics, in which men but never women can stand up for their rights. In miniaturized form, rescue stories reflect a global human rights Machtpolitik: a benevolent West (the rescuer writ large) is discursively positioned as the world's sole possible force for justice, as antislavery narratives omit or at best skip lightly over evidence that members of communities afflicted by coerced exploitation are organizing in defense of their own rights. Emplotting antislavery solely as rescue, then, slights the initiative of the oppressed and ignores their activist agenda. Facilitating that error are two commonly voiced human rights activist aspirations which may seem thoroughly benign even to many political progressives: the first is that might can be made to make right, through lobbying the world's powerful states to pressure less powerful states into conformity with human rights norms; the second is that the North American and Western European target audiences of human rights denunciations are capable of acting out of morally enlightened benevolence. Nothing per se is wrong with these aspirations. Indeed, it is often only through publicly demanded international pressure that human rights progress is possible. Yet the resulting blend of a citizen-driven politics of persuasion and principle, on one hand, and an international relations power play, on the other, can squeeze other approaches—based on dialogue and, quite often, woman-led—to the margins of human rights discourse, resulting at times in misapplications of international pressure and negative outcomes that could have been averted.

I signal recognition of the global reach of these concerns by beginning the main body of this essay with analysis of a fictionalized realist portrayal of sex slavery in Nepal and India. From that point, I develop my concerns through a reading of journalistic reports, feature-length dramatic films, and video documentaries concerning one case, which I have been studying as an ethnographer for years: that of human rights mobilization in favor of migrant and minority rights for people of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic. Even as new abolitionist activists depict the employment...