Confronting Global Gender Justice: Women's Lives, Human Rights

Confronting Global Gender Justice contains a unique, interdisciplinary collection of essays that address some of the most complex and demanding challenges facing theorists, activists, analysts, and educators engaged in the tasks of defining and researching women’s rights as human rights and fighting to make these rights realities in women’s lives.

With thematic sections on Complicating Discourses of Victimhood, Interrogating Practices of Representation, Mobilizing Strategies of Engagement, and Crossing Legal Landscapes, this volume offers both specific case studies and more general theoretical interventions. Contributors examine and assess current understandings of gender justice, and offer new paradigms and strategies for dealing with the complexities of gender and human rights as they arise across local and international contexts. In addition, it offers a particularly timely assessment of the effectiveness and limits of international rights instruments, governmental and nongovernmental organization activities, grassroots and customary practices, and narrative and photographic representations.

This book is a valuable resource for both undergraduate and graduate students in fields such as Gender or Women’s Studies, Human Rights, Cultural Studies, Anthropology, and Sociology, as well as researchers and professionals working in related areas.

Debra Bergoffen is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at George Mason University. Her book The Philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir: Gendered Phenomenologies, Erotic Generosities (1997), and her most recent articles, including "Exploiting the Dignity of the Vulnerable Body," evidence her ongoing concern with feminist theory, women’s rights and human rights.

Paula Ruth Gilbert is Professor of French, Canadian, and Women and Gender Studies at George Mason University. Her research covers: nineteenth-century French Studies; Quebec Studies; violence and gender and violent women; narrative, gender, and human rights. Her most recent book is Violence and the Female Imagination (2006).

Tamara Harvey is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. She is author of Figuring Modesty in Feminist Discourse Across the Americas, 1633-1700 (2008), and co-editor with Greg O’Brien of George Washington’s South (2003). Her research focuses on women and early America, with an emphasis on hemispheric studies.

Connie L. McNeely received the Ph.D. in Sociology from Stanford University and is currently on the faculty of the School of Public Policy at George Mason University. Her books have included Constructing the Nation-State (1995) and the edited volume Public Rights, Public Rules (1998). Her current research and most recent publications address various aspects of culture, politics, social theory, and inequality.