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Keerim Kim completed Assignment 07

In “Are women human? It’s not an academic question,” V. Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi assert that instead of analyzing human rights as based on androcentrism, we should focus on it in connection to heterosexism. They bring modernist references that assume men as the norm and universal being. From that view, women existed as a subcategory, and were naturally excluded. However, it is not only stemmed from the modern state system. Rather, the institutionalization of gendered relations and biased definition of human rights existed from when the western civilization started. The idea was dominant from Greek political theorizing, and became as a clear normalization since then. Therefore the foundational thoughts were institutionalized for a very long time and this is how feminists analyze the system. Then social inequality arouses naturally based on this idea. There were regulations on sexual activities and prevalence of masculinist laws. The asymmetry in male-centered world had been affecting every part of people’s life. Also, in androcentric feminists’ view, women’s subordination is accepted without a doubt and they deny all other gender identifications. This is problematic thought that justifies the discrimination between gender. According to their theory, gender binary is socially constructed and emphasized by influential scholars such as Freud and Marx. Feminist interrogations of social orders are related to their psychoanalytic and social structural explanations. Distinction of gender and institutionalization became the only norm of sexual identity and also constructed western and liberal definition of the term ‘family’. There is a difference between acknowledging the problem in androcentric way and heterosexist way. Peterson and Parisi argue that we should analyze group reproduction and state making in heterosexist way. In heterosexual contract, all notions such as binary gender identities, social contracts, language codification are tied together. In their sense of normalization and reproduction of gender identities, women acquire reproductive roles.