Abstract
The ongoing fight for gender equality and gender rights is an important topic for feminist and gender scholars across the globe. As anti-feminist and anti-LGBTIQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, intersex, and queer) actors gain momentum, social movements challenge sexual violence, demand equal civil status for LGBTIQ+ people, and defend reproductive freedom. Yet, critical research with a global outlook is still lacking. The edited volume by Alexandra Scheele, Julia Roth, and Heidemarie Winkel strives to remedy this situation by providing a multi-perspective and interdisciplinary view on contestations of gender rights and by situating the debate within broader reflections on decolonial understandings of rights, universalism, and gender (in)equalities.
The book comprises four parts, with the first two dedicated to showing facets of this broad analytical framing. The first part (“Framing the Global Contestations of Women’s and Gender Rights”) provides five very different analytical perspectives on the “global” in “Global Contestations,” looking at political mobilizations and the ambivalence of human rights discourse, but—importantly—also offering an understanding of gendered inequalities from a decolonial perspective and emphasizing the necessity to analyze equality policies. The three contributions in the second part aim at “Reconfiguring Universal Rights Norms,” that is, tackling the thorny problem of how to conceptualize universal rights for women and LGBTIQ+ people without enforcing a colonial, patriarchal, and decidedly Western universalism.
Part III, which includes six chapters, deals with the reproduction of inequalities through institutionalized power relations, while the four chapters comprising Part IV focus on the global and local production of normativities. Both Parts III and IV showcase empirically grounded contributions analyzing specific national contexts and/or phenomena and discourses, such as the gendered effects of COVID-19, a historical comparison of female right-wing activists’ illiberal gender politics, a critical appraisal of the heteronormativity embedded in liberalism, and the politicization of religion. One of the strengths of this volume is its truly global outlook in terms of selection of national case studies, which feature countries from the Global South, especially the African continent, besides better-known European cases.
Three chapters dealing with legal norms might serve as an example for the multitude of approaches contained in the edited volume: Elisabeth Holzleithner’s contribution in the first part of the book addresses “Global Contestations of Gender Equality and Queer Rights” from legal philosophy perspectives. Anchoring her narrative in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy, she presents not only challenges and backlashes to women’s and queer rights but also successes that incrementally foster recognition of complex gender identities and gender equality for which the law might serve as an important tool on the national as well as international levels.
A very different take on universal norms is presented in a dialogue between political theorists José-Manuel Barreto and Ina Kerner, who question the possibility of a decolonized universalism without simply rejecting the idea of universal rights. Both authors find common ground in their argument for a historic perspective centering on the European claim to universalism, which was grounded in the dehumanization of colonized people, thereby completely contradicting the idea of equality. Their nuanced views considerably complicate feminist politics especially in post-colonial settings, where an appeal to universal norms might be met with resistance because of the racist legacy of European colonialism.
A final perspective is Ziba Mir-Hosseini’s chapter on Muslim feminists challenging conservative interpretations of Islamic law, which provides a fascinating example of a dialogue between human rights, feminist analysis, and religiously grounded legal norms. Here, a historically informed feminist analysis is used to critique Islamic family law from within the religious tradition, thereby providing a pathway to reform beyond the “dialogue of the deaf” (p. 340) that has dominated discourse, for example, by the United Nations’ Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and Muslim-majority states.
While the broad outlook of Global Contestations of Gender Rights—both in geographic and thematic terms—provides readers with a kaleidoscope of perspectives, questions, and approaches (an impression that is enhanced by the rather short format of the individual contributions), it can also make it difficult to see the connections between them. The editors provide three common (albeit very broad) research questions in their introduction and define citizenship, the division of labor, and religion as the main arenas for contestations of gender rights, but there is no concluding chapter pulling the different strands together, which at least this reader would have found a valuable addition. Nevertheless, the much-needed global and decolonial perspectives this book adds to the current debates about gender rights make it an indispensable contribution.
