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kat_lairI'm doing seminar prep on Human Rights, and happen across this quote I used in an essay many years ago.
Over the last few days I have seen and read many posts about male privilege, gender inequalities and sexual violence against women - some academic, some deeply personal. And what is common to all of them is the utter, horrible, normality of it. These things do not happen, or happen solely, because of individual pathology or some personified evil. They stem from embedded cultural and societal values, from deeply entrenched understanding of what it means to be one sex or another, what is expected and allowed, and what is not.
Which is why I think this quote unfortunately still stands as true as it did 16 years ago.
"Human rights principles are not based on the experience of women. It is not that women's human rights have not been violated. When women are violated like men who but for sex are like them - when women's arms and legs bleed when severed, when women are shot in pits and gassed in vans, when womens' bodies are salted away at the bottom of abandoned mines or dropped from planes into the ocean, when womens' skulls are send from Auschwitz to Strasbourg for experiments - this is not recorded as the history of human rights atrocities to women. They are Argentinian or Honduran or Jewish. When things happen to women that also happened to men, like being beaten and disappeared and tortured to death, the fact that they happened to women is not noted in the record book of human suffering. When no war has been declared and still women are beaten by men with whom they are close, when wives disappear from supermarket parking lots, when prostitutes float up in rivers or turn up under piles of rags in abandoned buildings, these atrocities go unmarked entirely in the record of human suffering because the victims are women and it smells of sex. What happens to women is either too particular to be universal or too universal to be particular, meaning either too human to be female or too female to be human."
From:
MacKinnon, C. (1993). ‘Crimes of war, crimes of peace’, pp. 83-109. In Shute, S. & Hurley, S. (Eds.). On Human Rights. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993. New York: BasicBooks.
Over the last few days I have seen and read many posts about male privilege, gender inequalities and sexual violence against women - some academic, some deeply personal. And what is common to all of them is the utter, horrible, normality of it. These things do not happen, or happen solely, because of individual pathology or some personified evil. They stem from embedded cultural and societal values, from deeply entrenched understanding of what it means to be one sex or another, what is expected and allowed, and what is not.
Which is why I think this quote unfortunately still stands as true as it did 16 years ago.
"Human rights principles are not based on the experience of women. It is not that women's human rights have not been violated. When women are violated like men who but for sex are like them - when women's arms and legs bleed when severed, when women are shot in pits and gassed in vans, when womens' bodies are salted away at the bottom of abandoned mines or dropped from planes into the ocean, when womens' skulls are send from Auschwitz to Strasbourg for experiments - this is not recorded as the history of human rights atrocities to women. They are Argentinian or Honduran or Jewish. When things happen to women that also happened to men, like being beaten and disappeared and tortured to death, the fact that they happened to women is not noted in the record book of human suffering. When no war has been declared and still women are beaten by men with whom they are close, when wives disappear from supermarket parking lots, when prostitutes float up in rivers or turn up under piles of rags in abandoned buildings, these atrocities go unmarked entirely in the record of human suffering because the victims are women and it smells of sex. What happens to women is either too particular to be universal or too universal to be particular, meaning either too human to be female or too female to be human."
From:
MacKinnon, C. (1993). ‘Crimes of war, crimes of peace’, pp. 83-109. In Shute, S. & Hurley, S. (Eds.). On Human Rights. The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993. New York: BasicBooks.
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no subject
on 2009-10-17 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2009-10-17 04:41 pm (UTC)