Gender Equality: Gender and Human Rights: Between Morals and Politics

The phenomenon of globalization, with its attending imaginary representations of one-world, shrinking-world, global village, and global integration, among others, raises issues that are as vast as they are complex. Globalization has forced us to change our way of thinking about gender and justice. Gender equality had hardly begun at the national level when developments called attention to the need to think about the condition of women on a global scale. The issue of women's equality has assumed a place of prominence in the debates on globalization and international law, and in the context of globalization paradigms, has motivated efforts to develop universal norms to guide the conduct of public life as well as private realms.The project to improve the condition of women has assumed multiple forms, spanning from local grassroots organizing to national and international movements. Women's organizations and human rights groups have frequently relied upon legal approaches and rights-based claims. Constitutional citizenship, social citizenship including economic and development rights, and human rights are key concerns that recently have been identified as essential norms of women's global citizenship to be advanced within an international framework. In fact, the realization of the gendered dimensions of global citizenship has served to provide the standard by which to take measure of the progress made toward equality for women. Progress has been made in the development of international legal standards for the benefit of women. Violence against women is now considered a proper subject for international human rights law. International tribunals have established that genocide and crimes against humanity may include sexual violence. Indeed, the issue of human rights for women has moved to center stage of the United Nations in terms of programmatic, administrative, and methodological approaches to international relations. So too has the International Criminal Court included both substantive protections, procedural safeguards, and administrative structures that are gender-sensitive and designed to fully incorporate the needs of victims of and witnesses to gender-based crimes. Feminist legal scholars have developed a body of scholarship for the purpose of demonstrating the emergence of a body of customary international law that requires governments to expand protection for women, particularly as against all forms of gender-based violence. But it is more complicated, for this process is itself a microcosm of the larger debate about globalization, specifically the degree to which old paradigms of colonialism are being recreated in the guise of global integration. The call for women's equality, a summons to which people of good will cannot but be sympathetic, must, nevertheless be received warily, indeed perhaps even skeptically, to be examined for hidden agendas and ulterior motives. Transnational feminism cannot yet be unhinged from nation, where one nation, the United States, so dominates global dynamics. Caution is warranted if the pursuit of objectives that envision women's equality is not as an end unto itself but a means by which to enhance U.S. global interests.