Can Human Rights Accommodate Women's Rights? Towards an Embodied Account of Social Norms, Social Meaning, and Cultural C
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Can Human Rights Accommodate Women’s Rights? Towards an Embodied Account of Social Norms, Social Meaning, and Cultural Change Moira Gatens Philosophy Department, University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. E-mail: [email protected]
The paper is in four parts. The first part offers a brief reminder of the historical context for human rights as women’s rights. The second part notes the relative lack of attention in human rights theory to the roles of social meaning and what has been called the ‘social imaginary’. The third part suggests that the social imaginary — understood in terms of the always present backdrop to meaningful social action — may be seen as a fruitful ‘middle ground’ upon which negotiations may take place between human rights and cultural norms. The fourth part examines a case where women’s entitlements to basic human rights are compromised by men’s claims to cultural or group rights. I conclude by arguing that if human rights are to accommodate women’s rights then women must be recognized as legitimate stakeholders in, and valuable contributors to, the necessarily ongoing re-invention and recreation of social meaning and cultural identity. Contemporary Political Theory (2004) 3, 275–299. doi:10.1057/palgrave.cpt.9300178 Keywords: human rights; women’s human rights; social imaginary; social norms; embodiment; group rights
Introduction The idea that an increasing awareness of cultural differences tends to have a corrosive effect on the credibility of universal laws and absolute moral claims is not new.1 In the late 16th century Michel de Montaigne wrote I reckon that there is no notion, however mad, which can occur to the imagination of men of which we do not meet an example in some public practice or other and which, as a consequence, is not propped up on its foundations by our discursive reason. There are nations where you greet people by turning your backs on them and where you never look at anyone you wish to honour. [y] Our judgement’s power to see things is lulled to sleep once we grow accustomed to anything. The Barbarians are in no wise more of a wonder to us than we are to them, nor with better
Moira Gatens Human Rights and Women’s Rights
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reason — as anyone would admit if, after running through examples from the New World, he concentrated on his own and then with good sense compared them. Human reason is a dye spread more or less equally through all the opinions and all the manners of us humans, which are infinite in matter and infinite in diversity. (Michel de Montaigne, 1991a, 125, 126) In another essay Montaigne (1991b, 654) mocks philosophers’ confidence in the existence of ‘perpetual and immutable’ natural laws. It is striking, he says, ‘that out of laws so infinite in number, they cannot find even one which luck or accidental chance has allowed to be universally accepted by the agreement of all peoples.’ As we know, Montaigne’s ‘scepticism’ gave way to Descartes’ ‘certainty’. The stark contrast between the epistemological modesty of one and the hubris of th
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