ABSTRACT
Despite the wider recognition that Indigenous women’s rights are human rights within the meaning of international law mechanisms and legal practices, 1 Indigenous women continue to struggle in local contexts to achieve a minimum level of state support to alter colonial and nation-state policies that have contributed to their cultural dislocation and social marginalization, and to convince nation-state actors that gender discrimination, including violence, 2 is socially constructed rather than culturally normative. The ‘indivisibility’ of women’s human rights that guides their implementation at the nation-state level rests on the understanding that the infringement of one right or category denies women access to other rights to which they are entitled and withholds from them a diversity of social choices through which to achieve their full participation in all aspects of society (Otto 2002, 4–5). Women’s substantive equality, as a goal of feminist activism, requires that gender-inclusive measures be adopted, rather than gender-neutral mechanisms, to account for the ‘economic, social, and cultural differences that gender makes’ in order to ‘prohibit differentiations’ that maintain ‘women’s secondary status’ (ibid., 47). Remedying women’s subordination entails implementing policies that interpret human rights from the vantage point of women, while also eliminating ‘structural impediments [such as] entrenched disadvantage, gender stereotypes, and hierarchies’ (ibid., 50–51) so that women may be free in their personhood from institutionalized forms of gender exploitation. By fostering the participation of women through local practices that advance the ‘indivisibility’ of their human rights and by developing mechanisms grounded in the specificity of their experiences, feminist human rights advocates contend that states may implement human rights mechanisms that are ‘fully gender inclusive’ and more representative of the ‘substantive equality’ (ibid., 50) that women have been denied.
