II: WOMEN AND HEALTH

Gender and Human Rights in a Global, Mobile Era delves into feminist debates surrounding the relationship between gender and human rights through engaging feminist perspectives on the multifaceted issue of human trafficking. Building on analyses of domestic servitude, commercial sex, and labor trafficking by military contractors, and grounded in intersectional feminist cosmopolitanism and feminist theorizing on vulnerability, precarity, and ethical interdependence, Laura Hebert makes several interrelated contributions. As she explores how a feminist gender analysis illuminates the structures and norms enabling trafficking, Hebert simultaneously considers the future of feminist rights advocacy. Emphasizing the sociality of human rights, she encourages feminist scholars and activists to look beyond states as the duty-bearers of human rights and the assumption that human rights are made meaningful mainly through the establishment of legal rights at the national level. She challenges the idea that "feminism" can be reduced to advocacy on behalf of women’s rights. She also encourages critical reflection on how divisions associated with feminist politics have impeded opportunities for the building of feminist solidarities across differences aimed at the realization of the human rights of all. Strongly interdisciplinary, Gender and Human Rights in a Global, Mobile Era will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

Women's Human Rights: Seeking Gender Justice in a Globalising Age explores the emergence of transnational, UN-oriented, feminist advocacy for womens human rights, especially over the past three decades. It identifies the main feminist influences that have shaped the movement liberal, radical, third world and cosmopolitan and exposes how the Western, legalist, state-centric, and liberal biases of mainstream human rights discourse impede the realisation of human rights in womens lives everywhere. The book traces the evolution of the womens human rights movement through an examination of its key issues, debates, and practical interventions in international law and policy arenas. This includes efforts to: Develop global gender equality norms via the UN Womens Convention Frame violence against women as a human rights issue Address gender-based crimes in conflict situations, include women in conflict resolution and post-conflict reconstruction, and challenge new forms of militarism Highlight the gendered human rights dimensions of widening inequalities in a context of neo-liberal globalisation Develop human rights responses to anti-feminist fundamentalist movements with a focus on reproductive and sexual rights Ultimately, Women's Human Rights reaffirms a commitment to critically reinterpreted universal human rights principles and demonstrates the vital role that bottom-up, transnational movements play in making them a reality in women's lives.

This volume counters one-sided dominant discursive representations of gender in human rights and transitional justice, and women’s place in the transformations of neoliberal human rights, and contributes a more balanced examination of how transitional justice and human rights institutions, and political institutions impact the lives and experiences of women. Using a multidisciplinary approach, the contributors to this volume theorize and historicize the place of women’s rights (and gender), situating it within contemporary country-specific political, legal, socio-cultural and global contexts. Chapters examine the progress and challenges facing women (and women’s groups) in transitioning countries: from Peru to Argentina, from Kenya to Sierra Leone, and from Bosnia to Sri Lanka, in a variety of contexts, attending especially to the relationships between local and global forces

Human rights law and the legal protection of women from violence are still fairly new concepts. As a result, substantial discrepancies exist between what is decided in the halls of the United Nations and what women experience on a daily basis in their communities. Human Rights and Gender Violence is an ambitious study that investigates the tensions between global law and local justice. As an observer of UN diplomatic negotiations as well as the workings of grassroots feminist organizations in several countries, Sally Engle Merry offers an insider's perspective on how human rights law holds authorities accountable for the protection of citizens even while reinforcing and expanding state power. Providing legal and anthropological perspectives, Merry contends that human rights law must be framed in local terms to be accepted and effective in altering existing social hierarchies. Gender violence in particular, she argues, is rooted in deep cultural and religious beliefs, so change is often vehemently resisted by the communities perpetrating the acts of aggression. A much-needed exploration of how local cultures appropriate and enact international human rights law, this book will be of enormous value to students of gender studies and anthropology alike.

Confronting Global Gender Justice contains a unique, interdisciplinary collection of essays that address some of the most complex and demanding challenges facing theorists, activists, analysts, and educators engaged in the tasks of defining and researching women’s rights as human rights and fighting to make these rights realities in women’s lives. With thematic sections on Complicating Discourses of Victimhood, Interrogating Practices of Representation, Mobilizing Strategies of Engagement, and Crossing Legal Landscapes, this volume offers both specific case studies and more general theoretical interventions. Contributors examine and assess current understandings of gender justice, and offer new paradigms and strategies for dealing with the complexities of gender and human rights as they arise across local and international contexts. In addition, it offers a particularly timely assessment of the effectiveness and limits of international rights instruments, governmental and nongovernmental organization activities, grassroots and customary practices, and narrative and photographic representations. This book is a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as Gender or Women’s Studies, Human Rights, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology, as well as researchers and professionals working in related areas.

As an instrument which addresses the circumstances which affect women's lives and enjoyment of rights in a diverse world, the CEDAW is slowly but surely making its mark on the development of international and national law. Using national case studies from South Asia, Southern Africa, Australia, Canada and Northern Europe, Women's Human Rights examines the potential and actual added value of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women in comparison and interaction with other equality and anti-discrimination mechanisms. The studies demonstrate how state and non-state actors have invoked, adopted or resisted the CEDAW and related instruments in different legal, political, economic and socio-cultural contexts, and how the various international, regional and national regimes have drawn inspiration and learned from each other.