“Human Rights Protection, Democratic Deliberation”
59
2008: 118-123; Jaggar, 2006: 301-322). There is little serious
engagement with scholars within her liberal-feminist tradition
24
and no engagement at all with those from the radical-feminist
tradition.
25
Finally, given Nussbaum’s reliance upon Aristotle,
Marx, and John Stuart Mill as intellectual allies in her theory of
development in spite of long-standing feminist criticisms of these
thinkers (di Stefano, 1991: 147; Okin, 1979: 92, 147), Nussbaum’s
“feminist” line of argument appears to be mostly nominal.
If the critique is that Nussbaum has not sufficiently taken into
account the insights of gender studies, then an alternative ought to
be attempted. To this end, let me mention the approach that is
centered on gender: gender mainstreaming.
26
Paradoxically,
requiring analyses of United Nations treaties’, instruments’, and
programs’ impact on men and women has been showed to backfire:
“gender mainstreaming has stripped the feminist concept of
‘gender’ of any radical or political potential”; once accepted by the
mainstream, gender has become “defanged” (Charlesworth, 2005:
16). Thus, without attention to differences of context, by applying
the transformative and radical potential of gender to “all” the
paragraphs of the
Platform for Action
from the 1995 Beijing
conference dealing with education, health, victims of violence,
24
In her reply to Okin, Nussbaum responded to Okin’s criticism, but has since
rejected Okin’s “characterization” for being “inaccurate in a number of ways.”
Nussbaum has not specified what these inaccuracies are (2011: 205).
25
Nussbaum has responded to the work of Jonathan Wolff and Avner De-Shalit,
and to the comments of Louise Antony, Richard Arneson, Hilary Charlesworth,
and Richard Mulgan (2000b; 2011: 42-45). To my knowledge, these scholars are
not radical feminists.
26
Gender and gender mainstreaming do not lend themselves to a precise definition.
By my count, gender mainstreaming informs at least four areas of inquiry: (1)
feminist theory and practices, (2) as a practice within public policy and public
administration, (3) as analysis underpinning by a theory of the state, the political,
democracy, globalization, and (4) beyond the state, as gendered interests in and
against the state, which are articulated within epistemic communities that
combine expertise and advocacy across states such as the European Union and the
United Nations. My focus is mostly on (4).
