Conference Abstracts:
Plenary Abstracts:
Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, Constitutional
Court of South Africa
Zillah Eisenstein, Ithaca College and anti-racist
feminist activist
Pragna Patel, Southall Black Sisters and Women Against
Fundamentalism
Gwen Brodsky and Shelagh Day, Poverty and Human
Rights Centre, Canada
Zillah Eisenstein, Ithaca College and anti-racist feminist activist
'SEXUAL DECOYS, Gender, Race, and War in Imperial Democracy'
Zillah Eisenstein continues her unforgiving indictment of neoliberal imperial politics by charting its newest militarist and masculinist configurations. She indicts Bush’s “cow-girls” - Condi Rice, Karen Hughes, Mary Matalin - as neo-liberal imperial feminists through discussions of the Afghan and Iraq wars, violations at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, the 2004 U.S. Presidential election, and hurricane Katrina. She warns that the latest manipulations of women’s rights rhetoric are a ploy for global dominance and a misogynist capture of democratic discourse. Eisenstein’s hope lies in the very contradictory roots of this decoy status - that the radically plural and diverse lives that white women and people of color lead lays the basis for an assault on the fascistic elements which have put this politics in play. This politics will both confound and clarify feminisms and with it reconfigure democracy for the globe.
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Gwen Brodsky and Shelagh Day, Poverty and Human Rights Centre, Canada
'Women’s Human Rights in an Era of Conservatism: Stories from Canada'
What are the ways of pushing a feminist, substantive equality agenda forward, and what role can litigation play? Canada has made commitments to women’s equality in human rights statutes, international human rights treaties, and, constitutionally, in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. From the 1980’s onwards, within the equality rights movement in Canada there has been an explosion of rights-focused activity, and use of human rights arguments, in the courts and elsewhere. Simultaneously, governments have refused to address longstanding issues of inequality, and savaged the social safety net, drastically eroding protections and benefits that are essential to women’s substantive equality. Two of Canada’s leading equality rights scholars and activists will reflect on these questions: Can entrenched issues of substantive inequality be addressed in the courts, before human rights tribunals, UN bodies? Are some venues more open to big picture analysis than others? Does the receptivity of the human rights framework to formal equality thinking pose an insoluble conundrum for a feminist substantive equality agenda? What cases are currently before the courts in Canada that challenge systemic discrimination against women, and how have the issues been framed?
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Justice Yvonne Mokgoro, Judge of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
'Women under Customary Law, Socio-Economic Rights and the Alleviation of Poverty in South Africa'.
The paper will reflect on the constitutional development of women’s customary law rights. It will then examine to what extent, if any, the protection of justiciable socio-economic rights in South Africa’s Constitution can contribute towards the alleviation of women’s indigence generally, but in particular that of rural women, who are mostly affected by the customary law regime.
Sponsored by Social & Legal Studies
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Pragna Patel, Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism
‘Silence, Invisibility and Denial: Asian women’s struggles for human rights in the UK’
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