Category: Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in Gender and Human Rights

by Ella Tan

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2024)

Abstract:

This paper explores anti-sex trafficking as a ‘humanitarian’ concern, arguing that the discourses of ‘rescue’ and ‘rehabilitation’ in the realm of anti-sex trafficking are not simply (failures of) humanitarian intervention to help sex workers, but are part of a neocolonial apparatus aiming to reconstruct women as workers of feminized labor within the neoliberal global economy. By examining the humanitarian laws and policies pursued by the US Government, American NGOs, and other stakeholders in the anti-trafficking industry, this paper demonstrates how the ‘rescue and rehabilitation’ discourse (and its legal, humanitarian, and political manifestations) create a paradoxical existence for the sex worker, who is transformed into a ‘victim-criminal’: simultaneously seen as a victim to be saved, as well as a criminal to be punished. By deconstructing the workings of this imperial and neoliberal apparatus, this paper demonstrates that the discursive and legislative anti-sex trafficking apparatus exists almost entirely separately from the lived experiences of women engaged in commercialized sex. This paper ultimately argues for the need to theorize new frameworks that more fully capture the nuances and complexities of women engaged in commercialized sex. Starting from the well-established framework of sex work, this paper challenges the fundamental assumptions of commercialized sex as work in the first place, and emphasizes the need to understand women’s aspirations for economic or material gain alongside their equal desire for intimacy, love, and connection, in order to create an inclusive and progressive framework of human rights and transborder justice truly beneficial to different communities of women globally.

Keywords: Commercialized sex, American neocolonialism, Gender politics, Southeast Asia, Politics of international aid

About the author:

Ella Tan Ray Ing graduated from Columbia University in 2024 with an M.A. in Political Science, specialising in Comparative Politics. She received her B.A. in History from the University of Oxford. Her research interests span the intersecting areas of postcolonial theory, gender studies, and the politics of human rights. Born and raised in Singapore, Ella has an academic and personal regional interest in Southeast Asia.

by Taís Penteado

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2023)

Abstract:

The present article is dedicated to showing how subordination is multifaceted and, as such, how legal decisions based on the antisubordination principle should be attentive to the diverse ways in which inequalities can permeate the law, in order to be properly addressed by it. By using the case in which the Brazilian Supreme Court criminalized LGBTQphobia as a focal point, I argue that equality considerations must guide how concepts are framed, how problems are defined, which solutions are proposed, as well as reflections about what a decision comes to mean for a determined place’s jurisprudence and political context. In my exercise, I also highlight complications that might arise when the antisubordination principle is legally mobilized. Subordination is not static and power relations are dynamic. As such, intersectionalities (in the case at hand, involving mostly gender identity, sexuality, race and class) might pose challenges for the identification of problems that should be addressed and for the choice of adequate emancipatory decisions, particularly when subordinate groups’ interests conflict. In the same vein, subordination happens through multiple overlapping practices, such as violence, deprivation, and exclusion, and addressing one does not always lead to a unitary all-encompassing antisubordinatory direction. I try to offer a provisional solution for these complications, based on the inclusion of civil society participation considerations on legal interpretation, through what I call the “Joint Venture Theory of Legal Interpretation”. The envisioned interpretation would be animated by the “demosprudential” assumption that legal meanings are created by courts, but also by people on the ground and asserts that, as such, the process of legal reasoning should give weight to the latter. The paper is part of a broader project of fully theorizing antisubordination, which includes the articulation of the antisubordination principle, concretizing its application, trying to solve its shortcomings, and establishing the political and constitutional theories that constitute its normative underpinning.

Keywords: Antisubordination, Equality, Legal Interpretation, Demosprudence, Brazil.

About the author:

Taís Penteado is a Ph.D. candidate at FGV Law School of São Paulo, Brazil. She holds an M.A. and a J.D. from the same institution, as well as an LL.M. from Yale Law School, where she is currently a Visiting Researcher. Her work explores the ways in which Constitutional Law, Fundamental Rights, and Equality Law interact with power relations, with a particular interest in understanding how subordination permeates fundamental legal categories and how law can become a better tool for emancipation. This paper was developed during her LL.M. year and constitutes one of the backbones of her Ph.D. thesis, which aims to provide a re-theorization of the antisubordination principle.

by Arti Gupta

View/download paper

View the edited version, now published in Vol. 48(2) of the Australian Feminist Law Journal.

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2022)

Abstract:

In September 2018, the Supreme Court of India in Navtej Johar v. Union of India, decriminalised consensual same-sex sexual activities by reading down Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. A significant aspect of the Court’s reasoning was that Section 377 was an embodiment of ‘Judeo-Christian’ morality and a colonial imposition. In providing that reasoning, the judgment does not stand alone. For a long time, various revisionist accounts of religious texts and scriptures have been presented to argue that ancient ‘Indian culture’ had been tolerant towards non-normative sex and gender, and ‘homophobia’ was simply a British imposition. Such revisionist arguments had initially been put forth by Indian queer rights groups to nullify the orthodox homophobic attitudes, which rested on the claim that homosexuality is alien to ‘our culture’. However, this article argues that there has been an increasing cooptation of such accounts by dominant Hindu Right groups for their political ends. This article also shows that such reliance on the past (through scriptures or otherwise) to confer legitimacy on the present can have the effect of constraining the radical potentialities of that past. At the end, this article argues for a turn towards the future, which, creating new solidarities, can become a horizon of possibilities.

About the author:

Arti Gupta graduated from the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in 2022, with a degree in B.A. LL.B. (Hons.). At law school, she explored her research interests in queer theory, postcolonial theory, female sexual abuse, and critique of the human rights discourse. This paper was written over a duration of 18 months as three essays for three separate courses. This paper is a combined, expanded and edited version of all three essays. Currently, Arti is practicing as an Advocate at the Supreme Court of India.

by Miriam Zucker

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2021)

Abstract:

The scholarship on internal minorities has generated different proposals for addressing concerns about the oppressive impacts of minority cultures’ practices on their more vulnerable members. Critical reflection on this scholarship reveals that it is characterized by a rigid binary choice between an interventionist approach—seeking to eradicate cultural practices that contradict liberal values and norms—and a laissez-faire approach that rejects interference in cultural minority communities’ affairs and instead relies on the right of minority members to exit their community. Despite these two approaches dominating the scholarship, both options under this binary are detached from the interests and needs of minority women. Rarely do women and girls benefit from putting their family members in jail under the interventionist approach, while leaving the community under the laissez-faire approach is either impossible or undesired (or both) because it often requires the individual to “leave her whole world behind.” This paper demonstrates that this binary stems from the fact that scholars have not accounted for the role of the state in the problem of intra-group vulnerability, and illuminates how when one does, one notices other options that better align with women and girls’ interests and needs.

About the Author 

Dr. Miriam Zucker is an Adjunct Professor and a visiting research fellow at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University. She is currently researching at the Nathanson Centre on Transnational Human Rights, Crime and Security, and has been a visiting fellow at the Institute for Feminist Legal Studies at Osgoode Hall Law School since February 2021. Miriam received her SJD degree from the University of Toronto Faculty of Law (June 2021).  Her research concerns the areas of Multiculturalism and Feminism, Law and Religion, and Human Rights Law, and her doctoral work focuses on the problem of minority women’s intra-group vulnerability, often described as the treatment of “minorities within minorities.”

By Shireen Jalali-Yazdi

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2019)

Abstract:

This paper argues that the colonial conditions faced by African American men contribute to the construction of feminicidal masculinities.  Feminicide—the killing of women because they are women—has received increased international focus but has largely eluded political, academic, and public consciousness in the United States.  This despite the fact that the United States shows alarming rates of violence against women, particularly intimate partner violence. A 2017 report from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention shows that female homicide rates for African American women are higher than those of other races and ethnicities and that these feminicides are overwhelmingly committed by African American men known to the victim.  One of the major goals of this paper is to disabuse scholars and policymakers of notions of pathological blackness that dehistoricize the conditions of African American livelihood and disengage the State from fulfilling its duty to provide civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights to its citizens.  To do this I present a feminist decolonial intersectional framework of the killing of African American women and use it to undermine culturalist and racial explanations for the prevalence of feminicide in African American communities.

About the author:

Shireen Jalali-Yazdi is a recent graduate of the Dual BA Program between Columbia University and Sciences Po, where she majored in Social Sciences and Human Rights with concentrations in Law and Women’s and Gender Studies.

By Katherine Fallah

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2018)

Abstract:

In its everyday operation, the law presumes to narrate trans stories and shape trans lives. This piece shines a light on law’s claims to authority over transgender identities and transgender bodies, and offers an alternate, intimate account of one transgender person’s interactions with law and society. The stories recounted here offer glimpses into the life of Georgio. Written from the perspective of Georgio’s close companion — in response to a journal call for inter-disciplinary, first-person accounts of law and gender — this essay assembles incomplete fragments of the joys and frustrations of Georgio’s gender transition. The style and form of this piece are part of an effort to reimagine human rights scholarship; the essay is an exploration of possibilities for inviting deeper reflection on legal assumptions about the human rights and lives of transgender people. It represents an attempt to breathe humanity into law’s cold scripts of gender identity.

About the author:

Dr Katherine Fallah is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Technology Sydney and a member of the Australian and New Zealand Professional Association for Transgender Health.

by Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2016)

Please note that in November 2017, Helgudóttir Ingulfsen wrote a follow-up post to this paper, entitled “3 Reasons Why We Need Critical Feminist Theory More Than Ever in the Age of Big Data” (available here).

Abstract:

This paper explores strategies to justify refugee exclusion that are employed by Twitter users who tweet with the hashtag #refugeesnotwelcome. The tweets, understood as transnational nodes of discourse within a transnational platform for identity politics, are analyzed by combining particular theories of nationalism and immigration that are concerned with the gendered cultural construction of identity politics. I demonstrate how the Twitter users imagine themselves as a White Western Enlightened community in binary opposition to refugees who are cast as threats to the community’s racial and cultural preservation, and show how the construction of these binary oppositions relies on inherently gendered discursive strategies.

Keywords: gender, refugees, immigration, nationalism, transnational discourses, identity politics

Read a response to this paper by Courtney McGinn and Reina Wehbi

About the author:

Inga Ingulfsen is a Research Analyst, Global Partnerships at Foundation Center, where she supports the organization’s global programs, focused on building partnerships around data and knowledge sharing among philanthropic organizations around the world.

Inga received her MS in Global Affairs from New York University, focusing on peacebuilding, gender and migration. During her graduate studies, Inga worked for the United Nations in New York and Amman, supporting policy development and research on conflict-related sexual violence and regional governance and peacebuilding. Her graduate thesis, “#RefugeesNotWelcome: Making Gendered Sense of Transnational Asylum Politics on Twitter”, earned her the 2016 Center for Global Affairs Outstanding Thesis Award and the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights, as well as an invitation to present her research to the Data & Research Department at UN Women. Inga received her BA in International Studies from the University of Oslo and has several years of experience working in public administration in Norway.

by Maria Hengeveld

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2015)

Abstract:

With the rise of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and philanthro-capitalism since the early 2000s, transnational corporations (TNCs) have come to play a prominent role in international policy debates on sustainable development and human rights. A key feature of the growing corporate interest in poverty reduction is its faith in feminist ideas as tools for change. Spearheaded by the ‘Girl Effect’ campaign of athletic apparel giant Nike (since 2008), development institutions and aid agencies have largely embraced the idea that ‘rebranding girls’ in the Global South as untapped market potential and training them as self-confident, entrepreneurial market actors represents the key to solving poverty. In an attempt to gauge the growing influence of TNCs on development policy, this article analyzes the principles and the actual effects of the Girl Effect and compares it with Nike’s own interests as a corporation built on women’s labor. It argues that contrary to freeing girls’ potential, the Girl Effect project capitalizes on patriarchy to depoliticize poverty and inequality. Far from empowering women or supporting the poor, Nike’s rebranding project is an attempt to discipline girls, and the NGOs that represent them, into behaviors that support the status quo, distract from corporations’ misbehavior and expand the power of the market.

Keywords: corporations, globalization, Girl Effect, sweatshops, poverty, development, feminism

Resumen:

Desde el inicio de la decada del 2000, el crecimiento de los programas de Responsabilidad Social Empresaria (RSC) y el capitalismo filantrópico, han dado un lugar cada vez mas relevante a las corporaciones transacionales (TNCs) en los debates internacionales sobre las políticas en torno al desarrollo sustentable y los derechos humanos. Un rasgo que sobresale de las campañas de las corporaciones de reducción de pobreza es su fe en que las ideas feministas pueden ser un motor de cambio. Inspirados en la campaña “Girl Effect” llevada adelante por el gigante de la ropa deportiva Nike (desde 2008), instituciones dedicadas al desarrollo y a campañas de alivio de la pobreza han adoptado la idea de que “apuntar a las mujeres como marca” del Sur Global, que representan un mercado a explorar, entrenarlas en ganar autoestima y en convertirse en actores del mercado empresarial, puede ser una  clave para combatir la pobreza. En un intento por medir la creciente influencia de las TNCs  en las políticas del desarrollo, este artículo analiza los principios y los efectos de la campaña “Girl Effect” y los compara con los  propios intereses de Nike, una corporación construida en base al trabajo de las mujeres. Se argumenta que la campaña “Girl Effect” en vez de colaborar en liberar el potencial de las mujeres, utiliza el patriarcado para despolitizar la pobreza y la inequidad. Lejos de empoderar a las mujeres o apoyar a los pobres,  el “apuntar a las mujeres como marca” de Nike es un intento por disciplinar a las mujeres y a las ONGs que las representan en la importancia de mantener el status quo, distraerlas de las malas conductas de las corporaciones y expandir el poder del mercado.

Read a commentary response to this issue:

“Nike’s Girl Effect and the Privatization of Feminism”
By: Megan Tobias Neely

About the author:

Maria Hengeveld is a researcher and journalist who writes about inequality, gender, globalization and corporations. This paper is based on the M.A thesis she wrote as a Fulbright Fellow in human rights at Columbia University in 2015. Earlier this year, Hengeveld conducted a research project in Vietnam, funded by the 2015 IF Stone Award from The Nation Institute for Investigative Reporting, to test the Girl Effect standards in Nike’s own factories. There, she interviewed 18 women who work for Nike about the factory and living conditions they face. To read more of Hengeveld’s work, she blogs at Africa is a Country and tweets @HengeveldMaria.

by Lina Buchely

View/download paper

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2014)

Abstract:

Whereas mainstream literature affirms that the rule of law is an abstract concept that comes from democracy and liberal institutional systems, people in the local Global South do not experience this certainty. In some ways, the rule of law is a product of the daily life transactions and bargains of social actors. This article analyzes the case of community mothers as street-level bureaucrats who produce the rule of law in their local spaces, within an institutional or democratic mechanism. This case study of community mothers, developed between June 2012 and February 2013, shows how street-level bureaucrats use the rule of law as a tool of empowerment. Community mothers display an undocumented agency that develops a feminist agenda of helping fellow women, contrary to the government agenda that promotes childcare and the early childhood program policies. In this sense, the fieldwork undertaken portrays mothers and children as conflicting actors. Despite this, the social policy hides this conflict reproducing the normative image that ideologically links mothers with their children. The results of this research project reveal, therefore, that the local agents as the street level bureaucrats play an unexpected role in the power dynamics inherent to the rule of law.

Keywords: community mothers, feminism, Latin America, street level bureaucracy, rule of law

About the author:

Lina Buchely earned her doctorate in law from Universidad de los Andes (Bogotá, Colombia) in 2014. She is currently a professor and director of the Gender Studies Group at Universidad Icesi (Cali, Colombia).

by Kali Yuan

Winner, Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights (2012)

View/download paper

Abstract:

In June 2011, the International Labor Conference adopted the Domestic Workers Convention (the Convention), the first international labor standard to set out legal obligations that specifically protect and improve the working lives of domestic workers. This paper argues that previous regulatory attempts to protect domestic workers have been inadequate and, although it is an improvement, the Convention is currently also an insufficient legal instrument. However, although the Convention is not yet in force, educational and advocacy work on this legal instrument are already underway. For example, in September 2011, I volunteered as an advocacy officer with the recently-established Working Women’s Centre Timor Leste on its first project, providing education, support and advocacy based on the rights expressed in the Convention to domestic workers in Dili and four other rural Districts. My experiences while working with this project suggested that a convention, as a legal instrument, can still have significant impact at a grassroots level without reliance on its legal mechanisms. This paper argues that the Convention may still be effective in improving the lives of domestic workers, by changing norms at the grassroots level. Crucially, the degree of effectiveness will depend on how successfully the Convention’s norms can be translated into local contexts. But there are tensions within the process of translation: between remaking rights resonantly and faithfully; between affecting local consciousness and retaining the essence of the Convention’s rights. How then to successfully harness the normative power of the Convention? This paper considers Community Conversations – a radical, participatory approach where domestic workers themselves drive the translation process – as one method of negotiating the tension inherent in translation. Such an approach may effectively engender the key Convention rights of solidarity and collective industrial agency. Through this approach, the normative power of the Convention’s legal obligations may successfully affect the protection of labor rights at the grassroots level.

Keywords: Domestic workers; labor rights; participatory development; law and society

Resumen:

El junio de 2011, la Organización Internacional del Trabajo adoptó elConvenio sobre las Trabajadoras y los Trabajadores Domésticos, el primer estándar laboral internacional que incluye obligaciones legales especificas para proteger y mejorar las vidas de trabajadores domésticos. Este artículo sostiene que los anteriores intentos de reglamentación para proteger a los derechos de los trabajadores domésticos no han sido suficientes, y que aunque es una mejora, el Convenio es actualmente un instrumento jurídico insuficiente. Sin embargo, a pesar de que el Convenio no ha entrado en vigor, la labor educativa y de promoción de este instrumento legal ya están en marcha. Por ejemplo, en septiembre de 2011, trabaje de manera voluntaria como encargada de labores de apoyo y defensa en el primer proyecto del recientemente establecido Centro de Trabajo de las Mujeres de Timor Leste, proporcionando educación, apoyo y defensa basada en los derechos del Convenio para trabajadores domésticos en Dili y otros cuatro distritos rurales. Mis experiencias trabajando con este proyecto sugieren que un convenio, como un instrumento legal, aun puede tener un impacto importante al nivel local sin depender de los mecanismos legales. Este artículo sostiene que el Convenio todavía puede ser efectivo para mejorar las vidas de trabajadores domésticos, mediante el cambio de normas al nivel local. Fundamentalmente, el grado de eficacia dependerá de cuan efectivamente las normas del Convenio puedan ser traducidas al nivel local. Pero existen tensiones dentro del proceso de traducción: entre reconstruir esos derechos resonantemente y fielmente al mismo tiempo; entre afectar la conciencia local y mantener la esencia de los derechos del Convenio. Entonces, ¿cómo aprovechar con éxito el poder normativo del Convenio? Este artículo considera las Conversaciones Comunitarias – un enfoque radical y participatorio donde los mismos trabajadores domésticos manejan el proceso – como un método para negociar la tensión inherente en la traducción. Quizás aún más fundamentalmente, esta metodología puede generar derechos claves del Convenio tales como solidaridad y agencia industrial colectiva. A través de esta metodología, la fuerza normativa de las obligaciones legales del Convenio puede contribuir a la protección de los derechos laborales de los trabajadores domésticos.

Palabras claves: Trabajadores domésticos; derechos laborales; desarrollo participativo; derecho y sociedad

About the author:

Kali Yuan completed a Juris Doctor (Honours, 1st Class) at the Australian National University in 2012. Prior to undertaking the graduate law program, she completed a Bachelor of International Studies (Development Studies) at the University of New South Wales in 2008. Since late 2010, Yuan has worked at the Australian Attorney-General’s Department in the Human Rights Policy Branch and Indigenous Justice and Community Safety Branch. Yuan has worked at the employment law firm Slater & Gordon and will begin working at the Australian Agency for International Development in 2013. Yuan’s academic and professional interests include gender, labour law, international human rights law, and international development and aid.