“First, human rights literature relies on a framework of a modernized first world that should go in and rescue, civilize and liberate those facing yet another crisis in the third world, always imagined as a ‘region of aberrant violence’. Second, human rights discourse presumes women only as individual, autonomous beings who can be rescued, rather than as members of families or other group identities. This demonizes socioeconomically disempowered men in particular ways as the oppressors of women, pits marginalized groups against and in competition with one another, and promotes international organizations as the saviors when marginalized men, as a group, also lack systematic access to resources and decision-making power. Third, this paradigm presumes that women can be identified as a group. In other words, to argue the collective rights of women ‘assumes women live their lives solely as women, a universalizing move that ignores the fact that women are not all gendered in the same ways’”
— Elora Halim Chowdhury on the silences embedded within the universalising rhetoric of human rights (via kawrage)
