Critiques: Feminists
Reveals the role of law in reinforcing gendered relationships of power.
• Structures and vocabulary of international law male-centred.
• Public/Private dichotomy: sexual relations, marriage, family, home, child-rearing (traditionally private, traditionally disproportionate impact on women). Been a long time to questioning
• Male norms in definition of torture, action that inflicts pain or suffering for a purpose. Failure to see domestic violence as a human rights issue. One of the criticisms is what is included and excluded.
See Brems on liberal feminists (argue for increased consideration of women’s needs in existing human rights framework), cultural feminists (emphasise women’s difference from men and argue that this difference should be valued); and radical feminists (other schools all continue to use a ‘male yardstick’, more fundamental change to the system as a whole is needed).
• Keeping the state out of ‘private’ sphere reinforced existing private power structures. The structures within home is never addressed or readdressed.
• ‘To act as if [the state is all there is to power] produces an exceptionally inadequate definition for human rights when so much of the second class status of women...is done by men to women prior to express state involvement”. (MacKinnon, 23).
• Three different focuses on feminist movements
• Liberal feminism simply argued that need of women needs to include
.
• Cultural feminist: differences women and men needed to be taken into account. We cant’ ignore the differences biological, socialisation etc. but they exist never less.