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"?