Control, alt, delete: Patriarchal populist attacks on international women’s rights

Rebecca Sanders,Laura Dudley Jenkins

doi:10.1017/s2045381721000198

Abstract

AbstractThe rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women’s international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’ equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this ‘norm spoiling’ strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ ‘global gag rule’; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’ speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.

Highlights

Introduction ‘Gender’, ‘gender-based violence’, ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’ (SRHR), ‘comprehensive sexuality education’, ‘unmet need for family planning’, ‘safe abortion’ and ‘unsafe abortion’, and ‘various forms of the family’: these terms appear regularly in United Nations (UN) resolutions, declarations and policy initiatives related to women’s international human rights
We briefly survey women’s rights norms in international law and global governance, locate norm spoiling within the scholarly literature and consider the role of recent patriarchal populist actors in accelerating attacks on women’s rights
While the expansive understandings of women’s rights preferred by feminist women’s rights advocates have tended to dominate in UN committees and fora dedicated to rights promotion, state and non-state critics of women’s rights in general, and of feminist interpretations in particular, have inserted themselves into international law and policy-making in order to halt and reverse the progressive development and diffusion of women’s rights norms

Summary

International women’s rights norms

While the expansive understandings of women’s rights preferred by feminist women’s rights advocates have tended to dominate in UN committees and fora dedicated to rights promotion, state and non-state critics of women’s rights in general, and of feminist interpretations in particular, have inserted themselves into international law and policy-making in order to halt and reverse the progressive development and diffusion of women’s rights norms In some cases, these norm spoilers challenge rights head on; in others, they utilize the language of rights, reinterpreting the meaning of rights to reflect their rival preferences (Bob 2019). This creates fertile terrain for spoilers, which aim not just to promote non-compliance, but to unmake international women’s rights law itself

Human rights contestation and ‘norm spoiling’

Women’s rights norms spoilers

Controlling women’s rights language

Deleting women’s rights language

Findings

VIII. Conclusion