patriarchal narratives drive women out of control of their lives – international law conversions and praxis of revolutions – women are shut out without deep interrogations
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
Conceiving of international legal argument as a dialogic framework 190 would create a significant methodological and substantive tool for subjecting the interaction of "sources," "process," and "substance" doctrines to substantial deviation. A dialogue that incorporates a feminist understanding of social arrangements and legal argument as part of a critique of international law and the human rights field would help to undo the repressive nature of these three doctrines and thereby enable law's transformative potential to run its course.
The patriarchal narrative which divorces the economic and social framework from the political and civil framework generates a story of "civility" and citizenship that neglects the socioeconomic structures in which women's subordination occurs. It promotes the demarcation of social into public and private spheres. It creates a coerced exile of the experiences of women in the rights framework. This narrative must [*125] be the subject of a reconstituted dialogue which brings to the fore the ideological nature of such constructions and which creates conditions for a reasoned construction of alternatives.
Women, as aliens within such a system, must create a dialogue which avoids the one-dimensionality that currently infects the human rights discourse. Patriarchal domination is a state of being which goes beyond material conditions of subordination; women are also stripped of the "psychic, linguistic and textual vehicles of resistance." 191 International society is an enveloping silence where actors who mirror masculine world views operate unhindered by the need to provide discursive justifications of their authority and who do not disclose to the "citizens-readers" (by mystifying legal discourse) the exclusionary nature of the master script.
The legitimation of human rights discourse therefore rests on the renunciation of the hegemonic communicative competence held by the few. Ideal speech situations which create the conditions for transformation require that actor-participants enjoy more or less equal chances to participate effectively in norm-constituting dialogues. Such conditions enable women to recapture control over their lives. Law as a site of struggle becomes debureaucratized and deinsulated from the barriers of expertise. Communicative competence for the alien woman requires a rejection of a language of silence that only a few can master and requires renewed political speaking. This renewed dialogue gives all participants mobilizing insights which depose the structured silence enthroned by the ideological constructions perpetuated by the praxis of historical elites.