Theorizing Women's Cultural Diversity in Feminist International Human Rights Strategies

Abstract

In this article I want to explore how international human rights strategies can be more responsive to the needs of women in diverse cultural settings. While there has been an increasing amount of feminist legal writing which has examined the cultural assumptions that often lie within the category of 'women', feminist scholarship concerning international human rights protections has been dismissive of culturally relative positions and therefore has implicitly maintained universalistic and essentialist norms. Feminists fear that challenging the artificial cultural unity of women's experience will hinder the project of prioritizing women's concerns in the international sphere. My argument is that cultural and gender critiques of the dominant discourse are interrelated and necessary aspects of a project for women's empowerment. It is my contention that international women's rights will not have the support of diverse women worldwide until the cultural assumptions within international human rights norms are interrogated along with the gendered premises of those norms. To ignore the importance of culture, race, class, sexuality, and history ends up leaving feminist theory within international human rights theoretically impoverished and strategically weak. In many ways the cultural critiques of the dominant human rights discourse echo the critiques of the dominant feminist discourse and yet neither of the critiques has been adequately merged in feminist international scholarship. The prevailing tendency for feminists is to address cultural relativism only when evaluating strategies for the implementation of international human rights standards. I know of no attempts to evaluate systematically the appropriateness of those universalist standards for women in varying cultures, nor to problematize the internationalist feminist project. The general