å Sunday, March 26th, 2017

‘Human rights’ is a polite term for discussing heterosexism, like the way that women fight for equality while refusing to associate with feminism. It is a specification of vocabulary that is imperative and seemingly offensive to the privileged gender, without addressing androcentrism it is impossible to analyze gender differences in human rights as human rights. Heterosexism is so ingrained in our culture that Peterson and Parisi discuss the psychoanalytical and linguistic effects of the binary identities, most interestingly the male specific needs such as men leading the people and women giving birth to the people. The grouping of hierarchical roles further emphasizes the heterosexism in the separation of male and female, encouraging male bonding and discouraging female grouping beyond the mother-daughter perpetuation of oppression which assists in normalizing this behavior for the state.

This ‘masculinism’ of the early state formation goes beyond gender roles to include control of female education and reproductive rights as well as female sexual behavior, with the invention of writing transforming at the same time the influence on human history is profound. Materially women are not synonymous with citizens in definitions of early political rights, separating male and female in the public sphere of the state. Conceptually this denigrates rights of women to the private sphere, in subordination to male self-determination and completely dismissing female agency. Internationally this division is more obvious because most law making is still made by men which continues the state’s complicity in gender inequalities, the female irrationality stereotype persists often keeping women from challenging the status quo in the public arena. By the state’s denial of female personhood private abuses of power are normalized, domestic abuse and sexual assaults are widely underreported because the trauma of reporting is often worse than the initial victimization.

Marginalization in the home translates into the workplace through unequal pay, denial of equal credit and less job security during layoffs. Denial of heterosexism leaves women with the weight of invisible contributions to the state without adequate protection from exploitation by the state. Without looking at heterosexism as it applies to human rights we cannot create a path for feminine independence from masculine dependence, state dependence or female competition for agency and how it applies to all people categorized as other.