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Title
'They would rather have the women who are humbled': Gendered citizenship and embodied rights in post-colonial Kenya |
Full text
http://hdl.handle.net/1885/148124 |
Date
2017 |
Author(s)
Kenny, Christina Mary |
Abstract
For all the effort and attention Kenyan women receive from the
international rights community and at times, from their own
government, human rights frameworks are not significantly
improving the lives of Kenyan women. Attempting to address this,
a great deal of work has been done on monitoring and evaluating
human rights based interventions, including tightening funding
structures, making recipient organisations more accountable to
donors, and assessing the progress of governments and
non-government organisations in promoting human rights based
reform. I take a different approach. Rather than assess
individual projects or goals of aid, my approach questions the
assumptions which underpin these interventions from their
conception.
Following Sally Engle Merry's work on the vernacularisation of
transnational gender rights projects, and taking Kenya as a case
study, I argue that the local histories, understandings and
hierarchies of gendered power must be understood in much more
nuanced and critical manner that we are doing presently. Further,
I contend that internationalist human rights discourses create
certain kinds of subjects and requires these subjects to behave
in particular ways. The current failure to recognize and make
space for individual and cultural complexity means that human
rights based interventions are only superficially affecting
relationships and power dynamics in women's lives, making
substantive, long term change very difficult.
My thesis is an interdisciplinary project, and combines an
engagement with scholarly literature on gender, post-colonial
feminism, human rights theory and practice, as well as Kenyan
history and historiography, with research gathered during 13
months of field work. My field work is based on focus groups and
interviews with women in Nairobi and rural areas around Lake
Victoria and engages with the lived experience of African women.
These discussions illustrate the ways in which the discourses of
international human rights in fact reproduce the very patterns,
structures, and hierarchies which are at the core of women's
disenfranchisement and marginalization.
This project historicises women's current experiences of human
rights through Kenya's late colonial and post-colonial history,
and follows these colonial legacies into the modern period
through four thematic cases: women as victims and objects of
cultural violence; myths of the sorority of African women; women
as victims of political and state violence; and women as actors
in national political processes. These four cases carry two
overarching concerns, firstly, that we need to challenge
ourselves to locate women's agency within their own politics
and goals, rather than through what Saba Mahmood describes as the
diagnostic and prescriptive lens of feminist analysis. And
secondly, we need to be vigilant that our continued attention to
the bodies of women does not re-inscribe the embodied-ness of
women, and the disembodied-ness of men. In centring the lived
experiences and views of Kenyan women, and historicising the
production of gender, I critically evaluate the efficacy of
modern human rights discourses and projects in local contexts,
contributing to the post-colonial feminist project which explores
the complex and intersecting dimensions of gender, race, and
culture. |
Subject(s)
Gender; women; Kenya; East Africa; politics; elections; late colonial history; post-colonial history; Wanjiku; civil and political rights; feminism; women's representation; public space; embodiment |
Language
en_AU |
Type of publication
Thesis (PhD) |
Repository
Canberra - Australian National University
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Added to C-A: 2018-11-20;14:09:05 |
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