Feminist critiques of the historical norms of international rights law seeks to destabilize the current system of IR Romany 93 Professor of Law, City University of New York Law School. This Article is part of a joint project with Professor Rhonda Copelon, who addresses gender-based violence as an egregious human rights violation. (Celina, “ARTICLE: WOMEN AS ALIENS: A FEMINIST CRITIQUE OF THE PUBLIC/PRIVATE DISTINCTION IN INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW”, 6 Harv. Hum. Rts. J. 87, 1993, Nexis Uni via the University of Michigan Library System, DOA: 7/13/24)//LFS – LMH

A feminist approach to human rights would incorporate a critical, political-historical assessment of both the emergence and hierarchization of human rights; it would insist upon the recognition of women's political and civil rights in order to liberate them from their social and economic subordination. In such a historicization of human rights,  [*96]  a feminist critique would demonstrate how the emergence of human rights derives legitimacy from sources and process doctrines which embrace political and moral choices played out through historically specific conceptions of justice, equality, and dignity. The critique would show how core concepts of human rights law, such as the dignity and personal integrity of human beings, have the imprint of the historical struggles of groups and individuals who bring about changes in the discursive and non-discursive conditions that ultimately realign power structures and thus generate legitimate legal rules. 43

A feminist critical historical review of those norms considered as jus cogens, for example, which achieve universal acclaim by virtue of their "protection of interests which are not limited to a particular state or group of states" but which "belong to the community as a whole," 44 must ask why women's issues do not belong to the international community and are relegated to either individual states or treaty law. A feminist critique must ask why white supremacy belongs to the "community" while male supremacy belongs to the individual state, why gender issues are deemed private within international society. 45

An historical feminist analysis acts to destabilize the legitimacy foundations embedded in the sources and process doctrines of international human rights law. Women's struggle for dignity, justice, and equality still needs to capture the attention of those legislators and adjudicators who do not see that women's civil and political rights in the private sphere are systematically abused as part of a global structure of gender subordination.