On Their Own by Goebel Allison;

Author:Goebel, Allison;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2015-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

CONCLUSIONS

This discussion leads to a qualified acknowledgement of some positive outcomes for women and gender justice under a rights framework in South Africa, but also a recognition of the powerful social and cultural currents that hamper full achievement and recognition of women as equal rights bearing citizens. The effect of programs such as housing subsidies and social welfare, while addressing constitutional rights, also work to reduce women to their roles as mothers and care givers, compromising their position as full and equal persons. The state is also hampered by neoliberal pressures under globalization in its ability to deliver on its constitutional obligations. Rights are indeed an incomplete vehicle to address the “complexities that these conditions create for women” (Gouws 2005a, 2). While women are recognized, or “seen” by the state in some of their difference and their particular needs, the kind of citizenship produced through the major mechanisms of connection between women and the state (housing subsidy and welfare) move the discourse from “rights” to “needs.” This system produces women primarily as “the vulnerable” and the needy, not as rights bearing citizens actively engaging in their own transformation and empowerment. In Ferguson’s terms, women may be viewed more as clients of state dispensing patronage under African communitarian values than as rights-bearing citizens (Ferguson 2013).

Despite these critiques, few scholars (or activists) are prepared to abandon rights as a strategy or as an aspect of citizenship. Wendy Brown, writing about feminist rights in the United States, emphasizes that rights claims are one of the most powerful discourses in the liberal democratic imagination. Rights claims are deeply problematic and contradictory, and “almost always serve as a mitigation -- but not a resolution -- of subordinating powers” and “vanquish neither the regime nor its mechanisms of reproduction” (Brown 2002, 422). Further, rights specified to women in North America have often fenced them in as defined by their subordinated status, and while offering some protection, usually do not “enable the escape of the subordinated from the site of that violation” (ibid.). Nevertheless, rights offer something irresistible. Borrowing from Gayatri Spivak, Brown indicates that even within the limits of equality rights, “we cannot not want” them (421). Rights constitute the language of liberal democracy, an imperfect and incomplete means through which injustice can be made visible: “Rights function to articulate a need, a condition of lack or injury, that cannot be fully redressed or transformed by rights, yet within existing political discourse can be signified in no other way” (431).

Similarly, returning to the South African context, Desai acknowledges that “there would be little civic resistance at all today in South Africa if it was not for expectations of dignity, human rights and a dignified life” (2002, 146). As Ballard et al. point out, “acknowledging second-generation rights in the constitution allows for material gains to be constructed as rights” (2006a, 17). Zuern (2011) also points out that most community based protests in South Africa focus on material needs, or socioeconomic rights. Thus, while rights-based discourses are of

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