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Assignment 07

Spike Peterson and Laura Parisi spend this chapter critiquing previous androcentric views on gender and human rights. They argue that heterosexism is a more precise way of analyzing this relationship of gender difference and human rights. Heterosexism has been defined throughout history. Peterson and Parisi define heterosexism in terms of the institutionalization of heterosexuality being the only ‘normal’ sexual identity. In this way, heterosexism completely denies and negates any other form of sexuality. This idea stems from systemic masculine views and practices over time – making the male gender the prominent voice in these heterosexual relationships. Hierarchies, including gender, sexual, socio-economic, political, and familial hierarchies, are clearly outlined through heterosexism.

The authors explain how the state is “complicit in maintaining” heterosexism. For instance, women will have to continue to ‘rely on’ their husbands in heterosexual marriage because women do not get paid the same as men. I also think that because the state normalizes heterosexism, homosexuality is ‘abnormal’. We see this explicitly through the struggles of same-sex marriage laws throughout the world. State regulations on reproductive rights and property rights are other examples of how the state adds to the marginalization of women.

Androcentric ideas deem men as the ‘norm’ and women the ‘other’ or a ‘subcategory’ of men. Through this lens, feminists think of human rights as only being men’s rights, which exclude women completely. Women’s lives are not protected in this way. Peterson and Parisi argue that human rights practices reconfirm gender inequalities in the home by continuously perpetuating a division between public/state spheres and private/family spheres – holding the state accountable for both protecting and violate individual rights (134). Instead of merely adding ‘women’s rights’ to ‘human rights’ that already exist, heterosexism views ‘humans’ as only men and so this is not possible. In order to fight oppression, the authors think that we need to stop perpetuating gender difference by continuing to view the female as the ‘other’.