First of all, there are terminology issues underlying the debate that are worth looking at more closely before going any further. The authors who mention the French Revolution and the Enlightenment as the focal point of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) do not define ''equality'' in a satisfactory manner (Coomaraswamy, 2001) (Gatens, 2004). Whereas ''gender equality'' has sometimes been intepreted as the idea that women should become more like men, generating common stereotypes of feminists as women with shaved heads and hairy legs, I would argue that even the term ''mankind'' implies that women are inferior to men. However, although a strict dichotomy between men and women does not exist in certain cultures – for example, the Nepali who see the flesh as female and the bones as male (NEW368, Lec. 03) - it remains dangerous to deny such differences because it has been proved that men and women do have different fundamental characteristics. To further complicate the matter, not all females identify with the label ''women'' as it is primarily understood, and different cultures do not associate the same understanding with the concept of womanhood; it is thus impossible to use only one category to describe all women.
The word ''rights'' is another polemic term, and the relation between rights, their enforcement and their associated responsibilities is blurred. As phrased in the context of the universalism versus cultural relativism (CR) debate, ''it is this dynamic relation between an abstract right and its implementation in a particular context that presents a challenge to those who conceive of the relation between human rights and particular norms as a 'clash' or 'contradiction''' (Gatens, 2004 ). I think a right per se is a policy rather than a law; the positive side of that is it is possible to adapt laws to the local context. However, the right is then subject to more interpretation, which can be, in many cases, detrimental to women. Moreover, from my experience, the coloquialisation of the term ''right'' engenders certain rhetorical clashes which I find easier to position towards after reading the articles. For example, in discussion arising in the context of meetings for an Anti-Oppression Committee, I realized that a number of white men, without necessarily feeling historically entitled to their privilege, were complaining about being discriminated against because of hiring procedures in the public sector aiming at attaining a gender balance; they were clinging at the human rights (HR) framework to bulkward against their loss of privilege, which indicates a different notion of the term ''right'' depending on one's position in the social hierarchy.
Moreover, I believe there are some false underlying assumptions in the universalism versus CR debate. First, feminism and cultural relativism are seen as antagonists (Coomaraswamy, 2001). I disagree with this idea because there are so many types of feminists; the movement has a complex history filled with internal contradictions and proponents adhere to certain parts while criticizing other. Also, being a feminist is only one part of somebody's identity, and someone may have a more radical, liberal or global approach for advocating gender equality. HR are a mainstream tool of analysis and are not necessarily the basis of argumentation for all feminists. Second, one can not separate women's rights from human rights, because women are humans, but also because ''women'' are not isolated, as we saw in class (NEW368, Lec. 09) in Sembene Ousmane's movie Moolade, the structures oppressing them are part of a greater system of social interactions. One ought to keep the intersectionality of such transient but significant ''identities' as' race, class, gender, religion, ethnicity, in looking at which women are in fact denied otherwise ''universal'' HR and why.
One last point before I start looking at the actual debate: I think there are problems in adopting either of the two extremes in this debate. On one hand, CR can be as arrogant as universalism, for its proponents seem to be telling to a ''morally inferior'' legislative system that they are not advanced enough to be judged with the same criterion as them. Also, cultures are dynamic and contested entities, and thousands of years of intercultural interaction, be it through trade, colonialism or other, make it impossible to isolate a culture that exist on its own. As discussed in previous readings, it is not infrequent to see powerful members of society selecting and manipulating aspects of both their own and foreign cultures to better suit their interests. On the other hand, I disagree with the claim that CR is the easy way out of the debate (Nagengast, 1997). This exercise made me see through an approach to development – the rights-based approach - that I used to adhere to in the past. As an enthusiast of Paulo Freire's teachings of political rights, I was thrilled to see that such a paradigm allowed for more public mobilization and more pressure for accountability by development organizations onto governments, corporations and others. Now, I realize that the apparently fundamental and immutable character of HR makes it easy to justify development activities, and that the HR framework itself is not questionned as a unifying set of standards and common language.
What I now turn to examine is the legitimacy of HR as a universally appropriate paradigm. The fact that the UDHR has originated from the theory of the social contract is interesting in itself, because when it was first written by John Locke, the exit from the state of nature was justified to preserve one's property (property meaning the product of one's labor). No author pointed out the difficulties in interpretation emerging from the fact that, in some cultures, women are considered to be private property and that John Locke himself reserved a Right to Rebellion if the leaders of the state emerging from the social contract were not adequately preserving property (Locke, 1982). Furthermore, no author indicates that the very idea of HR as a tool for international relations is indeed an official and bourgeois concept that values stability and the rule of law without addressing structural discriminations. Consequently, can the HR framework actually respect abused Third World women, considering that these ''victims'' can not even participate to the debate sometimes because it occurs in the public space (Gatens, 2004)? I think that is unfair since they should be consulted since it is their plight that is at stake. In addition, one has to ask whose priority HR are? Should the entitlement to social values such as Confucianism, a moral privileging family over individuals, be relegated to the second plan (Coomaraswamy, 2001), or should ''the right to development in which peoples have the right to choose the kind, direction, and rate of development, in the view of some, takes precendence over the liberal emphasis on the rights of individuals'' (Nagengast, 1997)? After looking at such legitimacy question, I feel more critical on the politics of rescue, and I realize that I as a Western feminist may not always be welcomed as an Ally by other women who might understand my empathy as the imposition of my own value system upon theirs.
Another important point of disagreement in the universalism versus CR debate relates to the limits for enforcement the international human rights (IHR) legislation. One big question is: Should the United Nations (UN) continue to operate according to their non-interference principle or should they breach national sovereignty in order for IHR to prevail everywhere? I think it is hypocritical for a proponent of universal HR to believe the UN should become an intransigent world police and forcively enforce HR legislation on ''criminals'', because the UN as it presently constituted is non-democratic and faces serious issues of representation of the minorities or groups that usually suffer HR abuses. Along the same line of thought, IHR have been designed to deal with states, not individuals, acknowledging that states can be predatory and commit abuses of civil and political rights (Nagengast, 1997). However, a government has its own agenda (for example, staying in office by pleasing the – principally male – electorate) and hence it can be as discriminatory towards women by its inaction in reforming systems that marginalizes women. In that situation where the government is unsupportive of Third-World women's rights, adopting a human-rights perspective and choosing no to comply with tradition or social norms can result in stigma, rejection and alienation leading to further marginalization and represents a huge sacrifice when there are no other alternatives possible. I agree with Elster when she stresses the importance of the emotional aspect in discussing women's HR (Gatens, 2004); what's the purpose of having institutionalized women's HR if there are no structure to support them? What safety net do victims of domestic violence have if there are no women shelters?
In addition, it is essential to look at the phenomenon of resistance to universalism by cultural relativists. It has been argued that ''women and girls are visible and vulnerable embodiments of practices that designate them as the repositories and guardians of cultural meanings that ironically also imply second-class status'' (Nagengast, 1997). From that perspective, dominant groups appear to be the ones who have the most to lose when current gender norms are challenged, and they may try to justify the institutionalized violations of women's HR by saying it is for their protection. I reject this argument. I have been trained, as a women traveler and karateka, to believe that men try to control women's sexuality because they can not control their own instincts towards the women's body, which they picture as beautiful but passive. I also have learned in Wendo that women are thus socialized to beg, scream or freeze when their human rights are violated, because showing attitude will result in them being called a 'bitch'. I think it is a myth that women can not be empowered to defend themselves.
Through time and by taking this class I was brought to try harder to become more self-reflective and conscious of the ways in which I can be culturally imperialist, a behavior that seem to be taken by some authors and neglected by others. For instance, Howland's principled approach suggest that consent to UN HR treaties automatically implies that states are responsible for changing their national laws (C., 2001). Partington adopts the same universalist point of view, which implies that a women either does what is expected of her or she exits her culture. Gatens goes on to explain that it is likely that one will want to reject only certain parts of one's culture and focus on reforming these. (Gatens, 2004). My critic of these arguments is that, to me, a universal standpoint is very Eurocentric because it seems to take for granted the idea that anybody would want to ''convert'' or ''assimiliate'' to Western culture if they had the chance. Gunning, by point out at the limitations of the legal approach, suggests a World-traveller approach in which one is advised to first know oneself to understand one's own standpoint before making judgements about harmful traditional practices (HTP) elsewhere (Coomaraswamy, 2001). This advice would have been useful to me while in Chad, where I had an argument with my guy friends since they said the way in which a girl dressed excited men, which resulted in the spread of HIV/AIDS and unwanted pregnancies. They were saying it was the woman's fault if she was raped, while I was saying that a women has to be free from rape and free to maintain physical integrity. Now I realize I was being imperialist by trying to impose my IHR framework onto cultural practices with which I was not so familiar to since I did not know much about youth gender relations at that time. However, the cultural imperialist accusation is not always well-founded. For example, I disagree with the idea that ''activists misunderstand, undervalue, or disparage cultural and traditional practices that reinforce community solidarity at the expense of individual liberty'' (Nagengast, 1997), because, although Westerners often admire ''communitary'' values, they would be wrong to understand the community as a homogeneous set; it is in fact an aggregate of political actors with their own agendas who were sometimes united in the first place principally because of a common geographic location. In that case, criticism of the ''community'' is not cultural imperialism, but political analysis.
It would be dishonest to deny the power issues existing in the CR position. An absolute CR stance based in a post-modernist vision risks seeing the universe as a chaotic system in which invalid claims can be accepted because no universal Truth is said to exist. This is very dangerous, since it can suggest that all viewpoints, be them racist, sexist, heterosexist or fundamentalist, can be justified. Hence, I would argue for partial universalism, which also brings in the problem of which HR have priority over others. In fact, there seem to be a hierarchy of rights in the UDHR; often cultural relativists contest only certain rights as being human rights and they may question the interpretation that attaches to certain human rights (Coomaraswamy, 2001). Also, different types of rights are interpreted differently; economic, social and cultural rights are seen as more relative or subjective than civil and political rights (Nagengast, 1997). A potential solution to that problem is phrased by Sullivan, when she suggests balancing various rights by horizontalizing them and putting them into perspective rather than assume all rights are independent from one another (Coomaraswamy, 2001). This last argument struck me in its usefulness to analyse HTP, because it stresses the importance of context in judging them. I am nevertheless slightly ill-at-ease with the notion of ''universalism''; it has always been a very difficult philosophical challenge to find something that is common to all humankind, a task that may even be impossible since even themes explored in all major religions (i.e. The Golden Rule – Treat others as you want to be treated) are never interpreted literally and out-of-time by anyone.
All in all, there are several aspects of the universalism versus cultural relativism debate that I find lying on rather unstable grounds. Although both extremes present significant intellectual problems, it is still difficult to position oneself in the middle since it implies one has to make choices as to what practices are acceptable and which are not. Hopefully, certain authors encourage self-reflexivity and encourage their readers to track back how their stance is informed by their position. By looking at part of twentieth-century history, one realizes that most advances in women's human rights have occurred after times of serious conflict, turmoil or disturbance such as World War II. My last question is thus: can or should a legal framework impede these contradictory forces of change, would be more effective to let change happen from within? Who knows...
Bibliography
Coomaraswamy, Radhika (2001). ''Different but Free : Cultural Relativism and Women's Rights as Human Rights'', in Religious Fundamentalisms and the Human Rights of Women, ed. Howland.
Gatens, Moira (2004). ''Can Human Rights Accomodate Women's Rights? Towards an Embodied Account of Social Norms, Social Meaning and Cultural Change'', Comtemporary Political Theory, Vol. 3, pp. 275-299.
Locke, John (1982). ''Second Treatise of Government'', ed. by H. Davidson, Arlingon Heights, 3rd ed.,. 150 p.
Manicom, Linzi. NEW368 : Gender and Cultural Difference in Transnational Perspectives. Lectures 03 (24/01/06) and 09 (14/03/06)
Nagengast, Carole (1997). ''Women, Minorities, and Indigenous Peoples: Universalism and Cultural Relativity'', Journal of Anthropological Research, Vol 53 (3).
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