Gender Equality, Citizenship and Human Rights

Pauline Stoltz, Marina Svensson, Sun Zhongxin, Qi Wang, Pauline Stoltz, Marina Svensson, Sun Zhongxin, Qi Wang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136990670
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

This comparative volume examines the ways in which current controversies and political, legal, and social struggles for gender equality raise conceptual questions and challenge our thinking on political theories of equality, citizenship and human rights.

Bringing together scholars and activists who reflect upon challenges to gender equality, citizenship, and human rights in their respective societies; it combines theoretical insights with empirically grounded studies. The volume contextualises feminist political theory in China and the Nordic countries and subsequently puts it into a global perspective. It tackles a complex set of tensions across a dense and shifting landscape and addresses issues including labour, health, democracy, homosexuality, migration and racism.

By cutting across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of comparative politics, gender studies, human rights and also those interested in Scandinavian and Asian politics.

Part I
Gender equality, citizenship and human rights

Introduction to Part I

Setting the stage

Pauline Stoltz

Bridging the gap between academia and activism is an old theme in feminist theory and practice. How can (feminist) academic research be useful in human rights law work and public policy debates? This section starts with two chapters providing personal narratives of women who are both well-known academics and controversial activists in their respective societies. Ai Xiaoming is a professor of Chinese Language and Literature in China, a documentary film-maker and a women’s rights activist. Tiina Rosenberg is professor of Gender Studies in Sweden, queer activist and co-founder of the political party ‘Feminist Initiative’, a party that she recently left.

The interviews illustrate some of the current obstacles faced by feminist activists in China and Sweden in their efforts to obtain social change and gender equality. Rosenberg and Ai, as well as human rights lawyer Sharon Hom in the third chapter, are deeply embedded in specific local struggles and face different socio-political realities. They also often face similar obstacles. Challenging prescribed gender roles and power relations is not only seen as upsetting to the political establishment and society at large, but can also be difficult to accept for more traditional women activists. Both Ai and Rosenberg have thus found themselves the targets of harassment—as activists and public intellectuals—by different groups in their respective societies.

What is controversial may differ between respective societies and may also differ over time. The two interviews show that how we react to injustices and what strategies we use to fight them depend on individual choices as well as upon our socio-political context. Both Rosenberg and Ai made a deliberate decision to leave the relatively peaceful confines of academia for political struggles on other arenas. Whereas Rosenberg became disillusioned by the party political arena and decided to take part in public debate in other ways, Ai has continued her activism by making documentaries and signing charters such as Charter 08 calling for political and democratic reform, while increasingly finding herself a target of official harassment.

Ai, Rosenberg and Hom not only take part in local struggles, but are also part of transnational and global communities of feminist activists. This gives shape and support to both their theoretical and their practical and political endeavours. The relations between local, transnational and global expressions of feminism are discussed in all four contributions in this part of the book.

Hom has also traversed the academic and the political in her different roles as legal scholar, participant in legal training activities and, currently, as executive head of Human Rights in China, an international NGO working for human rights in China. Her experiences confirm Siim’s more theoretical discussions on transnational feminism in Chapter 4. Events such as the NGO Forum at the 1995 UN intergovernmental Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing create possibilities for women activists to come together and put human rights on the political agenda. The challenge is to concurrently develop strategies for social change that are sensitive to inequalities between women, such as differences in economic and political resources, to power structures in gender relations which are due to diversities in identities and belongings, as well as to different political realities in respective societies.

Siim uses the international women’s movement for women’s rights as human rights as a paradigmatic case through which both the potentials and problems of transnational feminism can be discussed. She discusses how political globalisation processes have enabled feminists to influence the public agenda at the international level (if only to a certain extent).

The differences between women, notably in terms of the intersections of gender and ‘race’, have been the focus of many feminist debates. Women’s rights can be discussed as human rights, but the idea of a relatively coherent notion of ‘women’ as a crucial element of the raison d’être of feminist politics is not self-evident. This has been a sensitive issue, as feminist scholars ultimately share a commitment to social change which demands a strong relationship between feminist theory and practice. We can ask then how the universality of human rights can be combined with the particularity of our different lives. The debate concerns the frustration over an impasse which could be described as a paradox of visibility. In order to make claims which enable feminists to visualise women, a definition of ‘women’ is made which is automatically exclusionary in itself. Certain differences between women are often neglected and ignored; thereby certain groups of women are always excluded (Stoltz 2000:32).

As we will see in Part II of this book, this dilemma becomes particularly obvious when discussing the positions of migrant women in society. The necessity to rethink notions of citizenship beyond the nation state has become increasingly pressing in both China and the Nordic countries. Feminist debates about globalisation and women’s rights have raised critical questions about the power and authority of different categories of women to represent themselves in local, national and global struggles for equality and justice. This can be recognised in the political and legal tensions between state-based citizenship and human rights. These tensions lead Siim to focus on the ways in which the globalisation of rights necessitates a rethinking of the notion of citizenship beyond the nation state. She suggests that a multi-layered notion of citizenship that connects rights and duties at different levels provides a good starting point for developing a transnational approach to both citizenship and democracy.

The authors in this section encourage us to bridge theory, practice, academia and activism in the field of gender equality, citizenship and human rights. The fact that their insights are drawn from different socio-political realities shows how important it is to contextualise current debates on these three issues. The importance of an intersectional approach also becomes obvious. The different chapters clearly show not only how difficult work for gender equality is, but also the many similarities and common concerns feminist activists in China and the Nordic societies share with each other.

Reference

Stoltz, P. (2000) About Being (T)here and Making a Difference. Black Women and the Paradox of Visibility, Lund Political Studies 115, Lund: Lund University, Department of Political Science.

1
‘It is the people who serve the government’

Interview with Ai Xiaoming

Cecilia Milwertz

Ai Xiaoming is a feminist academic and human rights activist. She is Professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and initiator and head of the Sex/Gender Education Forum at the Sun Yat-sen (Zhongshan) University in Guangdong Province. Professor Ai is an avid supporter of struggles to claim the rights of the oppressed, discriminated and marginalized. She is an outspoken critic of injustice, and she uses documentary films as a central medium in her work. The first film she was involved in was the documentary ‘The Vagina Monologues: Stories from China’ about the staging of the play ‘The Vagina Monologues’ at her university. She arranged for the translation of the play into Chinese together with the Stop Domestic Violence Network, an NGO, and she brought together students and fellow teachers to set up the performance. The documentary film showed how the performance was used to start discussions with audiences to critically reflect on dominant gender roles and relations. The majority of Professor Ai’s films document the lives of ordinary people in China. They include topics such as the stmggles of villagers fighting against a corrupt village director, the lives of people living with HIV/AIDS, and the efforts of a mother insisting on an investigation of what the police had defined as her daughter’s natural death. Professor Ai also leads a film-making programme for NGOs. This interview took place as an email exchange in July-August 2007 (For previous interviews with Ai Xiaoming in English, see Thornham 2008 and Wang 2005).

The government follows Chairman Mao’s words

‘Serve the people wholeheartedly’

The people follow the expectations

How many sufferings do you understand?

(Poem and translation by Ai Xiaoming 2005)

CECILIA MILWERTZ (CM): The slogan ‘Serve the people’ used to be prominently visible in huge characters on the inner and outer walls of public buildings. Smaller versions of the slogan were printed on everyday items such as cups and canvas bags. Since the economic reforms of 1978, advertisements for a huge variety of consumer goods rather than political slogans are now displayed in public spaces. In your poem you have used the slogan in relation to the Taishi village case in Guangdong province in which villagers accused the village committee director of corruption. They requested his dismissal and launched a petition to elect a new director. Following the arrest of villagers and their legal advisors, government commitment to grassroots democracy was seriously questioned. Why do you invoke Chairman Mao and a slogan that derives from the Maoist period of the People’s Republic of China (1949–78) in relation to the Taishi village case that took place in 2005?

AI XIAOMING (AXM): The poem was printed on the back cover of the documentary Taishi Village (Ai 2005). Most often the back cover of a documentary provides a short text describing the content of the film. However, we couldn’t write one for this film because the Taishi Village election had become a highly sensitive issue in Guangdong province and no public discussion was permitted. Therefore, I wrote a text in the format of the lyrics of a pop song. I had just started editing the film when I wrote down these sentences and they actually correspond to our editing clues. ‘Serve the people’ is such a popular saying from Mao Zedong that all government officials are familiar with it. Unfortunately, in reality, government officials are used to being served by people rather than vice versa. In other words, it is the people who serve the government. Any disobedience from people is regarded as anti-government activity and as a serious political crime.

During the Taishi elections, the local government agreed to initiate impeachment procedures and they came to the village, demonstrating an attempt to ‘serve the people’. But how could they ‘serve the people’ by sending police armed with high-pressure water hoses against the people? I had to ask the question: have you ever realized the civilians’ sufferings when you claim you ‘serve the people’?

CM: Your keynote ‘speech’ at the Second Sino-Nordic Women and Gender Studies Conference, held in Sweden in August 2005, consisted of a showing of the first three parts of the documentary film Garden in Heaven on the Huang Jing case of date rape (Ai and Hu 2005). I would like to talk about your work as an academic and activist, taking this case as a starting point and moving back to previous cases and forward to other cases you have been involved in since then. I know that your view is that women’s studies are closely linked to social activism in the sense that an important feminist goal is to transform society and eliminate injustice. Your position is that you cannot teach theories of subordination and gender discrimination in your classes at university and then not follow up in practice outside of the classroom. You have to actively oppose injustices that are taking place in society. So I would like to ask you how it is possible to be as openly confrontational in the Chinese political context as you are? How do you dare to stand up and voice your opinion so clearly? We have heard of others who have documented suffering and injustices of the people in rural China. Take for instance the book Will the Boat Sink the Water?: The Life of Chinese Peasants by Chen Guidi and Wu Chuntao (2006). The book was banned and led to legal prosecution of the authors; additionally one of the authors lost his job. How is it possible for you to engage in activism that is so directly political and confrontational?

AXM: The Sun Zhigang case was my first encounter with public affairs.

[In 2003 the young migrant Sun Zhigang was beaten to death by police in Guangzhou. The case led to the abolishment of the Detention and Repatriation regulations. See Pan 2008 for a vivid description of the case.]

At that time, I voiced my opinion publicly without any awareness of the possibility of pressure from above. However, there has been increasingly more pressure as I have become involved with more cases, and after the Taishi case I have even been placed on a blacklist as someone who requires intense supervision. This is totally beyond anything I had imagined. But with my deep involvement in various social problems, I have come to realize there must be someone to confront and solve these problems. We have to bring knowledge of these problems to more people and we have to encourage the government to listen to the voice of disadvantaged groups.

How has this been possible? I don’t think I am unusually courageous. The reasons might be as follows: First, in order to make documentaries, I have to be present and aware of the problems. Then, once I am aware of a problem, I like to promote its solution. Take HIV/AIDS as an example, which is a problem of life or death. Third, I have no way to retreat. I can retreat if I am wrong. But how would I be able to withdraw if I have done nothing wrong? Fourth, our work is not comparable to the fate of the book by Chen ...