Bronwyn Winter

The UN Approach to Harmful Traditional Practices

Within the international human rights community, there is a growing concern with ‘harmful traditional practices’ (HTPs)1 which violate the human rights of women. The concept has been developed within the United Nations as a way of naming and combating some of the most blatant forms of male domination of women. This has been a response to concerted lobbying by feminist NGOs, of both the UN and the League of Nations before it, to get ‘culturally’ condoned forms of violence against women included within the UN human rights agenda. During the 1980s, and particularly in the 1990s, HTPs have become a visible part of UN platforms and actions on women’s human rights, culminating in 1995 with a comprehensive UN Fact Sheet devoted to this issue, Harmful Traditional Practices Affecting the Health of Women and Children (United Nations 1995). Laudable though this UN initiative is, it has some disquieting implications. The UN literature on HTPs, and in particular the 1995 Fact Sheet, is concerned for the most part only with practices in non-western societies. The single exception to this focus is the category of ‘violence against women’, characterized in the Fact Sheet as ‘other forms of non-traditional practices, such as rape and domestic violence’, and acknowledged to be ‘a global phenomenon’ (United Nations 1995: 22–3, 44). What concerns us about this UN focus on non-western societies is that it gives the impression that the metropolitan centres of the West contain no ‘traditions’ or ‘culture’ harmful to women, and that the violence which does exist there is idiosyncratic and individualized rather than culturally condoned. The terminology, ‘West’ and ‘non-western’, is not unproblematic, but we use

Who Counts (or Doesn’t Count) What as Feminist Theory?: An Exercise in Dictionary Use

I have a small space to answer a big question. Not because the answer to the question ‘What counts as feminist theory?’ is not simple and selfevident, for I believe it is, but because of the woolliness surrounding the term ‘feminism’ in specialist circles, and the readiness to define it in extremely limited ways in non-specialist circles. The effects of this are so devastating for the state of feminist theoretical debate that I consider their discussion to be of some urgency. I will thus leave aside my own model for ‘feminist theory’ to address the question that heads this article.1 Let us deal with the question of ‘theory’ first. Looking up this term in my friendly dictionary,2 I found a collection of six definitions from which the following can be gleaned:

Preemptive fridge magnets and other weapons of masculinist destruction : The rhetoric and reality of safeguarding Australia

A “national security” mind-set has increasingly informed the policies and practices of the Australian government led by Prime Minister John Howard, who has been in power since 1996. The lead-up to the 2000 Olympic games; the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States; the bombing of a nightclub in Bali in October 2002, in which Australian tourists were killed; and a hijack attempt on a Qantas jet in May 2003 have all been used as justifications for the Howard government to enhance security measures. In this article I will examine some of the government’s agenda of “safeguarding Australia,” particularly although not solely as it specifically targets women. In doing so, I will argue that policies and practices of the government that affect women’s rights and their access to services are not simply collateral damage as the government shifts its focus from spending on education, health, infrastructure, and welfare to funding the military and boosting corporate capitalism. Diminished spending on public services and welfare and attacks on advocacy groups for the poor and minorities, accompanied by legislation that favors corporate private enterprise, have been a hallmark of neoliberal governments in the West. The current raft of measures both construct and target women in quite particular ways that are directly related to the Howard government’s Hobbesian autocratic role as the self-proclaimed safeguarder of Australia. The reality of these measures is more complex than the simple withdrawal of support for services or advocacy groups. In fact, the gov-

(Mis)representations: What French feminism isn't

Abstract The recognition of a discipline within the academy necessitates some conformity to pre-established parameters and priorities, such as accepted research methods and the dictates of academic fashion. Hence the paradoxical position of womens studies: it is increasingly at risk of losing touch with the movement to which it owes its existence, and often ends up reinforcing assumptions it purportedly set out to challenge. A striking example of this double problem, in western English-speaking countries, is the academic representation of “French feminism” as synonymous with postmodernism and as almost entirely limited to the work of a few academics whose connection with feminism is at best highly questionable. This is both reductionist and dangerous, as it masks both the diversity of feminist debate and practice in France and the problems of manipulation, disinformation and lack of access to a public forum which plague both French feminists and some areas of English-speaking feminist scholarship.

Global Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage

This book provides a comparative, neo-institutionalist approach to the different factors impacting state adoption of—or refusal to adopt—same-sex marriage laws. The now twenty-one countries where lesbians and gay men can legally marry include recent or longstanding democracies, republics and parliamentary monarchies, and unitary and federal states. They all reflect different positions with respect to religion and the cultural foundations of the nation. Countries opposed to such legalization, and those having taken measures in recent years to legally reinforce the heterosexual fundaments of marriage, present a similar diversity. This diversity, in a globalized context where the idea of same-sex marriage has become integral to claims for LGBTI equality and indeed LGBTI human rights, gives rise to the following question: which factors contribute to institutionalizing same-sex marriage? The analytical framework used for exploring these factors in this book is neo-institutionalism. Through three neo-institutionalist lenses—historical, sociological and discursive—contributors investigate two aspects of the processes of adoption or opposition of equal recognition of same-sex partnerships. Firstly, they reveal how claims by LGBTIQ movements are being framed politically and brought to parliamentary politics. Secondly, they explore the ways in which same-sex marriage becomes institutionalized (or resisted) through legal and societal norms and practices. Although it adopts neo-institutionalism as its main theoretical framework, the book incorporates a broad range of perspectives, including scholarship on social movements, LGBTI rights, heterosexuality and social norms, and gender and politics. (Publishers abstract)

Walking the Middle of the Peace Road? The Emergence of JCall in France

On 3 May 2010, a ‘Call to reason’ (Appel à la raison) was presented to the European Parliament in Brussels by a number of prominent figures from European Jewish political and intellectual classes, launching JCall, which is supposedly the European version of the US J Street. JCall explicitly positions itself as pro-Israel on one hand but against the Israeli states occupation and increased settlement of Palestine, including East Jerusalem, on the other hand. The ‘reason’ it calls for is thus a negotiated two-state settlement to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and the organisation urges EU governments to apply pressure on both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to this end. This article looks at JCall within the French context, first in distinction to J Street in the USA, with which JCall shares a political position but not organisational links, and second in relation to the broader French political debate about Jewishness, Muslimness and the Middle East. Criticised by the right for its supposed disloyalty to Israel and even ‘anti-Semitism’, and by the left for its non-support of boycott, divestment and sanctions and its ongoing support of the Israeli state, JCall at first appears as somewhat middle-of-the-road in the French context. It also, from this writers point of view, regrettably lacks a strong female presence or gendered perspective. It has, however, emerged as a serious political voice in the debate over the Middle East and could be less of a lightweight in the French political battles over Israel and Palestine than it may have first appeared.

Guns, Money and Justice

In late 2005, Suzette Nicolas, then known publicly only as ‘Nicole’, alleged that on 1 November of that year she had been gang-raped by US Marines in Olongapo City in the Subic Bay area on the island of Luzon, site of one of two former large US military bases in the Philippines. Thus began what was to become an internationally notorious rape case, involving the US and Philippine governments, the US military, the Philippine judiciary and a broad feminist-led activist coalition. The case, played out against the backdrop of the US states Asian front in the ‘War on Terror’, has become inextricably linked with the ongoing Philippine campaign against the US–Philippines Visiting Forces Agreement. This article looks at the case, its background, its symbolism and the current political debate on the ongoing connections between militarism, globalization, US imperialism and violence against women in the Philippines.

Preserving the Social Fabric: Debating Family, Equality and Polity in the UK, the Republic of Ireland and Australia

This chapter compares the UK, Ireland and Australia, which are linked by a long colonial history, and which, notwithstanding their differences, have comparable political and legal systems, and where the family and Christianity are core national values. Yet the process of institutionalization of same-sex marriage has been markedly different. In the UK, a common-law parliamentary monarchy without a formal constitution, same-sex marriage was legalized by a conservative-majority parliament in 2013. In Ireland, a Catholic-majority republic, heterosexual marriage was encoded in the Constitution, necessitating a referendum in 2015 to legalize same-sex marriage. By contrast, in Australia marriage is not a constitutional matter, but the Marriage Amendment Act (2004) explicitly requires that marriage be between a man and a woman. At the time of writing, same-sex marriage remains illegal there.

“Tampering with Society’s DNA” or “Making Society Stronger”: A Comparative Perspective on Family, Religion and Gay Rights in the Construction of the Nation

The family is encoded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a fundamental value and basis of social, economic and cultural organization of modern societies. In contemporary debates over same-sex marriage and “rainbow families” within capitalist democracies, LGBTI rights groups, states and religious groups all battle over how “family” should be defined and inscribed within the national value system. Drawing on both feminist critiques of the family and literature on homonormativity, homonationalism and homoprotectionism, this chapter considers the imbrication of debates over homosexuality and gay rights with debates over the meaning of the nation and the still profoundly gendered family as its bedrock. The chapter is comparative, drawing on examples from several countries and regions.

Women’s human rights and Tunisian upheavals: is ‘democracy’ enough?

ABSTRACTThe regimes that came to power (in some cases ephemerally) in the wake of the so-called ‘Arab spring’ claimed democratic legitimacy as a primary means of credentialling their political agenda in international and even local eyes. Yet, how legitimate some of these new regimes have been is open to question. So-called ‘moderate’ Islamist movements have been criticised as using democratic processes to introduce new forms of theocratic authoritarianism and/or for not paying sufficient attention to strengthening and resourcing the political, legal and civic institutions, which make democracy effective. Moreover, women’s rights have been under fire in both overt and covert ways. Through a study of Tunisia, touted as one of the success stories – indeed the only one for the moment – of the ‘Arab spring’, this article investigates the question of ‘democratic legitimacy’ from a feminist perspective.