Just Advocacy?: Women's Human Rights, Transnational Feminism, and the Politics of Representation

In the continuing estrangement between the West and the Muslim Middle East, human rights are becoming increasingly enmeshed with territorial concerns. Marked by both substance and rhetoric, they are situated at the heart of many foreign policy decisions and doctrines of social change, and often serve as a justification for aggressive actions. In humanitarian and political debates about the topic, women and children are frequently considered first. Since the 1990s, human rights have become the most legitimate and legitimizing juridical and cultural claim made on a woman's behalf. But what are the consequences of equating women's rights with human rights? As the eleven essays in this volume show, the impact is often contradictory. Bringing together some of the most respected scholars in the field, including Inderpal Grewal, Leela Fernandes, Leigh Gilmore, Susan Koshy, Patrice McDermott, and Sidonie Smith, Just Advocacy? sheds light on the often overlooked ways that women and children are further subjugated when political or humanitarian groups represent them solely as victims and portray the individuals that are helping them as paternal saviors. Drawn from a variety of disciplinary perspectives in the humanities, arts, and social sciences, Just Advocacy? promises to advance a more nuanced and politically responsible understanding of human rights for both scholars and activists.

Table of Contents:
Foreword by Inderpal Grewal
Acknowledgments 

Introduction by Wendy S. Hesford and Wendy Kozol

Part One: Human Rights, Trans/Nationalisms, and Cultures of Security
1. Claiming Afghan Women: The Challenge of Human Rights Discourse for Transnational Feminism by Amy Farrell and Patrice McDermott
2. The Boundaries of Terror: Feminism, Human Rights, and the Politics of Global Crisis by Leela Fernandes
3. The Campaign for Fair Trials Abroad: Long-Distance Nationalism and Post-Imperial Anxiety by Susan Koshy

Part Two: Human Rights and the Evidence of Experience
4. Autobiography's Wounds by Leigh Gilmore
5. Belated Narrating: "Grandmothers" Telling Stores of Forced Sexual Servitude during World War II by Sidonie Smith
6. Kairos and the Geopolitical Rhetorics of Global Sex Work and Video Advocacy by Wendy S. Hesford
7. Misrepresentations of Missing Women in the U.S. Press: The Rhetorical Uses of Disgust, Pity, and Compassion by Arabella Lyon

Part Three: Correspondences: Activist and "Official" Networks
8. Intensifications: Representing Gender and Sexuality at the UN General Assembly Special Session on HIV/AIDS by Meredith Raimondo
9. Human Rights, Feminism, and Transnational Labor Solidarity by Mary Margaret Fonow
10. Feminist Strategic Rethinking of Human Rights Discourses in Education by Jill Blackmore
11. Piercing the Veil by Mahavi Sunder

List of Contributors
Index

About the Author :
Wendy S. Hesford is an associate professor of English at Ohio State University where she teaches feminist rhetoric, autobiography, human-rights literature, and composition theory. Wendy Kozol is an associate professor of gender and women's studies at Oberlin College, where she teaches courses on feminist cultural studies.

Review :
Interdisciplinary in design and transnational in scope, this book brings together some of the best new work in feminist scholarship on human rights. - Patrice Petro (professor and director of the Center for International Education at the Universi) Not a moment too soon, Just Advocacy? arrives to guide us in our thinking about international human rights and the gender politics of representation. Presenting a timely critique of the ways in which global feminism constructs gendered subjects of aid, the editors and contributors to this volume challenge us to recognize the legacies of colonialism in the workings of governmental and non-governmental organizations. - Caren Kaplan (associate professor of women & gender studies at the University of California at)