Capitalism, male do minance, racism, imperialism are intertwined and inseparable. •Socialist feminism remains more historical than biological and more specific than universal: recognizes all the important differences among human beings—class, sex, but also age, race, ethnicity, nationality, sexual orientation. •Women, like all human beings, are constituted essentially by the social relations they inhabit. A woman’s life experience is shaped by all these various dimensions. •Refuses to reduce oppression to one single type or
The first section contains the examination of cultural relativism argument related to the human rights of women. The next section consists of the discussion of the detected similarities between two different human rights critique. The last section is the concluding part, presents the argument of the author
Gender identity is a controversial concept that has been discussed in terms of several perceptions such as psychological, social and political point of views. In consequence, it acquires different definitions and interpretations. However, in feminist works, using the feminist approach seems to be imperative because of its validity in analyzing the psychology of female heroines, as well as the psychology of female writers. This thesis attempts to clarify gender identity thought reading three postmodern gothic novels written by Angela Carter –a British contemporary writer. The ultimate goal of this thesis is to read the concept of gender identity in the terms of postmodern principles; it argues that Angela Carter in her postmodern gothic novels The
Cultural Relativist and Feminist Critiques of International Human Rights Journal Summary The journal which is composed by Oonagh Reitman is really talking with respect to the conflict between all-inclusiveness of human rights and woman 's rights; and the conflict between comprehensiveness of human rights and social relativism. Women 's activist and social relativist has condemned the idea of human rights both in its practices and its fundamental idea, women 's activist concentrate on practice and social relativist on both practice and essential idea. The journal is not just clarifying on how both women 's activist and relativist censured the comprehensiveness of human rights, additionally the likelihood of concealed politic which is brought
The article, “Cultural Relativist and Feminist Critiques of International Human Rights – Friends or Foes?” by Oonagh Reitman seeks to address how cultural relativist and feminist sees the existence of the international human rights, specifically women’s human rights. The research problem being addressed is the similarities between these two critiques of international human rights and how these two critiques have come to defy one another when it comes to the term of women’s international human rights. The author has made it clear that this is a debatable issue. The cultural relativist argued on the universality of human rights, which contradicts with the statement that human rights are those held simply by virtue of being human and whose substance, form and interpretation are not subject to variations in culture (Donnelly 1989: 109-110). Cultural relativist uphold that culture is the principle source of any rights or rules, they argued that the existence of women’s human rights cannot be universally applied.
The assumption is that gender is socially constructed category that comes of out whole systems and layers of meaning that is structured into the way in which the world works and can be unstructured or deconstructed. In that sense, feminism is a part of a constructivist agenda. However, there are tensions between feminist and constructivist works. One of the interesting areas of this is that some constructivists have started to take gender seriously as a kind of cause or variable, and started to talk about the way that gender can influence the actors and people involved in international politics. For example, during the evacuation of people in the wars that lead to the splitting of Yugoslavia in the mid 1990s, It is argued that because of the way that some humanitarian organizations and other organizations took for granted certain assumptions about gender, they failed to notice that it was the men who were the most vulnerable category of the population that were most under threat from the invading forces, and the priority was given to the old, the sick, the women and the children by
Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) and Bodies that Matter (1993) works are fundamental texts of study for this thesis. Both works are deeply influenced specially by French structuralism and post-structuralism schools of thought. In Gender Trouble, Butler deconstructs the established, normative, Western construction of the Gay/Straight and hetero/homosexual binaries to discuss the lack of perspective regarding the heterogeneity of sexual identity and diversity as it is present in twentieth century society. Her arguments focus not only on the production of binaries and their rigidity from a sociological standpoint, but also on how the use of these binary structures can affect us in processes of sexual identity construction because of interpretations and constraints coming from various fields such as: the economic, the philosophical, the medical and the psychological and the use of language. Butler focuses repeatedly on the production of language.
The theory focuses on explaining why women are oppressed and highlights ways states can be deconstructed to equally represent women nationally and internationally. First of all, it is essential to establish the understanding that Feminist theory is constructed from what is known as core international relations feminism, and the four-variant feminist international relations: liberal feminism, critical feminism, postcolonial feminism, and post-structural feminism, these theories branches off of the core theory. Each theory applies a different understanding to how feminism might be applied to certain fields and situations; like how feminism might be applied to an international situation like the Arab Spring. Therefore, understanding core feminist theory is essential to understanding feminism as a whole. As well, majority of the current international relation theories are masculine in nature, feminism is a political tool that struggles to free all women from the oppressive nature of patriarchy.
Margrit Eichler is a Professor Emerita of the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research area is specifically family policy, reproductive and genetic technologies, feminist methodology, and an integrative approach to social in/equity that understands the issue of sustainability to be part of social stratification. Eichler’s wrote this book to elucidate as to how the field of Research Methodology indulges in sexism. She mainly draws this analysis from a study of various journals carried out by her in the process of writing this book. Eichler’s book, in a way provides a new alternative method for research.
Feminism is one of the critical and theoretical studies that are reshaping literary studies. Many feminist theories have been developed in different places and different periods of time. Each of these theories and studies criticize the way that the economic, political or traditional systems deal with women’s rights. Some of the feminist perspectives protest against the distinction and discrimination against women in modern society (Johnson 57). In this paper I will concentrate on how some feminist theories approach objectification by reviewing many different definitions of objectification; second I will explain the wrong thing about objectification and then what is ok about to see if they all those feminist critics agree about the idea of objectification.