Sharmila Lodhia

New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights: AN INTRODUCTION

On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, feminists are at a critical juncture to re-envision and re-engage in a politics of human rights that underscores the creative displays of grassroots resistance by women globally and affirms transnational feminist solidarity. In highlighting feminisms and human rights that are antiracist and social justice oriented, this issue highlights new research that reveals the transformative potential of a feminist human rights praxis that embraces collective justice. In this introduction, we discuss dominant critiques of human rights frameworks and explore critical human rights activism ‘from below’ in order to establish the context for this special issue on new directions in feminism and human rights.

“Stop Importing Weapons of Family Destruction!” Cyberdiscourses, Patriarchal Anxieties, and the Men’s Backlash Movement in India

A critical, albeit understudied, dimension of the backlash against women’s anti-violence advocacy is the rise of Indian men’s rights organizations formed to lobby for changes to, and in some cases, the complete abolition of vital legal protections for women. Utilizing cyber forums, public protests, and print media, these groups disseminate narratives of women wreaking destruction on the Indian family through their alleged misuse of “gender-biased” laws. These activities are significant because they operate as transnational sites of meaning making about the realities of violence against women in India and because they conspire in a distortion of reality that jeopardizes ongoing advocacy efforts.

Constructing an Imperfect Citizen-Subject: Globalization, National “Security,” and Violence Against South Asian Women

The landscape of antiviolence advocacy for South Asian women living in the United States has been altered in several significant ways. My research on legal advocacy for South Asian women suggests that distinct patterns of abuse against immigrant women are not easily addressed within existing legal paradigms of domestic violence because mainstream advocacy models continue to imagine as their primary subject women who do not experience interlocking forms of oppression. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, I argue that South Asian women’s incomplete access to antiviolence laws in the United States provides further evidence of the salience of nation-state boundaries, particularly in the lives of gendered subjects whose enjoyment of citizenship, I argue, remains imperfect. In this essay I analyze the enduring link between women’s access to legal protections against domestic violence and their legal status in the United States. What endures, I believe, are the ways in which raced and gendered notions of citizenship continue to erode the meaningfulness of legal protections for battered immigrant women. What has evolved, however, are the ways in which transnational shifts have reconfigured the landscape in which antiviolence laws are being imagined and enforced within the modern nation-state. My study of the particular constraints in antiviolence advocacy for South Asian women draws on the following theoretical ideas regarding the reconfiguration of citizenship and the reterritorialization of power in a transnational age.