Document Type

Essay

Award Designation

First place

Publication Date

2019

Abstract

On January 21, 2017, masses of people around the globe gathered for one of the largest collections of public protest in history. It is estimated that over seven million people gathered to raise awareness of human rights violations towards several different groups. However, perhaps the largest common trope was echoed time and time again in the phrase, "women's rights are human rights." Conversations surrounding women's rights have been pushed to the forefront of human rights discourse in the recent past, and although there has certainly been a lot of progress towards the universal enforcement of women's rights, the role of bearing witness to modern day violations is still incredibly important. In his book The Work of Global Justice, Fuyuki Kurasawa notes that, ''public spaces have been transformed into veritable machines for the production of testimonial narratives and evidence." Thus, in the past century, bringing human rights violations to the forefront of conversation within public sphere has become a powerful tool in combating violations, which is especially true for the women's rights movement. Contextualizing the ways in which intersubjectivity, publicity, and transnationalism play into that act of bearing witness to women's rights abuses is critical in understanding why challenges, like silencing and indifference, arise and how they can be combated.

Disciplines

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Women's Studies

Comments

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