Gender Rights Research Articles

Government Respect for Gendered Rights: The Effect of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on Women’s Rights Outcomes, 1981-20041

Cole, Wade M. (2012) Government Respect for Gendered Rights: The Effect of the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women on Women’s Rights Outcomes, 1981–2004. International Studies Quarterly, doi: 10.1111/isqu.12000 © 2012 International Studies Association Using two-stage least-squares regression models, I analyze the effect of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) on rated levels of respect for women’s rights. The results show that CEDAW has a strong positive effect on women’s political rights, no effect on economic rights, and a partially negative effect on social rights. Detailed analyses of political outcomes reveal that CEDAW membership was associated with an increase in the share of women in national parliaments but had no effect on the likelihood that governments adopted legislative quotas guaranteeing female representation in parliament. CEDAW was also more effective for some kinds of countries than others. Post-ratification improvements were particularly strong in democratic countries and countries with extensive linkages to women-focused international organizations, but CEDAW proved ineffective in Muslim polities and societies. The paper evaluates the implications of these findings and proposes new avenues for research.

Género y Derechos Humanos Algunas reflexiones feministas sobre la ciudadanía y el Estado Nación en América Latina

The article examines the relationship between the concepts of gender, citizenship and human rights, both from a Sociology of Law and a gender perspective. It takes into account the various theoretical perspectives and the distinct established practises in Latin America, which involves the relation between theory and practice. It also brings some empirical cases from the region into examination, particularly from Argentina. The current framework in the discussion revolves around the existing process of globalisation and the transnational phenomena and how they influence the structure of the Nation-State.This includes legal and welfare institutions as well the concept of national sovereignty,territorial authority, the production of law and the concept of national citizenship. A number of interesting questions in the investigation relates to how the current process of globalisation influences the role of the Nation-State and how the concept of citizenship in Latin America is seen from a gender perspective. What is the inter-relation between citizenship, gender, class and ethnicity? How has the interrelation and development between the political, the socio-economic and sexual/reproductive rights of women on the continent progressed from the past to the present? The study is based on a qualitative analysis from previous research in this field, by Latin-American, European and North-American writers, as well as, studies done by international and regional organizations, such as the UN, the OAS and international and national NGO.

Negotiating Culture in the Promotion of Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment in Latin America

SummaryCulture interacts with development in multiple ways. However the importance of culture within development should not be seen as translating to crystallising and solidifying its meaning or providing definitive ideas of what works. In this paper, I look at the relevance of culture to the promotion of gender equality and women's empowerment, and examine how some women's movements in Latin America have negotiated and contested meanings around culture and as a result have re‐signified gender values, attitudes and behaviours.The example of Las madres de la Plaza de Mayo questions the cultural construct of motherhood and the traditional role of the mother caring for the family within the home, and the women's neighbourhood action based in Bahia, Brazil which I look at contests and extends the notion of that domestic space. The importance of deconstructing and fighting against stereotypical images and patriarchal views of women in order to uphold gender rights is clear from the examples I look at on domestic violence, sex worker violence and the Black Women's Movement's struggle against sexist and racist images.In conclusion I argue that in employing ‘transformatory thinking’ the women's groups that I look at in this paper have worked together as women to contest and confront accepted cultural meanings and by doing so have begun to re‐structure the gender order and promote gender equality.

CIES Bibliography 2011

CIES Bibliography 2011

Issues of Tension

Western feminism has been used by Aboriginal and Métis women to assert their gender rights within Aboriginal cultures. However, issues of what exactly Aboriginal women’s issues are, and who gets to discuss them is under contention. Defining Western feminism and Aboriginal women’s exclusion from it, is followed by a discussion on how Aboriginal and Métis women are using Western feminism within various Aboriginal Algonquian cultures to assert their rights and this is building tension between Aboriginal women with a Western feminist view, and traditional Aboriginal women. The focus is largely drawn from my experience in Cree culture, with the broader issue of feminism discussed within the context of Native cultures.

Building a Left Coast: The Legacy of the California Popular Front and the Challenge to Cold War Liberalism in the Post-World War II Era

The Cold War in the late 1940s blunted attempts by the Truman administration to extend the scope of government in areas such as health care and civil rights. In California, the combined weakness of the Democratic Party in electoral politics and the importance of fellow travelers and communists in state liberal politics made the problem of how to advance the left at a time of heightened Cold War tensions particularly acute. Yet by the early 1960s a new generation of liberal politicians had gained political power in the Golden State and was constructing a greatly expanded welfare system as a way of cementing their hold on power. In this article I argue that the New Politics of the 1970s, shaped nationally by Vietnam and by the social upheavals of the 1960s over questions of race, gender, sexuality, and economic rights, possessed particular power in California because many activists drew on the longer-term experiences of a liberal politics receptive to earlier anti-Cold War struggles. A desire to use political involvement as a form of social networking had given California a strong Popular Front, and in some respects the power of new liberalism was an offspring of those earlier battles.

Resistance to the Eradication of Female Circumcision and the Political Economy of Underdevelopment in Cameroon

This article examines resistance to the eradication of the ritual practice of female circumcision in the enclaves populated by the Ejagham people in Southwest Cameroon. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this study shows how in the face of abject poverty and institutionalized state marginalization, resistance to opponents of female circumcision becomes a placemaking project. It demonstrates that the social arrangement sustaining female circumcision has been kept in place by conditions of poverty, underdevelopment, and dependency as well as by local gendered discourses of respectability, honor, and reciprocity among kin and community. Within this system of inequality, women use ritual female circumcision as a powerful tool for negotiating with patriarchy. By focusing on health alone, antifemale circumcision interventions by both the state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) miss the point even as this practice is increasingly becoming a human, social, gender rights, and development issue. The article suggests that for health education to be successful, it must take cognizance of the local needs met by female circumcision so as to empower the people as dialogic partners in development and not ostracize the target population.

PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

PROTOCOL: The Impact of Land Property Rights Interventions on Agricultural Productivity in Developing Countries: A Systematic Review

Barriers to Women's Access to Justice in Haiti

While gender-based violence is not a new phenomenon in Haiti, the aftermath of the January 12, 2010 earthquake further exposed the vulnerability of Haitian women and girls to gender-based violence and the limited possibilities for women to evince a judicial response to gender-specific violations of the law. Drawing from the experiences of Haitian lawyers and women’s rights advocates, this paper will examine women’s barriers to accessing justice in Haiti by drawing on actual examples of gender-based violence at each step of the investigatory process under the Haitian justice system. It will provide, by way of background, an overview of the Haitian justice system, including gender rights under Haitian law, the framework of Haiti’s obligations with respect to the administration of justice, and the structure and processes of each institution implicated in the pursuit of justice for cases involving gender-based violence. Additionally, the case studies will reveal the requirements and barriers women confront at each stage of the process. The article will then explore community-based responses to addressing these barriers and provide recommendations on legislative, judicial, and law enforcement reforms aimed at improving women’s access to justice.

More Pregnant Pictures

In contemporary U.S. law and popular culture, it is a politically fraught act to convey what is in the pregnant belly. New York Magazine, in 2009, termed women's paintings of their fetuses on their own pregnant bellies “lowbrow” and “despicable.” Soon after, Dr. George Tiller was murdered for providing legal late term abortions that credited pregnant women's self-representations, and talk radio had difficulty condemning the shooter. Gonzales v Cathart (2007) supports this disdain for women's power to portray by suggesting that women do not have the ability correctly to judge the need to terminate their pregnancies, and might suffer crippling “abortion regret” after representing the fetus incorrectly.Photographs of pregnancy are also sites of cultural struggle. Annie Leibovitz's portrait of Demi Moore on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine broke a widespread taboo by representing Moore as a glamorous consumer of lifestyle choices, who had both a successful career and a family. This important image attributed feminine agency as well as glamour to Moore. It was greeted initially with widespread public outrage but rapidly became iconic as numerous others imitated the pose, including Bruce Willis and Leslie Nielsen, who parodied it as ersatz pregnant men.A second barrier was broken by pregnant transman Thomas Beatie, whose well-publicized images significantly queered the Demi Moore pose. Although Beatie himself is conservative on gender codes, his images shift the feminine—and feminist—configuration of the Demi Moore pose to a more heterogeneous configuration, hopefully helping to expand future gender rights and freedoms.

Preventing the gendered reproduction of citizenship: the role of social movements in South Africa

Social movements have an important role to play in shaping our understanding of the entitlements and human rights related to citizenship. Feminist movements, in particular, actively challenge and reshape gendered perceptions of citizenship generated by the state. The present article focuses on the ‘One in Nine Campaign’, which advocates for, among many things, legal changes in relation to gender-based violence in South Africa. Research into the Campaign reveals the utility in legal mobilisation as a strategy for feminist organising, and opens great potential for changing the way states see the law in relation to gender and women's rights. This, however, also raises fundamental questions about different understandings of citizenship and citizenship rights.

The Impact of Conservative Discourses in Family Policies, Population Politics, and Gender Rights in Poland and Turkey

This article uses childcare as a case study to test the impact of ideas that embody a traditional understanding of gender relations in relation to childcare. Conservative ideas regard increasing female labor market participation as a cause of decreasing fertility on the functioning of a set of general policies to increase fertility rates. It looks into the Polish and Turkish contexts for empirical evidence. The Polish context shows a highly institutionalized system of family policies in contrast to almost unessential institutions in Turkey. Formally, the labor market participation of women is much lower in Turkey than in Poland. Yet, given the size of the informal market in Turkey, women's labor participation is obviously higher than what appears in the statistics. Bearing in mind this divergence, the article suggests Poland and Turkey as two typologies for studying population politics in contexts where socially conservative ideas regarding gender remain paramount. We qualify ideas as conservative if they enforce a traditional understanding of gender relations in care-giving and underline women's role in the labor market as an element of declining fertility. In order to delineate ideational impact, this article looks into how ideas (a) supplant and (b) substitute formal institutions. Therefore, we argue that there are two mechanisms pertaining to the dominance of conservative conventions: conservative ideas may either supplant the institutional impact on family policies, or substitute them thanks to a superior reasoning which societies assign to them. Furthermore, conservative conventions prevail alongside women's customary unpaid work as care-givers regardless of the level of their formal workforce participation. We propose as our major findings for the literature of population politics that ideas, as ubiquitous belief systems, are more powerful than institutions since they provide what is perceived as legitimate, acceptable, and good for the societies under study. In the end, irrespective of the presence of institutions, socially conservative ideas prevail.

In our culture, in our gender: Implications of the culture/gender interface for South African psychotherapists

Debates about the relationship between culture and gender, and the potential contradictions involved in simultaneously respecting both multicultural and feminist principles and values, have occupied an important place in theoretical discussion in the social sciences and humanities. This paper examines the relationship between gender and culture from the perspective of the psychotherapeutic encounter in a multicultural society, in this case contemporary South Africa. With the help of illustrative case material involving traumatically bereaved women who became subject to cultural ascriptions of maliciousness or murderousness, and where cultural beliefs potentially jeopardized gender rights, mental health and therapeutic recovery, the article argues that the relationship between gender and culture, viewed from a therapeutic perspective, can be seen to present complex conceptual and ethical challenges for the therapist. In addition, the structural, psychological and discursive positioning of the therapist and client in respect of warrants to speak and to accept or contest cultural constructions is recognized as implicated in particular kinds of therapeutic impasses. Both clinical and political concerns are discussed in order to illustrate the intersections between the intrapsychic and the social, as well as between the personal and the political. Two related lines of theory, that of intersectionality (derived primarily from feminist theory) and of psychoanalytic theory, are proposed and juxtaposed as a productive way of thinking about instances in which the interface between gender and culture presents particular kinds of problems in the consulting room for both clients and therapists. The necessity for a particular kind of critical self, group and cultural awareness is proposed.

Overnights and Overkill: Post-Divorce Contact for Infants and Toddlers

In post-divorce and post-separation contexts, overnight visitation is being recommended with increasing frequency for non-resident parents. However, there is confusion as to whether sleepover access serves the best interests of young children. My purpose in this paper is to raise awareness and to encourage debate on children's needs regarding overnight contact during early developmental phases. I review available research and reflect critically on emerging trends with reference to attachment theory, practical experience, parental and gender rights, cultural considerations, and adversarial legal contexts. I suggest that insistence on overnight contact in highly contested matters may be a form of overkill that serves parental and legal demands more than the best interests of children, and conclude that individual cases should be assessed with reference to, amongst other things, processes of separation, reunion, and attachment.

“The Psychological Marshall Plan”: Displacement, Gender, and Human Rights after World War II

In 1940, Howard Kershner, director of European relief for the American Friends Service Committee, was stationed in Vichy France, where Quakers were organizing relief for refugees. He had witnessed any number of wartime atrocities in his years of service during the Spanish Civil War, including violence directed at civilians, bombings, starvation, and disease. Now he added a new item to the litany of wartime suffering: “One of the greatest tragedies of all times is the separation of families in Europe today: wives in one country, husbands in another, with no possibility of reunion and often no means of communication; babies who have never seen their fathers; scattered fragments of families not knowing if their loved ones are living or dead, and often without hope of ever seeing them again. There are multitudes of wretched souls for whom it seems the sun of hope has set.”

Translating Gender Justice in Southeast Asia: Situated Ethics, NGOs, and Bio-Welfare

AbstractThis essay shows that regardless of existing laws and prominent female leaders, gender justice as a value must be attuned to the situated ethics of the majority populations in order to gain social legitimacy. Since the 1980s, NGO movements for reformasi, or reform, and democrasi have intervened on women’s behalf in a variety of areas—Muslim feminism, political violence, and the abuse of maids, sex workers, and migrants. They have had to modify rights-based strategies in accordance with religious, legal, and economic conditions. Universalizing gender rights articulate situated fields of power that contest or qualify imposed regulatory systems of humanitarian values. It is important to acknowledge that gender justice intervenes in webs of power that can thwart its regulation as well as form new alliances of solidarity. Gender justice and rights cannot be unilaterally imposed, but are transmitted and translated through negotiations with situated religious and citizenship norms. In postcolonial milieus, ideals of gender justice interact with diverse ethical regimes to shape the conditions of possibility for problematizing gender and possible solutions to gender inequality that cannot be predetermined.

Child Domestic Labour in (Accra) Ghana: A Child and Gender Rights Issue?

AbstractChild domestic labour is one of the widespread and exploitative forms of child labour in the world today. However, the ubiquity of child/adolescent (domestic) labour, together with the perception that such work-especially in relation to girls is important training for later life, normalises such work and renders it invisible. Child domestic labour is thus, largely feminised as almost 90 percent of the children are girls. Many domestics work for long hours with no rest or remuneration, and are subjected to verbal, physical and in some instances sexual abuse in the households of their employers. The conditions under which many child domestics live and work, undermines and threatens many basic rights of children. is paper highlights the child and gender-based rights that are actually or potentially denied child domestic workers in order to influence policy development and implementation, as well as advocacy for and on behalf of children.

Political Religion and Politicized Women in Turkey: Hegemonic Republicanism Revisited

Since its establishment in 1923, the Republic of Turkey has assumed a sacred character, owing primarily to the influence of republicanism, the country’s dominant political religion. Processes of modernization, inherent in republicanism, became the main instigators for the improvement of women’s rights in Turkey from the 1920s and 1930s onwards. However, thanks to the subsequent Europeanization process in Turkey, coinciding with the new millennium, modernization has acquired new meanings. The new interpretations of modernization, do not necessarily support the dominant political religion in Turkey. Gender policy is a crucial area to gauge how modernization and republicanism clash and/or converge with each other. This article comprehensively examines how, very recently, the demands of gender rights activists have accentuated differences between republicanism and modernization. We argue that the schism among womens’ groups in the public sphere regarding rights has been important for triggering debate and questioning the ongoing salience of republicanism. The article contributes to literature on political religions by suggesting that the sacralization of the republic, driven by Turkish nation‐building processes in our case, may be hampered by the process of modernization once this process becomes autonomous from sacralization and generates its own momentum.

Introduction: Gender and Empire

The articles in this collection, covering the diverse regions of Afghanistan, Egypt, and Palestine, engage in questions concerning gender and human rights discourses, anticolonial and anti-imperialist resistance, and religious and political fundamentalisms. They also discuss “colonial feminism” and “imperialist feminism” in the context of current wars and occupation in the Middle East, examine the mutually reinforcing yet conflicting relationships between regressive forces in the West and the Middle East, and consider the place of gender analysis in the debate on “empire” and “imperialism.” The articles in this special section, as well as the literature cited in this introduction, warn us that, in spite of the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), the conditions of women's lives are deteriorating and levels and forms of exploitation are on the rise. Women, whether under war and occupation in Iraq, Palestine, or Afghanistan or in the marketplace of NGOs, continue to suffer from the rule of capital in its imperialist expansion. The amount of critical literature on the role of women's NGOs is limited and needs to be expanded, to delve deeper into questions of how women's NGOs fit into the continuation of the production of capital and labor and the furthering of imperialism.

Islam and Family Legal Contests in Malaysia: Hegemonizing Ethnic Over Gender and Civil Rights

The family narrative is a rich site where feminist, ethnic and nationalist politics can be projected and advocated. In the Malaysian case, the discourse of feminism, cultural relativism and liberalism, vis-a-vis family litigation has been used to assert and bargain for specific political interests. The politicization of litigation involving Muslim-non-Muslim family cases has proved to be an effective means of drawing attention to the transformational potential of law in society. On the surface the unfolding of these events, especially when posed as a human rights concern can be reduced to a struggle between the Islamists and the secularists. However, there is a more complex process at work involving multiple contestations around middle-class competition, leadership struggles, and legitimacy of rule, rather than just an assertion of ideologies (particularly religious ideologies). What I will show in this paper is that the family as an economic and social unit, and even as metaphor, has become a terrain where acute power struggles can take place. By looking at the background and outcomes of several landmark inter-religious court cases in Malaysia the paper analyzes the wider socio-political implication of these contestations, especially how the representation of the family and its fragmentation has situated it within a critical interstitial domain lodged between the struggle for group affinity on the one hand and nation-state membership on the other. That this battle of wills is fought at the expense of families largely escapes the attention of those who are in this competition. It would seem that one of the costs of asserting or re-defining the rules of nation and belonging had been the undermining of the sacredness of family and the autonomy of private choice.