On the Strategic Uses of Women’s Rights: Backlash, Rights-based Framing, and Anti-Gender Campaigns in Colombia’s 2016 Peace Agreement

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Elizabeth S. Corredor

ABSTRACT This article examines organized opposition to feminist and LGBTI political projects in Colombia. Although there is a large body of literature on feminist movements and a growing literature on LGBTI movements, there is little research on resistance to them. Through an intersectional feminist lens, this study analyzes the “anti-gender” campaign organized against the gender perspective in Colombia’s 2016 peace agreement to demonstrate the limitations of backlash theory and certain normative understandings of human rights. In contrast to assumptions that backlash is predetermined, the study demonstrates that the anti-gender mobilization against the peace agreement was circumstantial rather than inevitable. To highlight the productive nature of backlash, it traces how opponents employed human rights rhetoric to establish an alternative present and promote an imagined future rooted in exclusion and repression. In addition, it shows that mobilized backlash against feminist and LGBTI movements does not necessarily decelerate or reverse the respective movements’ agendas.

Author(s):  
Amanda E. Donahoe

Gender, religion, and politics are closely intertwined, and both have a significant impact on international relations (IR). There is a large body of literature dedicated to the intersections between gender, religion, and IR, and they can be categorized into matters regarding female subordination, human rights and equality, and feminism and agency. Religion has been historically, traditionally, and androcentrically gendered both in practice and ideology. A good portion of the literature on the linkages between gender and religion in the IR context discusses the ways in which women have been subordinated within Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Their religious subordination can be linked to legal equality, and the different forms of subordinating women implicitly and often explicitly lead to the inequality of women. Scholars who address this issue vary widely between being critical of the religions that perpetuate inequality and a dearth of women’s rights, to arguing in support of religion but in critique of its application and cultural practice. In addition, as women’s rights are but one element of the international engagements of various forms of feminism, scholars also engage in a range of discussions on political agency and the critical analysis of gender from both within and without religious and secular feminisms.


This volume reframes the debate around Islam and women’s rights within a broader comparative literature. It examines the complex and contingent historical relationships between religion, secularism, democracy, law, and gender equality. Part I addresses the nexus of religion, law, gender, and democracy through different disciplinary perspectives (sociology, anthropology, political science, law). Part II localizes the implementation of this nexus between law, gender, and democracy, and provides contextualized responses to questions raised in Part I. The contributors explore the situation of Muslim women’s rights vis-à-vis human rights to shed light on gender politics in the modernization of the nation and to ponder over the role of Islam in gender inequality across different Muslim countries.


Midwifery ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann Thomson

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 246-253
Author(s):  
Juanita Kakoty

This piece is based on a conversation the author had with lawyer and human rights activist from Pakistan, Hina Jilani, in May 2016. It captures Jilani’s account of the ‘Satyagraha’ she has waged in her lifetime for the rights of women in her country; and as she narrates her story, she interweaves it with the ‘Satyagraha’ that shaped the women’s movement in Pakistan. One can read here about Jilani’s struggle for truth, for a human rights consciousness in a political climate of military regime; and how she challenged courts in the country to step outside the realm of conventional law and extend justice to women and girls. And in the process, learn that her struggle for truth has been intertwined with that of the women’s movement in the country.


Author(s):  
Charlotte Bunch

This article discusses women and gender, and first identifies the differences between the concepts. It moves on to a critical examination of the norms and their institutional manifestations, along with selected UN system efforts to promote women's rights in development, peace and security, human rights, and health. The article also provides a balanced evaluation of how much things have changed for girls and women over the last sixty years.


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