Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Two crises of our age, refugee statelessness and sexual violence, converge in the lives of refugee women. This article examines this convergence by analyzing the meanings of refugee-camp sexual aggression and refugee women's responses to it. Aligning Giorgio Agamben's and Hannah Arendt's ideas of refugee desubjectification with Simone de Beauvoir's concept of gendered subjectivity, the author argues that refugee-camp men use sexual violence to reinstate their gendered subjectivity. In rejecting men's demand that women accept their prerefugee, compromised subjectivity, refugee-camp women are rewriting the gendered subjectivity contract.

The history of human rights is ambiguous and uncertain. Appeals to rights have been used to secure the privileges of the powerful and to legitimate the status quo. Appeals to rights have been used to expose the evils of cruelty and oppression. Given this muddied history we cannot assume that calls for human rights will operate in the name of justice. Cognizant of this history, I argue that human rights discourses can be a force for justice if: (1) we read human rights demands as an attempt to respond to the experience of the destabilizing, destructive and incomprehensible forces that Lacan calls the Real and that Adriana Cavero calls horrorism; and (2) if we use human rights discourses to respond to the trauma of encountering this horror by defining the human dignity and bodily integrity that human rights claims are intended to protect in terms of the dignity and integrity of the vulnerable body. I argue that if we persist in fleeing our vulnerability by using human rights discourse to insist on our autonomous sovereignty we will perpetuate the cycle of violence endemic to human history.

When the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) tried and convicted the Bosnian Serb soldiers who raped and sexually enslaved Muslim women and girls, it broke new legal and philosophical ground. In addition to identifying genocidal rape as a crime against humanity, the court, in finding that the rapes violated the women's right to sexual self-determination, created a new human right - the right to sexual integrity. In grounding this human right in a woman's body, a body traditionally gendered and stigmatized as vulnerable, this book argues, the ICTY transformed vulner

Rape, traditionally a spoil of war, became a weapon of war in the ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia. The ICTY Kunarac court responded by transforming wartime rape from an ignored crime into a crime against humanity. In its judgment, the court argued that the rapists violated the Muslim women's right to sexual self-determination. Announcing this right to sexual integrity, the court transformed women's vulnerability from an invitation to abuse into a mark of human dignity. This close reading of the trial, guided by the phenomenological themes of the lived body and ambiguity, feminist critiques of the autonomous subject and the liberal sexual/social contract, critical legal theory assessments of human rights law and institutions, and psychoanalytic analyses of the politics of desire, argues that the court, by validating women's epistemic authority (their right to establish the meaning of their experience of rape) and affirming the dignity of the vulnerable body (thereby dethroning the autonomous body as the embodiment of dignity), shows us that human rights instruments can be used to combat the epidemic of wartime rape if they are read as de-legitimating the authority of the masculine autonomous subject and the gender codes it anchors.

Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women's Lives, Human Rights examines the most complex and demanding challenges facing theorists, activists, artists, and educators engaged in establishing women's rights as human rights and fighting to make these rights realities in women's lives. Issues addressed include: trafficking, AIDS, immigration, war-time violence, and legal battles

Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women's Lives, Human Rights examines the most complex and demanding challenges facing theorists, activists, artists, and educators engaged in establishing women's rights as human rights and fighting to make these rights realities in women's lives. Issues addressed include: trafficking, AIDS, immigration, war-time violence, and legal battles.