Abstract
The years since the UN adopted the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) have seen a process of global norm setting on women’s and human rights. Yet, much of this process frames social change surrounding gender-based violence as a problem of “legal rights” or “right consciousness,” of developing an understanding of seemingly universal ideals, and where the Global South is largely seen as needing to catch up to Global North standards. But the meaning of gender and womanhood is not uniform, men and women exist in particular contexts, and the relationship between local and global dynamics of social change is complex.
These struggles are the focus of The Prism of Human Rights by Karin Friederic. The book engages deeply with the question of how “global ideas about human rights, and especially women’s rights, are understood, negotiated and acted of by people” in a secluded, rural coastal village in northwest Ecuador (p. 7). In so doing, it addresses the tensions around gender violence, the social pressure to become “modern” and “developed,” and the way very specific cultural contexts—including their history of gender politics—frame the issue. It also underscores that violence is produced through the economic, the social, and the political, and explains why awareness of gender violence as wrong does not translate to the eradication of such violence.
The book relies heavily on Sally Merry’s work on the “vernacularization” of human rights discourse, that is, how it is translated into local contexts and terms. Friederic takes this cultural perspective to examine gender violence as a starting point for an analysis of the political economy of gender and family relations. It is an ambitious project that manages to explain much more than rights awareness of individual women in a particular setting in Ecuador. More importantly, it situates gender violence as an interpersonal form of violence embedded in a political and economic context, and foregrounds how men and women engage in and make meaning of it. This in itself is a contribution to the literature on women’s rights and social change dynamics.
Another contribution is the thoroughness of the research. Friederic’s approach is both comprehensive and reflexive, and underscores that violence is socially constructed. The work is also methodologically sound, based on an ethnography spanning 20 years that saw her interacting with the community that she examines as a volunteer, a development practitioner, an activist, and a scholar. This experience allows Friederic to illustrate the way human rights develop meaning on the ground in local places, and how vernacularization operates in practice—with men and women interpreting “newly circulating discourses of rights that reframe the relationships between masculinity, femininity, violence, and protection” (p. 25).
The book moves progressively from a description of everyday life and gender norms in the rural Ecuadorian locality that serves as base for the research here presented (chapter 1) and an examination of the social and political life of the individuals of the village, as well as the tensions and anxieties between masculinity and femininity there (chapter 2), to local women’s real experiences of violence (chapter three). This third chapter constitutes the core of the book, underscoring the multiples layers of gender violence with four powerful case studies illustrating the many forms of violence against women—physical, economic, psychological, social, sexual—and how they intersect and reinforce one another. The testimonies of Marta, Sofía, Teresa, and Paola and the analysis of Friederic draw out that the interpersonal violence these women endure is always interlocked with structural violence that also make them vulnerable to economic, political, and cultural abuses.
This sets up an analysis that puts vernacularization front and center, as shown in an examination of the effects and the effectiveness of human right interventions raging from transnational to local scales (in chapter four), and how development strategies on gender and women relate to and conflate discourses on modernity and shift in the relationship between the state and the community.
While each chapter offers a conclusion summarizing the main takeaways of the preceding pages, the conclusion of the overall book offers an informed critique of current human rights practice and suggestions of concrete strategies for improving outcomes on the ground that include paying more consideration to structural violence and everyday experiences of women. Paraphrasing Mark Goodale’s work on vernacularization, Friederic remind us that human rights do not live in closed systems but rather “they exist in a state of becoming” (p. 166), and thus it is key to understand what human rights means to different people and local subjectivities.
Footnotes
Correction (September 2024):
Book Review updated to correct the name “Katie Friederic” to “Karin Friederic” in the following paragraph “These struggles are the focus of The Prism of Human Rights. . . .” (p. 475).