‘Women's rights as human rights’: Feminist practices, global feminism, and human rights regimes in transnationality1

Abstract

This paper argues that the recent calls for articulating women's rights as human rights can be successful only by misrecognition of the geopolitical context of human rights internationalism and the nationalisms that are sustained by it. Arguing that it is only on the level of universalized constructions of ‘women’ as a category and the generalized invocations of oppression by ‘global feminism's’ ‘American’ practitioners that such discourses of rights become powerful, this paper argues that policy and action require addressing localized and transnational specificities that created gendered inequalities. Even in national contexts such as in India, generalized invocations of women's human rights have not been useful since hegemonic forms of religion and culture have also been oppressive to women in minority communities. Concepts of economic and social justice rather than rights may work better in many such cases.