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 womens rights as human rights and fighting to make these rights realities in womens 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 Womens Studies, Human Rights, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology, as well as researchers and professionals working in related areas.
Introduction: Women's Lives, Human Rights Part 1: Complicating the
Discourses of Victimhood
1. Women and the Genocidal Rape of Women: The Gender
Dynamics of Gendered War Crimes
2. Human Trafficking: Why is it Such and
Important Women's Issue?
3. Transforming the Representable: Asian Women in
Anti-Trafficking Discourse
4. Sin, Salvation, or Starvation? The Problematic
Role of Religious Morality in U.S. Anti-Sex Trafficking Policy Part 2:
Interrogating Practices of Representation
5. How Not to Give Rape Political
Significance
6. Human Trafficking: A Photographic Essay
7. Marjorie Agosķn's
Poetics of Memory: Human Rights, Feminism, and Literary Forms
8. Digital
Storytelling for Gender Justice: Exploring the Challenges of Participation
and the Limits of Polyvocality Part 3: Strategies of Engagement
9. 'Sweet
Electrical Greetings': Women, HIV, and the Evolution of an Intervention
Project in Papua New Guinea
10. Economic Empowerment of Women as a Global
Project: Economic Rights in the Neo-Liberal Era
11. Algerian Women in
Movement: Three Waves of Feminist Activism
12. Using Law and Education to
Make Human Rights Real in Women's Real Lives Part 4: Crossing Legal
Landscapes
13. Seduced by Information, Contaminated by Power: Women's Rights
as a Global Panopticon
14. Human Rights of Women and Girls with Disabilities
in Developing Countries
15. Gender and Customary Mechanisms of Justice in
Uganda
16. Policing Bodies and Borders: Women, Prostitution, and the
Differential Regulation of U.S. Immigration Policy
17. The
Institutionalization of Domestic Violence Against Women in the United States
Part 5: Confronting Global Gender Justice
18. Configuring Feminisms,
Transforming Paradigms: Reflections from Kum-Kum Bhavnani, from an Interview
with Kum-Kum Bhavnani
Debra Bergoffen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University. Her book The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (1997), and her most recent articles, including "Exploiting the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body," evidence her ongoing concern with feminist theory, womens rights and human rights.
Paula Ruth Gilbert is Professor of French, Canadian, and Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. Her research covers: nineteenth-century French Studies; Quebec Studies; violence and gender and violent women; narrative, gender, and human rights. Her most recent book is Violence and the Female Imagination (2006).
Tamara Harvey is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. She is author of Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700 (2008), and co-editor with Greg OBrien of George Washingtons South (2003). Her research focuses on women and early America, with an emphasis on hemispheric studies.
Connie L. McNeely received the Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University and is currently on the faculty of the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Her books have included Constructing the Nation-State (1995) and the edited volume Public Rights, Public Rules (1998). Her current research and most recent publications address various aspects of culture, politics, social theory, and inequality.
