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Gendered Violence and International Human Rights: Thinking Non-discrimination Beyond the Sex Binary

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Abstract

The concept of non-discrimination has been central in the feminist challenge to gendered violence within international human rights law. This article critically explores non-discrimination and the challenge it seeks to pose to gendered violence through the work of Judith Butler. Drawing upon Butler’s critique of heteronormative sex/gender, the article utilises an understanding of gendered violence as effected by the restrictive scripts of sex/gender within heteronormativity to illustrate how the development of non-discrimination within international human rights law renders it ineffective to challenge gendered violence due to its own commitments to binarised and asymmetrical sex/gender. However, the article also seeks to encourage a reworking of non-discrimination beyond the heteronormative sex binary through employing Butler’s concept of cultural translation. Analysis via the lens of cultural translation reveals the fluidity of non-discrimination as a universal concept and offers new possibilities for feminist engagement with universal human rights.

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Notes

  1. This is not a term, however, that Butler herself coined. For wider literature on heteronormativity see Warner (1993), Berlant and Warner (1998), and Jackson (2006).

  2. This is a concept which Butler derives from Jacques Derrida. Space does not allow for full engagement with Butler’s use of iterability, for further elaboration see Lloyd (2007b, 61–66) and Loizidou (2007, 30–42).

  3. Within international human rights law non-discrimination and equality indeed remain fluid and multitudinous concepts (Vandenhole 2005, 1; Charlesworth 2002). Feminist engagement with these concepts more broadly also reflects this fluidity. Issues feminist commentators have engaged with include the relationship between non-discrimination and equality, the issue of structuralism in inequality, issues of multiple discrimination and the question of whether equality can be moved beyond the terms of sameness/difference (see Bock and James 1992). Attempts have been made within feminist literature to rethink equality in various ways beyond these problems and, in particular, the sameness/difference bind which has come to dominate non-discrimination and equality within liberalism e.g. Iris Marion Young (1990, 193), Catharine MacKinnon (2006, 105-111) and Joan Scott (1990), amongst others.

  4. This discussion of equality is located within the wider frame of radical democratic thought, of which Laclau is a seminal theorist, and which has underpinned Butler’s work for a significant period. See further Lloyd (2009).

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Acknowledgments

Many thanks are owed to Ruth Fletcher for her comments on an earlier draft of this article, and to the journal’s two anonymous referees for their insightful contributions in shaping this piece.

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  1. School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast, 28 University Square, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK

    Kathryn McNeilly

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McNeilly, K. Gendered Violence and International Human Rights: Thinking Non-discrimination Beyond the Sex Binary. Fem Leg Stud 22, 263–283 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-014-9268-y

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