Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Feminism And Democracy, Louis Edgar Esparza

Human Rights & Human Welfare

After work on December 1, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks walked onto a bus that was to take her home that night. She ended up on a trip to jail instead, for refusing to give her seat to a white passenger. The event triggered resistance to bus segregation, the founding of the Montgomery Improvement Association, and the election of the then-unknown Dr. Martin Luther King as its leader. The success of the campaign is an integral battle in our historical retellings of the US African American Civil Rights Movement. Fewer recount the sexual harassment against black women by white …

The Irony Of Refuge: Gender-Based Violence Against Female Refugees In Africa, Liz Miller

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The Sudanese soldiers and the Janjawid invaded her village. When she tried to escape, they gang-raped her. At that time, she was eight months pregnant and described giving birth to a dead baby afterward and being very sick. She could not make it with her group to the border to flee to Chad so she had to walk alone. Once she got to Chad, she was raped by a Chadian soldier outside of the camp and became pregnant. Afterwards, her husband divorced her, and she now lives with the stigma of being a rape victim. She has been expelled from …

Latin America’S Indigenous Women, Courtney Hall

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Latin America’s indigenous women are as diverse as the land they inhabit. Their uniqueness is shaped by belonging to groups that have their own distinct history, traditions, and identity. Yet despite this diversity, indigenous women confront the same human rights challenges: racial, gender, and socio-economic discrimination. Without ignoring the diversity of indigenous women, a better understanding of their fundamental struggles can be gained by weaving these issues together in a comprehensive narrative.

Bedouin Women In The Naqab, Israel: Ongoing Transformation, Marcy M. Wells

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Since its inception in 1948, the state of Israel has based development plans on an agenda of nation-building that has systematically excluded Palestinian Arab citizens such as the indigenous Bedouin. Policies of relocation, resettlement, and restructuring have been imposed on the Bedouin, forcing them from their ancestral lands and lifestyle in the Naqab (or Negev, as it is called in Hebrew) desert of southern Israel. The rapid and involuntary transition from self-sufficient, semi-nomadic, pastoral life to sedentarization and modernization has resulted in dependency on a state that treats the Bedouin as minority outsiders through unjust social, political, and economic structures. …

Political Repression And Islam In Iran, Amy Kirk

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Signs with the slogan, ‘I am Neda’, flooded the streets of Tehran in the violent aftermath of the 2009 presidential elections and assassination of Neda Agha-Soltan. The internationally publicized video of Neda’s death became an iconic rallying point for the reformist opposition in Iran. Stringent clampdowns since the 1979 revolution have signified a sociopolitical change that has endured for three decades. President Khatami’s reform efforts of the late 1990s were stifled by Ahmadinejad’s election of 2005. Since Ahmadinejad’s appointment there has been little official tolerance for political and fundamental Islamic dissent, leading to serious human rights violations against the reformist …

Moving Beyond Divisive Discourse: Latin American Women In Politics, Ursula Miniszewski

Human Rights & Human Welfare

On June 25, 1993 the United Nations General Assembly held the World Conference on Human Rights, which adopted the Declaration and Programme of Action that states, “The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights. The full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social and cultural life, at the national, regional and international levels, and the eradication of all forms of discrimination on grounds of sex are priority objectives of the international community.” On September 18, 2008 The New York Times quoted Senator Cecilia López Montaño …

Violated: Women’S Human Rights In Sub-Saharan Africa, Kathryn Birdwell Wester

Human Rights & Human Welfare

In contemporary sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), women are facing human rights abuses unparalleled elsewhere in the world. Despite the region’s diversity, its female inhabitants largely share experiences of sexual discrimination and abuse, intimate violence, political marginalization, and economic deprivation.

Rights And The Hijâb: Rationality And Discourse In The Public Sphere, Howard Adelman

Human Rights & Human Welfare

The Rights of Others: Aliens, Residents, and Citizens by Seyla Benhabib. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 251 pp.

and

Why the French Don’t Like Headscarves: Islam, the State, and Public Space by John R. Bowen. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. 290 pp.

and

Muslim Girls and the Other France: Race, Identity Politics & Social Exclusion by Trica Danielle Keaton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. 223 pp.

and

Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe by Dominic McGoldrick. Portland, Oregon: Hart Publishing, 2006. 320 pp.

April Roundtable: Introduction

Human Rights & Human Welfare

An annotation of:

“Women Come Last in Afghanistan ” by Ann Jones. Salon.com. February 6, 2007.

The Trouble With Rights, David L. G. Rice

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Do human rights imply enforcement powers? Do they require police or armies? How many soldiers would it take to secure universal human rights? What sort of weaponry would suffice?

The Limits Of “No-Limit”, J. Peter Pham

Human Rights & Human Welfare

One must acknowledge and even admire the passion that writer and photographer Ann Jones brings to the different causes she embraces as she meanders along the paths of her rather eclectic career, now spanning over three decades. Her first book, Uncle Tom’s Campus (1973), examines how her students, in a predominantly African-American college, were being shortchanged by the system. In the late 1990s, she took off across Africa in search of a legendary tribe ruled by women and supposedly noted for its embrace of “feminine” principles of tolerance, diplomacy, and compromise, and returned to publish a travelogue-cum-utopian Weltanschauung set in …

Oppressing Women: Who Benefits And How?, Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann

Human Rights & Human Welfare

Women are the world’s oldest marketable commodity. “Good” women are marketed by their fathers, or brothers, to other men as wives. “Bad” women are incarcerated, raped, killed, or prostituted. Methods of marketing women range widely in kind: from simple one-on-one bargains, where two men exchange daughters or sisters; to exchange of women for material goods; to use of women to pay debts; to renting out women by the hour or minute to other men for sex.

Global Health And Global Hegemony, Randall Kuhn

Human Rights & Human Welfare

As the new director of a unique graduate program in Global Health Affairs, coming from the world of basic research, I have been faced with the need to reconcile a central paradox of American power and hegemony: I conduct my work as an American citizen and often with U.S. government funding in the hope that it will make a positive or at least neutral impact on my world. Yet my government (not only under the present administration) initiates imperial adventures that cause untold damage to the health, welfare, and survival of individuals throughout the world.

Appreciating Silence, Ronald C. Slye

Human Rights & Human Welfare

A review of:

Bearing Witness: Women and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa by Fiona C. Ross. London: Pluto Press, 2003. 240pp.