ABSTRACT
The relationship between women’s rights and human rights has become increasingly problematic due to the cultural relativism stimulated by the anthropological and historical work of many cultural studies1 and feminist theories around the world. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the realm of the feminist academic world2 where there are two distinct positions: those who seek a universal normative frame and, thus, regard rights as an important part of the gender problem; and those who consider that rights are a Western invention which cannot be translated to non-Western cultures. Many feminists, for example, were ready to accept certain cultural practices that inevitably meant the domination and oppression of women, and their arguments were formulated on the grounds of ‘our’ incapacities to understand other cultures because of ‘our Western prejudices’. Susan Moller Okin’s (1999) reply to these voices was a stark denunciation of all cultures as carrying ‘patriarchal seeds’. However, confronted by the challenges of globalization, academic feminism finds itself at an important historical moment of revision. We need to think about justice and rights in a global frame and we need to do it in such a way that world views do not pose a problem to the defence of the rights of dissenters or of women. The right to have rights must be translated into a principle whereby people’s claims for recognition and justice can be addressed in a transcultural way.
