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
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
Biography
Laura A. Hebert is Associate Professor in Diplomacy and World Affairs at Occidental College. Her research interests center on gender, human rights, international law, and international organizations, with a geographic emphasis on sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia and a thematic focus on gender-based violence.
"Using the topic of human trafficking to unpack debates concerning the relationship between gender and human rights, Gender and Human Rights in a Mobile, Global Era presents a persuasive, multi-disciplinary argument for the sociality of human rights that locates obligation for the tasks of creating just societies with all members of society, not just ‘official actors.’ Hebert’s analysis centers the predicaments of those who are the most precarious in human rights advocacy and practice, while declining all the usual opportunities that attend the topic of human trafficking to lapse into moralism. The result is a compelling moral vision of expansive human flourishing."
Yvonne C. Zimmerman, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, Methodist Theological School
