Engendering Human Rights

Engendering Human Rights brings together distinguished scholars and feminist activists in a collection of essays on human rights in Africa. Contributors explore the formulating, monitoring, reporting, and implementation of human rights in Africa and the African Diaspora. The individual chapters examine how human rights frameworks and practices differ in various political, economic, social, cultural, racial and gendered contexts througout Africa.

Engendering Human Rights explores the obstacles African women must overcome to obtain and protect their human rights. The essays in this important volume represent a varied group of distinguished scholars, activists, and practitioners, and incorporate gendered perspectives on the formulating, monitoring, reporting, and implementation of human rights in Africa and the African Diaspora in an age of globalization. Contributors tackle issues ranging from reproductive health and rights, immigration, religion, and spousal abuse to cultural imperatives, legal and constitutional reforms, and the arts. Engendering Human Rights is an excellent resource for scholars in human rights, public health, literature, gender/women's studies, cultural studies, and African studies.

Exploring why some states have been slower to incorporate the international diffusion of women's human rights norms domestically than other human rights norms, this book looks at the theoretical and practical implications and a variety of case studies.

Cultured Violence explores contemporary South African culture as a test case for the achievement of democracy by constitutional means in the wake of prolonged and violent cultural conflict. Drawing on and juxtaposing narratives of profoundly different kinds—the fiction of J. M. Coetzee, public testimony form the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, documents from former Deputy President Jacob Zuma's rape trial, and personal interviews among them—in order to illuminate different cultural senses of the “state of the nation” and retrieve otherwise elusive descriptions of South African subjects taken from accounts of their individual lives.

Publisher description

Engendering Transnational Transgressions reclaims the transgressive side of feminist history, challenging hegemonic norms and the power of patriarchies. Through the lenses of intersectionality, gender analysis, and transnational feminist theory, it addresses the political in public and intimate spaces. The book begins by highlighting the transgressive nature of feminist historiography. It then divides into two parts—Part I, Intimate Transgressions: Marriage and Sexuality, examines marriage and divorce as viewed through a transnational lens, and Part II, Global Transgressions: Networking for Justice and Peace, considers political and social violence as well as struggles for relief, redemption, and change by transnational networks of women. Chapters are archivally grounded and take a critical approach that underscores the local in the global and the significance of intersectional factors within the intimate. They bring into conversation literatures too often separated: history of feminisms and anti-war, anti-imperial/anti-fascist, and related movements, on the one hand, and studies of gender crossings, marriage reconstitution, and affect and subjectivities, on the other. In so doing, the book encourages the reader to rethink standard interpretations of rights, equality, and recognition. This is the ideal volume for students and scholars of Women’s and Gender History and Women’s and Gender Studies, as well as International, Transnational, and Global History, History of Social Movements, and related specialized topics.

The first book to engage in a comprehensive examination of the human right to water in theory and in practice.

The Sustainable Development Goals were launched in 2015 with grand ambitions for ending poverty, protecting the planet, and ensuring prosperity for all, with ‘no one left behind’. However, these goals will be impossible to achieve without addressing inequity, inequality, marginalisation, and exclusion related to gender, and to other intersecting social hierarchies linked to deeply emotional, culturally bound norms and judgements of worth. This book asks readers to consider issues of knowledge, power, and effectiveness, emphasising the limits of taking a categorical approach to gender and other social hierarchies, and the importance of process in what is known about generating transformative social change. Engendering Transformative Thinking and Practice in International Development draws on a range of real world examples which demonstrate both the limitations of the frameworks currently in use, and the very real possibilities for change when the intersecting social hierarchies that sustain and create inequity and inequality are challenged. This book brings together theoretical perspectives on social change, gender, intersectionality, and forms of knowledge, concluding with a set of proposals for revitalising a change agenda that recognises and engages with intersectionality and practical wisdom. Perfect for students and scholars of social change, gender, and development, this book will also be useful for practitioners looking for new ideas to help to generate social change.