MacKinnon's Objection to the Theory and Practice of Human Rights

Only rights that protect men have been extended to women. Important rights that affect women only have been invisible. "Atrocities committed against women are either too human to fit the notion of female or too female to fit the notion of human."(p. 528) What does this mean?

MacKinnon thinks that there are many kinds of invisible human rights violations against women:

(1) domestic violence;

(2) rape (for more on the history, see Susan Brownmiller, Against Our Will);

(3) prostitution;

(4) pornography.

RAPE AS A HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATION

The Bosnia-Herzogovina example: "[T]he rapes are an instrument of war."(531) Ethnic cleansing: Rape as genocide. At the time, there was no precedent for trying sexual atrocities in international law.

Even the U.N. troops committed rape.

Prosecutions in Bosnia-Herzogovina were the result of women from outside the country taking a role in interviewing victims. Human rights develop when a group that has previously been silenced finds a voice.

THE CRUCIAL ANALOGY: The analogy between violence in a civil war and violence in the private sphere: state sovereignty and family sovereignty. ("A man's home is his castle.")

Conclusion: "[V]iolence against women violates human rights."(540)

HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE PRIVATE SPHERE: RAO ON DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

1. The "two spheres" theory makes a sharp distinction between public (outside the family) and private (within the family) spheres.

2. The limitation of rights to the public sphere. (For more, see Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family.)

3. The problem of invisible human rights violations in the private sphere.

Need to reconceptualize the private realm "as a legitimate area of human rights concern at the highest level"(507)

ANDROCENTRICITY: A PROBLEM OF HUMAN RIGHTS THEORY OR OF HUMAN RIGHTS THEORISTS?

1. Rao's argument concerning torture. Here Rao echoes MacKinnon's argument that torture is "too human to fit the notion of female". Is her problem with the AI definition or with its application?

2. Rao's ambivalence about the individualism of human rights theory.

3. Rao's argument against the abstractness of human rights theory, constructed around the "denatured, dehistoricized, disembodied, disembedded, individual self"(p. 516)

The example of Rawls's Original Position behind the 'veil of ignorance'.

4. The Two Spheres: Public and Private. Rao's argument on the status of the family in human rights documents: There is a large category of rights missing from the UNUDHR.

5. Is the problem better understood as a "conceptual contradiction" or "strategic inadequacy"?

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