Visions and Revisions: Women and the Power to Change

This final panel, summing up and looking ahead at the end of the First NWSA Convention, borrowed part of its title from the collection of essays on feminism and education Women and the Power to Change [1975]. Contributors to that volume, and other writer-organizers joining them here, were asked to reflect on their work of the early \u2770s and to offer their analyses—and their visions—for the \u2780s

The Virtual Sociality of Rights: The Case of Women\u27s Rights are Human Rights

This essay traces the relationship between activists and academics involved in the campaign for women\u27s rights as human rights as a case study of the relationship between different classes of what I call knowledge professionals self-consciously acting in a transnational domain. The puzzle that animates this essay is the following: how was it that at the very moment at which a critique of rights and a reimagination of rights as rights talk proved to be such fertile ground for academic scholarship did the same rights prove to be an equally fertile ground for activist networking and lobbying activities? The paper answers this question with respect to the work of self-reflexivity in creating a virtual sociality of rights

Women’s rights as human rights: 25 years on

“Women’s Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-Vision of Human Rights,” by Charlotte Bunch (published in Human Rights Quarterly in 1990), is considered a classic text in the field of women’s human rights. In it, Bunch set out her arguments about the importance of connecting women’s rights to human rights in theory and practice and what prevented recognition of women’s rights as human rights. This chapter revisits Bunch’s 1990 article to explore continuity and change in how gender and women’s human rights are viewed 25 years after the UN World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna 1993) declared that “the human rights of women … are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights’. The chapter is organized around the responses given by Bunch to a series of questions about the continued relevance of the ideas developed in ‘Women’s Rights as Human Rights” regarding, for example, the current status of human rights as a global ethical and political vision compared to 1990; the nature of the excuses given for inaction on the human rights of women, then and now; and the extent to which the international human rights community has fulfilled its promise in 1993 to prioritize the human rights of women, especially by addressing gender-based violence.Peer reviewed2020-05-2

Feminism and Human Rights: The Legacy of Vienna

La Conférence mondiale des Nations Unies sur les droits humains tenue à Vienne en 1993 a reconnu mondialement que «les droits des femmes sont des droits humains». Cette affirmation des droits universels des femmes et en particulier de l’identification de la violence faite aux femmes ont été un point crucial sur l’agenda de la Déclaration des droits humains et du programme d’action à Vienne. On a aussi initié un processus d’intégration des femmes dans une perspective genrée dans une pratique des droits humains qui est en cours. Cet article examine les organismes de femmes depuis la conférence de Vienne et les gains mis en place pour normaliser les droits humains en général et surtout pour contrer la violence sexuelle