Rapoport Center Investigates Afro-Colombian Territorial Rights

Latin American Studie

Legislating Special Rights

Is it possible to pursue a queer agenda in promoting and defending gay rights ordinances? My answer is yes, or at least that we need to try to do it. I propose that we pursue a queer agenda by arguing for special rights, not equal rights. Not only does the special rights argument fit with the queer agenda; it also provides our best hope for confronting gay rights opponents. I\u27ll put forth my argument in the following way. First, I\u27ll talk about what a queer sensibility is, and discuss how a call for special rights fits within that sensibility. Second, I\u27ll look at the rhetoric that gay rights opponents use when they argue against ordinances, initiatives and national laws protecting gay rights. As a part of this discussion, I will explore what they mean when they use the term special rights. Third, I\u27ll look at how proponents of gay rights talk about special rights and study how, in responding to gay rights opponents, they often miss the boat. Finally, I\u27ll talk about what it would be like to respond with a special rights argument

Judging Sex in War

Rape is often said to constitute a fate worse than death. It has long been deployed as an instrument of war and outlawed by international humanitarian law as a serious-sometimes even capital-crime. While disagreement exists over the meaning of rape and the proof that should be required to convict an individual of the crime, today the view that rape is harmful to women enjoys wide concurrence. Advocates for greater legal protection against rape often argue that rape brings shame upon raped women as well as upon their communities. Shame thus adds to rape\u27s power as a war weapon. Sexual violence has not, however, been deployed as an instrument in every war. In this sense it is neither universal nor inevitable, as political scientist Elisabeth Jean Wood has recently demonstrated. If wartime rape is not inevitable, I would argue that neither is the shame often seen to accompany it. In this Review, I use For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway\u27s novel of the Spanish Civil War, and other narratives that consider sexual violence in war to demonstrate that women\u27s roles in war extend far beyond that of victim. By showing how different characters and agents in the stories offer possibilities for reimagining the harm of rape, I encourage feminists and humanitarians to question the assumption that women who have been raped in wartime are destroyed. By seeing rape as a fate worse than death, at least in part because of the harm of shame they assume it brings, feminists and humanitarians often exacerbate the very shame they hope to relieve. Particularly when made hypervisible in the context of mass rape, wartime rape risks becoming the exclusive identifying element for women who are members of the group primarily subjected to it

Anthropology, Human Rights, and Legal Knowledge: Culture in the Iron Cage

In this article, I draw on ethnography in the particular zone of engagement between anthropologists, on the one hand, and human rights lawyers who are skeptical of the human rights regime, on the other hand. I argue that many of the problems anthropologists encounter with the appropriation and marginalization of anthropology\u27s analytical tools can be understood in terms of the legal character of human rights. In particular, discursive engagement between anthropology and human rights is animated by the pervasive instrumentalism of legal knowledge. I contend that both anthropologists who seek to describe the culture of human rights and lawyers who critically engage the human rights regime share a common problem—that of the “iron cage” of legal instrumentalism. I conclude that an ethnographic method reconfigured as a matter of what I term circling back—as opposed to cultural description—offers a respite from the hegemony of legal instrumentalism

Refining Research Representations through Fiction, Journalism, and Creative Non-Fiction Writing Ideas

Research accounts have been critiqued as boring and unreasonably difficult to read when the actual research process is deeply fascinating and should be accessible to many. Academic researchers should draw on the creative writing disciplines (e.g., fiction, creative nonfiction, journalism) in order to improve the quality of written research accounts, and there are numerous style guides that give guidance on how to improve the quality of writing. An understanding of different academic disciplines’ style expectations seems to be needed in order to Publish and Persevere, yet literary understandings of writing will allow us to enliven writing in engaging ways. It is important to acknowledge that requiring strict adherence to style guides may be a form of intersectional oppression of race, class, and region that is seldom reflected upon. In this article, the authors review four style guides from the areas of journalism and creative writing, including the classics guides The Elements of Style (Strunk & White, 1959) and On Writing Well (Zinsser, 2006), as well as Thrice Told Tales: Three Mice Full of Writing Advice (Lewis, 2013), a contemporary guide with eye catching graphics, and The Writing Life (1989), literary author Annie Dillard’s reflective thoughts on writing