Feminism: Global Justice

Review (2007) of three books fighting violence against women of color. Organizers and activists all, the theorists of these volumes provide comprehensive analyses as well as strategies exploring the struggle for reproductive justice for women of color, policing the national body and criminalization, and American Indian genocide as related to sexual violence and colonial relationships. The arguments highlight once again the inseparability of theory and practice. The focus hope is to bring mainstream feminism back to its struggle for social justice.

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

Decolonizing Universalism develops a genuinely anti-imperialist feminism. Against relativism/universalism debates that ask feminists to either reject normativity or reduce feminism to a Western conceit, Khader's nonideal universalism rediscovers the normative core of feminism in opposition to sexist oppression and reimagines the role of moral ideals in transnational feminist praxis.

Book review of Complicit Sisters: Gender and Women’s Issues across North-South Divides, by Sara de Jong.

This article offers a feminist engagement with and evaluation of Rainer Forst’s concept of transnational justice, especially as he articulates it in his most recent book, Normativity and Power: Analyzing Social Orders of Justification. While focusing on this book, the analysis I offer also builds on his earlier writings on a critical theory of transnational justice and the concept of the right to justification. Feminist theoretical resources, including current transnational feminist theory, provide a series of lenses that bring into focus (...) the strengths and weaknesses of Forst’s approach. This is particularly true with regard to the issue of whether he offers a theory of transnational justice sensitive to the gendered dimensions of global injustice, as well as to the realities of a non-ideal world. At key moments in the paper, I draw on examples of transnational gender-based and sexual violence as representative of a specific and prolific form of gendered global injustice to illustrate my argument. The argument advances in two main steps. First, I consider ways in which Forst’s work is feminist in nature and explore how he might reinforce feminist theoretical efforts. I then identify limitations of Forst’s theory from a transnational feminist perspective, exploring how feminist philosophers might challenge aspects of his approach. In this vein, I offer reflections relating to two main concepts: the tensions between ideal and non-ideal theory within Forst’s work and the idea of adaptive preferences. (shrink)

In its broadest sense, globalization refers to the economic, social, cultural, and political processes of integration that result from the expansion of transnational economic production, migration, communications, and technologies. This article outlines the ways in which predominantly Western feminist philosophers have articulated and addressed the challenges associated with its economic and political dimensions.

In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of the philosophical role “method” plays in MacKinnon’s argument, (...) and by reframing her critique of juridical neutrality and objectivity as epistemic harms. In the second section, we sketch out a provisional coalitional theory of liberation that builds on MacKinnon’s feminist epistemological insights and aligns them with decolonizing projects in women-of-color feminisms, suggesting new directions and conceptual revisions that are on the way to coalition. (shrink)

How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women’s rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth century. Botting explains why this revised (...) and internationalized theory of women’s human rights—grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocentric biases—is an important contribution to thinking about human rights in truly universal terms. (shrink)

Migrant women are often stereotyped. Some scholars associate the feminization of migration with domestic work and criticize the “care drain” as a new form of imperialism that the First World imposes on the Third World. However, migrant women employed as domestic workers in Northern America and Europe represent only 2% of migrant women worldwide and cannot be seen as characterizing the “feminization of migration”. Why are migrant domestic workers overestimated? This paper explores two possible sources of bias. The first is (...) sampling: conclusions about “care drain” are often generalized from small samples of domestic workers. The second stems from the affect heuristic: imagining children left behind by migrant mothers provokes strong feelings of injustice which trump other considerations. The paper argues that neither source of bias is unavoidable and finds evidence of gender stereotypes in the “care drain” construal. (shrink)

The last two decades have seen a welcome proliferation of the collection and dissemination of data on social progress, as well as considered public debates rethinking existing standards of measuring the progress of societies. These efforts are to be welcomed. However, they are only a nascent step on a longer road to the improved measurement of social progress. In this paper, I focus on the central role that gender should take in future efforts to measure progress in securing human rights, (...) with a particular focus on anti-poverty rights. I proceed in four parts. First, I argue that measurement of human rights achievements and human rights deficits is entailed by the recognition of human rights, and that adequate measurement of human rights must be genuinely gender-sensitive. Second, I argue that existing systems of information collection currently fail rights holders, especially women, by failing to adequately gather information on the degree to which their rights are secure. If my first two claims are correct, this failure represents a serious injustice, and in particular an injustice for women. Third, I make recommendations regarding changes to existing information collection that would generate gender-sensitive measures of anti-poverty rights. Fourth, I conclude by responding to various objections that have been raised regarding the rise of indicators to track human rights. (shrink)

Leaders of the world’s largest food sovereignty movement, La Vía Campesina, have argued that gender justice is a core component of food justice. On their view, food justice requires an end to violence against women and a guarantee of women’s equal social and political status. However, some have wondered what gender justice has to do with food. In particular, they have worried that La Vía Campesina’s embrace of radical gender egalitarianism cannot be grounded in food-related concerns. My goal in this (...) paper is to respond to these objections, and to show that La Vía Campesina’s efforts to promote gender justice may be grounded in its broader food justice goals. (shrink)

Rawls saw need for non-ideal theory also within society but never developed that project. In this chapter, Card suggests that the non-ideal part of Rawls’ Law of Peoples can be a resource for thinking about responding to evils when the subject is not state-centered. It is plausible that defense against great evils other than those of aggressive states should be governed by analogues of scruples that Rawlsian well-ordered societies observe in defending themselves against outlaw states. This essay explores those hypotheses (...) in relation to women’s self-defense and mutual defense against evils of misogyny, the term feminists apply to the most deeply hostile environments of and attitudes toward women and girls and to the cruelest wrongs to them/us, regardless whether perpetrators harbor feelings of hatred. It extrapolates and adapts to this case values, concepts, and methods from Rawls’s life’s work, especially his writing on war. (shrink)

This paper examines the proposal that the indigenous cosmovision of buen vivir (good living)—the “organizing principle” of Ecuador's 2008 and Bolivia's 2009 constitutional reforms—constitutes an appropriate basis for responding to climate change. Advocates of this approach blame climate change on a “civilizational crisis” that is fundamentally a crisis of modern Enlightenment reason. Certain Latin American feminists and indigenous women, however, question the implications, for women, of any proposed “civilizational shift” seeking to reverse the human separation from nonhuman nature wrought via (...) Enlightenment's “disenchantment of nature.” The paper argues that, in order to adequately address both the climate crisis and feminist concerns about buen vivir, a different critique of Enlightenment modernity is necessary—one drawing on Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics and on Adorno and Horkheimer's nonidentitarian dialectical understanding of Enlightenment. Conceiving Enlightenment as composed of nonsublatable moments of domination and liberation, Adorno and Horkheimer call for a rational critique of reason and for affinity rather than identity with nonhuman nature. The paper ends with a brief discussion of how feminist critiques of buen vivir and approaches to climate justice can be furthered via an engagement with an environmental feminist philosophy informed by a negative dialectical approach to Enlightenment. (shrink)

The World Bank’s World Development Report: Gender Equality and Development 2012 makes many recommendations for addressing the severe gender disparities that it finds persisting across much of the world. This paper proposes that the recommendations focus too exclusively on remedies at the national level while paying insufficient attention to transnational arrangements. The imbalance of the report’s analysis places too much responsibility for addressing the disparities on local and national actors, while underplaying the responsibilities of transnational actors, including the World Bank (...) itself. The idea of transnational cycles of gendered vulnerability provides a methodological approach for better assigning responsibility for global gender disparities. (shrink)

Book review of Serene Khader's "Adaptive Preferences and Women's Empowerment".

The gendered division of labour in combination with the feminisation of international migration contribute to shortages of care, a phenomenon often called ‘care drain’. I argue that this phenomenon is an issue of global gender justice. I look at two methodological challenges and favourably analyse the suggestions that care drain studies should include the effects of fathers’ and other male caregivers’ migration and, in some cases, the effects of migration within national borders. I also explain why care drain is a (...) problem of distributive justice, by looking at the background conditions that result in much of the care-givers’ migration. (shrink)

Care drain brings the traditional problem of carers' choice between paid work and family at a new level. Taking care drain from Romania as a case study, I analyse the consequences of parents' migration within a normative framework committed to meeting the needs of vulnerable individuals. The temporary migration of parents who cannot take their children with them involves moral harm, particularly the frustration of children's developmental and emotional needs. I use recent feminist work on justice and care in the (...) economy to address the question whose responsibility it is to fill the void of care created by temporary migration. I argue that the moral issues raised by care drain are also issues of social justice and therefore call for rectification by the states involved. (shrink)

Issues of global justice have received increasing attention in academic philosophy in recent years but the gendered dimensions of these issues are often overlooked or treated as peripheral. This groundbreaking collection by Alison Jaggar brings gender to the centre of philosophical debates about global justice. -/- The explorations presented here range far beyond the limited range of issues often thought to constitute feminists’ concerns about global justice, such as female seclusion, genital cutting, and sex trafficking. Instead, established and emerging scholars (...) expose the gendered and racialized aspects of transnational divisions of paid and unpaid labor, class formation, taxation, migration, mental health, the so-called resource curse, and conceptualizations of violence, honor, and consent. Jaggar's introduction explains how these and other feminist investigations of the transnational order raise deep challenges to assumptions about justice that for centuries have underpinned Western political philosophy. -/- Taken together the pieces in this volume present a sustained philosophical engagement with gender and global justice. Gender and Global Justice provides an accessible and original perspective on this important field and looks set to reframe philosophical reflection on global justice. (shrink)

The World Development Report 2012: Gender Equality and Development has recently confirmed the widely held belief that women across the world tend to perform different work from men who otherwise are situated similarly. Women also work longer hours than similarly situated men. In analyzing the justice of these gendered disparities in time-use, WDR 2012 uses a moral framework that is largely distributive. Although this framework illuminates some aspects of the injustice of the situation, I contend that it obscures other crucial (...) aspects, making the analysis inadequate overall. I argue that a more comprehensive and illuminating moral understanding can be reached by analyzing these time-use disparities in terms of global gendered exploitation. This alternative framework also better enables identifying those politically responsible for the injustice and points toward a vision of global gender justice that is morally more plausible. (shrink)

This article explains some moral dimensions of a transnational feminist research project designed to provide a better standard or metric for measuring poverty across the world. The author is an investigator on this project. Poverty metrics incorporate moral judgments about what is necessary for a decent life, so justifying metrics requires moral argumentation. The article clarifies the moral aspects of poverty valuation, indicates some moral flaws in existing global poverty metrics, and outlines some conditions for a better global metric. It (...) then explains the methodology used in our project, providing its moral rationale and discussing some remaining moral concerns. (shrink)

This article reflects critically on the methodology of one feminist research project which is ongoing as we write. The project is titled “Assessing Development: Designing Better Indices of Poverty and Gender Equity” and its aim is to develop a better standard or metric for measuring poverty across the world. The authors of this article are among several philosophers on the research team, which also includes scholars from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology and economics. This article begin by explaining why a (...) new and better poverty metric is needed and why developing such a metric requires an alternative methodological approach inspired by feminism. It then describes our methodological goals and strategies and summarizes our research findings, showing how they diverge from standard assessments as a result the feminist methods we used. We conclude with some methodological lessons we learned and questions that we think remain to be addressed. (shrink)

Introduction to collected papers. Journal of Global Ethics, Volume 9, Issue 3, Page 245-248, December 2013.

Struggles for gender justice by women's movements have sought to give legal recognition to gender equality at both national and international levels. However, such society-wide goals may have little resonance in the lives of individual men and women in contexts where a culture of individual rights is weak or missing and the stress is on the moral economy of kinship and community. While empowerment captures the myriad ways in which intended and unintended changes can enhance the ability of individual women (...) to exercise greater control over their own lives, it does not necessarily lead to their engagement in collective struggles for gender justice. This paper argues that ideas about citizenship, as both legal status and potential for action, can help bridge this gulf between institutional and individual change. It draws on empirical research from Afghanistan and Bangladesh to explore the extent to which efforts to empower women by development organisations have also encompassed discourses of citizenship which allow them to articulate, and act on, their vision for a just society. (shrink)

We present three rights-based approaches to research and policies on gender justice and equity in the context of climate change adaptation. After a short introduction, we describe the dominant discourse that frames climate change and provide an overview of the literature that has depicted women both as vulnerable victims of climatic change and as active agents in adaptive responses. Discussion follows on the shift from gendered impacts to gendered adaptive capacities and embodied experiences, highlighting the continuing impact of social biases (...) and institutional practices that shape unequal access to and control over household and community decision-making processes undermining timely, fair, and successful adaptive responses. Assessment of rights-based frameworks considers the space they provide in addressing persistent gender and other inequalities, at different political and operational scales. We argue that a human security framework is useful to fill the gap in current gender and climate justice work, particularly when implemented through the entry point of adaptive social protection. Gender justice in climate change adaptation is an obligation for transformational social change, not just rights. The time is ripe to replace narrow-minded vulnerability studies with a contextualized understanding of our mutual fragility and a commitment to enhanced livelihood resilience, worldwide. (shrink)

In an era of global interdependence, the concept of autonomy may no longer name our core moral need. Shifting friendships and enmities across political boundaries bear significant consequences for the individual. Perhaps social alliances and hostilities have always had an impact on the flourishing of individuals and communities. But globalization (especially as viewed through the technology of the information age) magnifies the impact of external forces on sovereign bodies. These forces remind individuals of the need to establish the right kind (...) of connections, and diminish (but do not exclude) the relative importance of autonomy for moral and political discourse. (shrink)

-/- The World Development Report 2012 "Gender Equality and Development" (GED), represents a new push to raise the profile of gender equality among a variety of official development actors. In this new CROP Poverty Brief Scott Wisor situates GED in the broader development context, discusses its key findings and some shortcomings and suggests how it should be used by advocates and allies concerned with eliminating gross gender injustice and global poverty.

Khader offers a deliberative perfectionist approach to identifying and responding to adaptive preferences-- deprived people's preferences that perpetuate their deprivation.

I argue that the epistemological virtues of concrete thinking, self-transparency, and narrative understanding developed by care ethicists can help international development practitioners combat their own temptations to engage in “unconscious unjustified paternalism” (UUP). I develop the concept of UUP—a type of paternalism in which one party unjustifiably substitutes her judgment for another's because of difficulty distinguishing her desires for the other from the other's good. I show that the temptation to UUP is endemic to development and that care ethics contains (...) virtues for combating it. Key to my claim is a view of caregiving as a practice of negotiating conflict. (shrink)

I develop the foundation for cosmopolitan care, an underexplored variety of moral cosmopolitanism. I begin by offering a characterization of contemporary cosmopolitanism from the justice tradition. Rather than discussing the political, economic or cultural aspects of cosmopolitanism, I instead address its moral dimensions. I then employ a feminist philosophical perspective to provide a critical evaluation of the moral foundations of cosmopolitan justice, with an eye toward demonstrating the need for an alternative account of moral cosmopolitanism as cosmopolitan care. After providing (...) an explanation of how care ethics in connection with Kantian ethics generates a duty to care, I consider one main feature of cosmopolitan care, namely the theory of obligation it endorses. In developing this account, I place special emphasis on the practical ramifications of the theory by using it to analyze gender violence in conflict zones. (shrink)

Despite being neighbouring countries, Bolivia and Argentina appear to be a world apart in terms of economics, international relations, and women’s rights. Historically, women’s rights have been fairly similar in both countries, but while one country seemingly made “progress,” the other country appeared to be stagnating. By exploring violence against women, and the current state of contraception and abortion laws it becomes apparent that “progress” does not necessarily bring about social change.

In this article I argue that clients who purchase commercial sex from forced prostitutes should be strictly liable in tort towards the sex-slaves. Such an approach is both normatively defensible and doctrinally feasible. As I have argued elsewhere, fairness and equality demand that clients compensate sex-slaves even if one refuses to acknowledge that fault is involved in purchasing sex from a prostitute who might be forced. In this article I argue that such strict liability could be grounded in the tort (...) of conversion, and not only (as argued elsewhere) in battery. Since the quintessential experience of sex-slaves is that of being treated as chattels, the appropriate legal response is to allow them to benefit from the strict liability imposed on those who interfere with an owner’s dominion over his property. Accordingly, sex-slaves should be viewed as both subjects and objects. As subjects they can sue clients for the violation of their sexual autonomy manifested by their treatment as objects. This approach is both advantageous to sex-slaves, in the sense it affords them protection that might not otherwise exist, and fair, since the ultimate response to the objectification of sex-slaves by clients should be to afford the former a proprietary-based claim against the latter. I further explain why my approach is not problematic on conceptual grounds, anti-commodification sentiments or feminist concerns with the symbolic message of my solution: that the law treats women as property. (shrink)

The present issue of Philosophical Topics is devoted to global gender justice. In this introduction to the volume, I sketch the emergence of global gender justice as a field of philosophical inquiry and identify some of the philosophical challenges that its emergence raises. The easiest way to explain the distinctiveness of this field is to situate it in the context of earlier philosophical inquiries into justice.

Arlie Hochschild glosses the practice of women migrants in poor nations who leave their families behind for extended periods of time to do carework in other wealthier countries as a “global heart transplant” from poor to wealthy nations. Thus she signals the idea of an injustice between nations and a moral harm for the individuals in the practice. Yet the nature of the harm needs a clear articulation. When we posit a sufficiently nuanced “right to care,” we locate the harm (...) to central relationships of the migrant women. The “right to care” we develop uses a concept of a relational self drawn from an ethics of care. The harm is situated in the broken relationships, which in turn have a serious impact on a person’s sense of equal dignity and self-respect, particularly since the sacrifice of central relationships of the migrant woman allows others to maintain these same relationships. The paper ends with a brief discussion of some of the solutions we need to consider. (shrink)

In this paper I make a preliminary analysis of Western (or global North) discourses on sexual violence, focusing on the important concepts of “consent” and “victim.” The concept of “consent” is widely used to determine whether sexual violence has occurred, and it is the focal point of debates over the legitimacy of statutory offenses and over the way we characterize sex work done under conditions involving economic desperation. The concept of “victim” is shunned by many feminists and nonfeminists alike for (...) its apparent eclipse of agency. Putting these concepts into a global framework sheds light on their limitations. Bringing in the debate over the concept “honor crime” reveals contrasting assumptions about the nature of sexual violence. The comparative analysis used in this paper shows how we can avoid universalizing from specific frameworks, but also how we can learn from the discourses elsewhere toward developing an account of commonalities across contexts. Ultimately I argue that in applications to sexual violence, “consent” has intrinsic limitations, “victim” has context-based dangers, and “honor crime” makes both correct as well as incorrect assumptions. (shrink)

Recent decades of women's rights advocacy have produced numerous regional and international agreements for protecting women's security, including a UN convention that affirms the state's responsibility to protect key gender-specific rights, with no exceptions on the basis of culture or religion. At the same time, however, the focus on universal women's rights has enabled influential feminists in the United States to view women's rights in opposition to culture, and most often in opposition to other people's cultures. Not surprisingly, then, feminists (...) across the global South have criticized the universal-women's-rights agenda. This article reviews representative critical responses to universal-women's-rights advocacy. The author argues that, taken collectively, these critical responses do not reject the possibility of cross-cultural feminist advocacy but they do suggest the need for feminists in the United States and Europe to focus less on transferring rights across the obstacles of culture and more on how they can revise and expand their own understanding of women's rights in response to the struggles of other women, many of whom view women's rights as organic to their own cultures and as connected to broader social struggles. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine Iris Marion Young's conception of power, arguing that it is incomplete in at least two ways. First, Young tends to equate the term power with the narrower notions of ‘oppression’ and ‘domination.’ Thus, Young lacks a satisfactory analysis of individual and collective empowerment. Second, as Young herself admits, it is not obvious that her analysis of power can be useful in the context of thinking about transnational justice. I conclude by considering one way in which (...) Young's analysis of power needs to be extended or perhaps modified in order to do justice to questions of transnational justice. (shrink)

Invoking three desiderata (empirical adequacy, conceptual precision, and sensitivity to social positioning), this paper argues that poverty is best understood as the deprivation of certain human capabilities. It defends this way of conceiving of poverty against standard alternatives: lack of income, lack of resources, inequality, and social exclusion.

En grandes números, la globalización beneficia a las mujeres. Pero no todo es de color de rosa: la falencia de los estados nacionales, los fundamentalismos y las deslocalizaciones perjudican. Globalizada no está la atención médica, porque todavía más de medio millón de mujeres mueren en el parto al año, pero sí lo está el tráfico y la trata, que trafican con mujeres desde cualquier parte del planeta para ponerlas a disposición allí donde paguen por usarlas. Digamos que la agenda feminista (...) está, además, abierta por páginas diferentes en cada lugar del mundo. Este libro se propone reflexionar sobre ello y dar alguna de las herramientas que permiten comprender el impulso de cambio que abrió la Modernidad y cómo actualmente se conjuga en los lugares más distantes y dispares. El feminismo nos conduce ahora de la supervivencia a la paridad, estamos en su «Tercera Ola». Seguimos en la punta de lanza de un movimiento mundial e irreversible por cuya agenda cruzan ahora buena parte de las tensiones civilizatorias. (shrink)