Gender and Human Rights in a Global, Mobile Era

Laura A. Hebert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000593013
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Gender and Human Rights in a Global, Mobile Era delves into feminist debates surrounding the relationship between gender and human rights through engaging feminist perspectives on the multifaceted issue of human trafficking.

Building on analyses of domestic servitude, commercial sex, and labor trafficking by military contractors, and grounded in intersectional feminist cosmopolitanism and feminist theorizing on vulnerability, precarity, and ethical interdependence, Laura Hebert makes several interrelated contributions. As she explores how a feminist gender analysis illuminates the structures and norms enabling trafficking, Hebert simultaneously considers the future of feminist rights advocacy. Emphasizing the sociality of human rights, she encourages feminist scholars and activists to look beyond states as the duty-bearers of human rights and the assumption that human rights are made meaningful mainly through the establishment of legal rights at the national level. She challenges the idea that "feminism" can be reduced to advocacy on behalf of women's rights. She also encourages critical reflection on how divisions associated with feminist politics have impeded opportunities for the building of feminist solidarities across differences aimed at the realization of the human rights of all.

Strongly interdisciplinary, Gender and Human Rights in a Global, Mobile Era will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

1

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003282686-1

In 2018, Camila Díaz Córdova, a 31-year-old transgender woman from El Salvador, joined the caravan of thousands of migrants who traveled from Central America to the United States hoping to escape economic insecurity, crime, and violence in their home countries. Like many of those who were allowed temporary entry into the U.S., Córdova was immediately detained by immigration authorities. Her claim for asylum on the basis of her gender identity was quickly rejected and she was deported back to El Salvador. A year later, after returning to sex work to support herself, Córdova was arrested, violently beaten by the arresting police officers, thrown out of a moving police vehicle, and left bleeding by the side of the road. She died three days later (Aviles 2019; Human Rights Watch 2020).

In April 2020, a local man in Lebanon tried to sell his Nigerian domestic worker on Facebook for $1,000 (Daragahi and Trew 2020; Flanagan 2020). While the man’s treatment of his employee as a commodity was especially egregious, his disregard for the humanity of the Nigerian woman was by no means exceptional. As Lebanon grappled with the combined effects of a lingering financial crisis and the government’s border lockdown to limit the spread of the COVID-19 virus, workers’ rights groups reported that tens of thousands of domestic workers, mostly Africans, were being abandoned by employers without money or their passports, leaving them destitute and unable to return home (Wuilbercq and Barkawi 2020).

In the U.S., among the many invisible “essential workers” who have been at the front line of the pandemic are farmworkers like Nancy Silva, a 43-year-old undocumented migrant from Mexico who picks oranges in California’s Central Valley. Undocumented farmworkers such as Silva have long coped with exploitative working conditions, made worse by anti-immigrant laws that discourage them from reporting abuses to the police. Silva now carries a piece of paper from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security recognizing her as a worker “critical to the food supply chain” (Jordan 2020). This alone, however, doesn’t address her heightened risk of virus infection as she works side by side with her fellow farmworkers or the precarity of her economic situation, exacerbated by the absence of labor protections for irregular migrant workers who have had to miss work or lost their jobs because of the pandemic (Jordan 2020; Justice for Migrant Women et al. n.d.).

We are a planet of people on the move, fueled by the emergence of cheaper and faster modes of travel, the increased mobility of capital across borders, widening socio-economic inequalities within and between states, and technological innovations that expand our knowledge of potential opportunities elsewhere, among many other factors. For those with sufficient resources, moving within or across borders may allow for enriching adventures or the pursuit of education or new jobs that enhance the prospect of socio-economic mobility. For others, there may be little choice but to leave home because of war, political repression, ecological scarcity, or natural disasters that cause devastation to their communities. But, as illustrated by the experiences of Córdova, the African domestic workers in Lebanon, and Silva, for tens of millions of people each year it is simply not possible to draw a clean line between movement that is chosen or compelled. Nor is it possible to consider the human rights significance of their movement if we only individualize their circumstances, focalizing personal histories, characteristics, and life conditions in lieu of attention to the power structures and complex dynamics of advantage and disadvantage of which we are all participants in some way (Fineman 2008, 16).

International human rights, first articulated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and elaborated in nine core human rights treaties, express the ethical belief that all humans deserve respect for our dignity and a minimum standard of treatment, with the rights we possess understood to be entitlements equally held by all, rather than privileges that must be earned or that we risk losing (Donnelly 2003, 8). It is indisputable that more than seven decades following the UDHR’s adoption human rights principles are routinely violated to some extent in nearly every country in the world, the observation of which has given rise to an expanding body of scholarship documenting the inadequacies, and irrelevance, of international human rights (e.g., Hopgood 2013; Moyn 2018; Posner 2014). The cases considered in this book offer further confirmation of how international human rights haven’t sufficiently evolved in response to shifts in state capacity, the exercise of power by non-state actors, and the emergence of threats to human dignity and well-being associated with deepening globalization and mobility. Contrary to endorsing the abandonment of human rights, however, the book instead revisits ongoing feminist¹ debates surrounding the relationship between gender and human rights to reflect on the possibilities of closing the sizable gap between human rights ideals and practices through ground-up advocacy, doing so through engaging feminist perspectives on the multifaceted – and highly scrutinized – issue of human trafficking.

Building on in-depth analyses of domestic servitude, commercial sex, and labor trafficking by military contractors, and grounded in intersectional feminist cosmopolitanism and feminist theorizing on vulnerability, precarity, and ethical interdependence, the book makes several overarching and interrelated contributions. As it explores what applying a feminist gender lens adds to our understanding of the structures and norms enabling trafficking, the book simultaneously considers the future of feminist rights advocacy. It calls for feminist scholars and advocates to look beyond states as the primary duty-bearers of human rights and the assumption that human rights are made meaningful mainly through the establishment and enforcement of legal rights at the national level, if the purposeful targeting of the social-structural sources of rights violations is to become possible. It questions the idea that “feminism” can be reduced to advocacy on behalf of women’s rights. It also encourages critical reflection on how divisions associated with feminist politics have impeded opportunities for the building of feminist solidarities across differences aimed at the realization of the human rights of all.

The references to “gender” and “human rights” in the book’s title signal its concern with the realization of gender justice. Historically, the language of gender justice has been taken to imply a focus on women – and women certainly are of central concern to this book and an important starting point; it is through feminist scholarship and advocacy on women’s rights that gender entered into international human rights discourses and practices. Gender justice as approached in the book, however, encompasses the achievement of full equality on the basis of gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, and sex characteristics, acknowledging how embedded norms of masculinity and femininity are implicated in rights infringements across the social categories of gender, sex, and sexuality. In the third decade of the 21st century, to equate gender justice with a narrow concern for the rights of women is out of step with contemporary feminist theorizing on the complexity and instability of identities. Relatedly, what runs through the book is the understanding that gender justice is not achievable through efforts to dismantle the gender hierarchy in isolation from other social hierarchies. In this, I build heavily on Black feminist contributions to theorizing on intersectionality,² emphasizing the interconnections between gender and other bases of identity and multiple systems of oppression, which in this book features attention to race, ethnicity, class, nationality, and migrant status.

Just as gender is intended to be understood broadly, so too are the references to “global” and “mobile.” The book engages but goes beyond the human rights significance of the physical movement of (gendered) people internally and across borders. Silva and the domestic workers from Africa made the decision to migrate internationally for the purposes of work with the main goal of improving their livelihood options, while for Córdova, the immediate impetus was to escape violence against transgender people in El Salvador and secure her physical and mental well-being. In each case, in the course of their migration experience, these individuals encountered blatantly discriminatory treatment and the denial of multiple human rights, including for Córdova the right to life. But while it may be possible to isolate specific individuals or institutions that bear clear responsibility for their mistreatment, doing so doesn’t go far enough if our objective is to work towards eradicating the conditions that allow – or even encourage – such abuses in the first place. The book’s emphasis on the achievement of gender justice within the context of the global, mobile era in which we are living is intended to allow for deliberation on the significance of the global circulation of ideas, values, and norms for who is recognized and treated as rights-bearing individuals and of the structures of inequality that are manifest in policies and practices that have globally felt ripple effects – structures we are participants in, directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, through our actions or inactions. It also aims to contribute to feminist efforts to build transnational coalitions that bridge differences, which is vital if the inequalities behind Córdova’s death, the abandonment of the African domestic workers, and the heavy burden borne by migrant workers such as Silva during the pandemic are to be countered.

Grounding Feminist Human Rights Debates: The Case of Human Trafficking

As the world prepared to mark the end of the first year of the 21st century, the UN adopted the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (UN General Assembly 2000). International concern for human trafficking didn’t spontaneously materialize at the turn of the new millennium. Instead, the international campaign against human trafficking goes back many decades – namely, to the late 19th century, when conservative social reformers and feminist activists put their deep ideological differences aside and jointly organized around their shared goal of preventing the sexual harm of women and girls. Contemporary scholars dispute the claims of rampant sexual exploitation that informed this early anti-trafficking campaign (Devereux 2000; Guy 2000, 157), and by the mid-20th century the issue had largely fallen off the international agenda. It resurfaced in the post–Cold War era, when persisting social anxieties over the sexuality of women and girls, intertwined with outdated notions of their intrinsic vulnerability, merged with a rising concern among states of the security threat posed by organized transnational criminal groups, widely understood (not unproblematically) by national and international political leaders to be the major driving force behind, and beneficiaries of, the contemporary traffic in human beings. The security lens through which states viewed trafficking is clearly signaled by the UN Trafficking Protocol’s attachment to the UN Convention on Transnational Organized Crime (UNODC 2004).

Despite the adoption of a series of international treaties on trafficking dating back to 1904, it was only with the protocol that consensus emerged among UN member states around the meaning of trafficking, which is defined under the protocol as:

the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harboring or receipt of persons, by means of the threat or use of force or other forms of coercion, of abduction, of fraud, of deception, of the abuse of power or of a position of vulnerability or of the giving or receiving of payments or benefits to achieve the consent of a person having control over another person, for the purpose of exploitation. Exploitation shall include, at a minimum, the exploitation of the prostitution of others or other forms of sexual exploitation, forced labor or services, slavery or practices similar to slavery, servitude or the removal of organs.

(UN General Assembly 2000, Article 3(a))

This definition highlights that trafficking...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Evolution of Feminist Engagements with Human Rights
• 3. The Politics of Human Trafficking
• 4. Revisiting Feminist Doubts About Human Rights
• 5. Commercial Sex, Human Rights, and Feminist Anti-Essentialism
• 6. Erasing Vulnerability: The Invisibility of Men as Trafficked Persons
• 7. Conclusion: Making the Unrealized Realizable
• Index