Cultural Models of Religion, Feminism, and the Effort to Advance Women’s Rights within the United Nations

• In Event: 405 - Regular Session. Transnational Social Movements

Abstract

This paper draws on interviews, field notes produced during UN sessions, and several hundred UN documents produced as part of the review of country compliance with one of the UN’s primary human rights conventions. Based on analysis of these three forms of data, this paper outlines preliminary findings about the nature of cultural models about religion and its relationship to women’s rights standards, which are present in the discourse of central officials involved in these UN review processes. These findings are then used to argue that the officials involved in these review processes play key roles in advancing feminist activism within the institutional structures within which they work (Katzenstein 1999) and that their approaches to religion and its relationship to women’s rights have important implications. In particular, the cultural models about religion they employ can provide insights for current efforts to revise feminist political theorizing (Reilly 2011), as well as to outline and critique the ways that transnational human rights institutions regulate and approach the concept of “religion.”

Author

• Shanna Corner, University of Notre Dame