WUNRN
A New Feminist Vision - Mobilizing the Women's Movement for 2015 & Beyond
By Women’s Learning Partnership Board
Member and former UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, Dr.Yakýn
Ertürk. This statement was given at the 2014 Transnational Partners
Convening Meeting organized by Women’s Learning Partnership.
A New
Feminist Vision?
So far the women’s movement has been
preoccupied with demystifying the existing patriarchal order that has for
centuries subordinated and oppressed women. In doing so, the primary task has
been to understand ourselves as women, how we are positioned within this order,
and how to change the terms of engagement to achieve an equal status. This has
entailed largely a liberal agenda calling for an equal representation in public
institutions and equal opportunity. This meant using basically a male yardstick
in identifying goals and making wrongs right.
Dr. Yakin Erturk
In the process, women have mobilized from
the local to the global around common goals and effectively used the
multilateral diplomacy and mechanisms of the UN. The engagement of women with
the UN resulted in a comprehensive international regime for gender equality and
women’s human rights. The UN provided women with a platform to voice their
concerns, and women’s activism helped to widen the scope of UN mechanisms and instruments
to become more inclusive.
The formation of the international gender
agenda, starting with the demand for formal equality, has undergone paradigm
shifts from WID/GAD (women in development/gender and development), to
empowerment, to human rights, to peace and security, reflecting the demands of
diverse women’s groups, women’s activism, and feminist scholarship. The gender
equality standards adopted at the international level empowered women to push
for change in their respective countries in all parts of the world. As a
result, considerable legislative and institutional reforms have taken place in
individual countries, which have had a positive impact on many women’s lives.
However, the progress achieved towards
greater gender equality has also provoked violent backlash, which is embedded
within the wider trends towards conservative governance, increased
militarization, the emergence of extremist non-state actors, and the overall
normalization of violence. These trends endanger universal human rights norms
and undermine the legitimacy of multilateral dialogue in responding to common
global problems.
In the struggle for equality, while a
global women’s movement emerged as an important transnational force, it also
encountered the limits of progress within a patriarchal gender order and
changing political dynamics locally and globally. Given the state of the world
today it is clear that ending patriarchy is not going to happen tomorrow. But
what can—and is—happening is the lessening of the patriarchal nature of
societies as patriarchal privileges are challenged, weakened, and ruptured. It
is time to reflect on a new feminist vision beyond a liberal agenda, one that
builds on lessons learned and forges alliances with other progressive movements
in imagining a post-patriarchal society.
A number of questions need to be asked to
stimulate a debate towards a new feminist vision:
·
Is there a feminist
vision of a new world order? What does such a vision entail?
·
·
What kind of a social
order do we want to transform towards, without being utopian?
·
·
Does this vision require
“rupturing” the patriarchal system only, or does it also require a vision of
how to humanize all relationships based on human rights?
·
·
How can a
post-patriarchal gender contract effectively reconcile the universality of
rights and the diversity of women’s realities?
·
·
Given the current
panorama of strong growth of patriarchalism in societies/states that claim that
only certain particular values/religions are legitimate, is it still possible
to claim the universality and indivisibility of international human rights? How
does diversity play in this new context?
·
·
The transnational
women’s movement was particularly strong because it was rooted in women’s
diversity and their capability of creating consensus around common goals, many
of which were included in the UN Declarations and Plans of Actions of the
1990s. However, what we see in the world scenario today is a backlash against
the achievements of the last century. Are those ideals from the 1990s again to
form a feminist platform?
·
·
How can the universality
of such standards be interpreted through existing community institutions which
can make them “localized”? In other words, how can we transform universalized
values to localized practices?
·
Are there legitimate
cultural divergences from international human rights norms? If so, how can such
legitimacy be established given the differences in power?
·
·
Can local practices be
induced to take on the international human rights norms with a process of
contesting the existing ones and reaching agreement on what is needed for the
best life for all—women and men, young and old?
·
How can universal norms
be made relevant to women’s concrete life experiences? That is, how can the gap
between international human rights values and concrete life experiences be
bridged?
·
·
What are the limits and
possibilities of creating alliances, networking with the Internet, and quickly
mobilizing, and where do our efforts towards medium- and long-term advocacy
stand?