Dual and Dueling Gender in Global Narratives

Through a tracing of key international documents, one can better understand how gender equality emerged as a specific set of politics and how “gender equals women” was a key development in this process. This chapter focuses on two narratives about gender that remain in tension with one another. One is radical and critical of the world order, while the other treats gender as a “technocratic” shortcut—treating women as a means to an end. Through a careful reading of the Geneva Conventions, reports on the World Conferences on Women, the Vienna Declaration, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Declaration on Violence Against Women, and United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325), a dual and dueling set of global narratives emerges. These narratives are reproduced in a neoliberal world order that prefers and promotes liberal feminist women’s rights and inclusion that adds women without challenging or radically destabilizing gender or the gendered institutions that exclude women in the first place.