Description
Product ID: | 9781496234438 |
Product Form: | Paperback / softback |
Country of Manufacture: | GB |
Series: | Expanding Frontiers: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality |
Title: | Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 |
Authors: | Author: Giusi Russo |
Page Count: | 306 |
Subjects: | Gender studies: women and girls, Gender studies: women, International relations, International relations |
Description: | Select Guide Rating Giusi Russo examines the United Nations’ gendered politics of colonialism and decolonization from its founding until the mid-1970s. Women, Empires, and Body Politics at the United Nations, 1946–1975 tells the story of how women’s bodies were at the center of the international politics of women’s rights in the postwar period. Giusi Russo focuses on the United Nation Commission on the Status of Women and its multiple interactions with the colonial and postcolonial worlds, showing how—depending on the setting and the inquiry—liberal, imperial, and transnational feminisms could coexist. Russo suggests that in the early stages of identifying discriminating agents in women’s lives, UN commissioners overlooked the nation-state and went through a process of fighting discrimination without identifying the discriminator. However, it was the focus on empire that allowed for a clear identification of how gender constructs were instrumental to state politics and the exclusion of women. An emphasis on colonial practices also generated a focus on the body and radically shifted the commission’s politics from formal equality to a gender-based equilibrium of rights that emphasized practice rather than law. Through a multidisciplinary approach, Russo looks at the women living under colonial and postcolonial systems as the key actors in defining the politics of women’s rights at the UN. |
Imprint Name: | University of Nebraska Press |
Publisher Name: | University of Nebraska Press |
Country of Publication: | GB |
Publishing Date: | 2023-03-01 |