Paper/Proposal Title
Miami Dade County’s CEDAW Ordinance: A Tool of Local Transformation toward Gender Justice?
Location
Room S2060, Curran Place
Start Date
12-2-2021 11:30 AM
End Date
12-2-2021 1:00 PM
Keywords
gender equality, local human rights, Cities4CEDAW, Miami Dade County
Abstract
Cities4CEDAW represents a new form of activism in the United States, where a global framework – the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, of 1979) – is used in local contexts to advance gender equality. After San Francisco became the first municipality to adopt a CEDAW ordinance in 1998, Cities4CEDAW was founded in 2013 and has since triggered a significant number of initiatives that work with the CEDAW framework locally. This paper takes a scholar-activist perspective on the Cities4CEDAW dynamics in Miami Dade County, Florida.
We start with an overview of the literature on global-to-local activism and the potentials and obstacles for transformation it has identified. We then trace local dynamics in Miami Dade County with a view to concrete steps taken, assessments of the actors directly involved in the County’s CEDAW ordinance as well as of local social justice organizations that focus on gender among other dimensions of discrimination. We find that the framework has had some impact that is considered significant by those directly involved, but that nevertheless has to be described as limited, especially due to lack of resources within local government structures, lack of wider and strategic community involvement, and an understanding of women’s rights that does not resonate with the intersectional realities of discrimination in the county. We draw conclusions from this process for a more transformative model of intervention in a local context whose extreme disparities have been exacerbated by the gendered impact of pandemic.
Author/Speaker Biographical Statement(s)
Susanne Zwingel is Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Florida International University. Her research interests are women’s human rights and their translation, women’s movements and public gender policies around the world, global governance and gender, and feminist and post-colonial IR theories. She is author of Translating International Women’s Rights: The CEDAW Convention in Context (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and co-editor of Feminist Strategies in International Governance with Elisabeth Prügl and Gülay Caglar (Routledge, 2013). Her work has appeared in a number of edited volumes as well as a wide range of journals including International Feminist Journal of Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Politics and Gender, International Studies Review, and Third World Thematics. She currently works on transnational gender norm translation in South Florida and the Caribbean. Jennifer Hill is an organizer, attorney, teacher, and writer working to advance worker and immigrant rights and economic security for all. She has worked throughout the U.S. South to build worker power, address structural racism and gender inequality, and improve labor standards. She has served as an organizer, advocate, and strategic advisor with workers’ centers, labor unions, immigrant rights organizations, and international labor solidarity groups. Hill has worked with nannies, homecare workers, housekeepers and janitors, and others to take on labor trafficking and wage theft. Hill, a former Skadden Fellow, is coeditor with Francisco Valdes and Steven Bender of Critical Justice: Systemic Advocacy in Law and Society, a new legal studies textbook of the Latino Critical Theory (LatCrit) movement.
Miami Dade County’s CEDAW Ordinance: A Tool of Local Transformation toward Gender Justice?
Room S2060, Curran Place
Cities4CEDAW represents a new form of activism in the United States, where a global framework – the UN Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW, of 1979) – is used in local contexts to advance gender equality. After San Francisco became the first municipality to adopt a CEDAW ordinance in 1998, Cities4CEDAW was founded in 2013 and has since triggered a significant number of initiatives that work with the CEDAW framework locally. This paper takes a scholar-activist perspective on the Cities4CEDAW dynamics in Miami Dade County, Florida.
We start with an overview of the literature on global-to-local activism and the potentials and obstacles for transformation it has identified. We then trace local dynamics in Miami Dade County with a view to concrete steps taken, assessments of the actors directly involved in the County’s CEDAW ordinance as well as of local social justice organizations that focus on gender among other dimensions of discrimination. We find that the framework has had some impact that is considered significant by those directly involved, but that nevertheless has to be described as limited, especially due to lack of resources within local government structures, lack of wider and strategic community involvement, and an understanding of women’s rights that does not resonate with the intersectional realities of discrimination in the county. We draw conclusions from this process for a more transformative model of intervention in a local context whose extreme disparities have been exacerbated by the gendered impact of pandemic.
