Doing transnational feminism, transforming human rights: The emancipatory possibilities revisited

This article contributes to cross-disciplinary engagement with the idea of transnationality through a discussion of transnational feminisms. In particular, it reviews and responds to some of the more critical readings of the women’s human rights paradigm and its role in underpinning, or not, emancipatory transnational feminisms in a context of increasingly fragmenting globalisation. The author considers two broad categories of critical readings of transnational women’s human rights: anti-universalist and praxis-oriented. This includes discussions of recent feminist articulations of the ‘cultural legitimacy thesis’ and ‘vernacularisation’ and of obstacles to contesting the oppressions of neo-liberal globalisation through human rights feminisms. Ultimately, the author argues that the emancipatory possibilities of human rights-oriented transnational feminisms reside in dialogic, solidarity-building feminist praxis tied to transnational processes of counter-hegemonic (re)interpretation and (re)claiming of human rights from previously excluded positions.