Feminist Human Rights

In Feminist Human Rights: A Political Approach, Kristen Hessler argues that the proper task of philosophical human rights theory is to theorize the multiple, contested moral visions of human rights that animate the practice itself. Drawing on a broadly pragmatist methodology, Hessler demonstrates that unjust social hierarchies concealed by entrenched ideologies can be exposed by the activism of marginalized groups for their own human rights, and the resulting understandings of human rights morality can then be realized in law. This more inclusive process both overcomes a significant obstacle to fulfilling human rights in practice and contributes to a fuller theoretical understanding of human rights morality in the abstract. Hessler closely analyzes an extended case study of the jurisprudence on crimes of rape and sexual violence in the ad hoc international criminal tribunals for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia. By centering the voices of women testifying about their experiences of violence, and insisting that their experiences deserved accountability, the tribunals initiated a process of legal and social reform. This complex process constitutes a form of social moral discovery that illuminates human rights morality in light of long-ignored realities of women’s experiences.