In the Name of What? Defusing the Rights-Culture Debate by Revisiting the Universals of Both Rights and Culture

Abstract

This article unravels the perceived dichotomy between universal human and women's rights and apparently misogynist cultural claims and practices. It does so by mainly focusing on the ‘universal’ side of the dichotomy. In pursuing this argument, it first describes how recent feminist work has gone beyond a critique and transformation of the content of universals and suggested the transformation of both the status and structure of universals. At the same time, feminists find it useful to retain universals, not because they are in fact universal, but rather because of the political utility of their universalising thrust. This radical feminist critique of Western universal ideals is further fleshed out with the help of Aristotle's notion of phronesis. Thereafter, the culture side of the perceived dichotomy is briefly considered and it is suggested that cultural claims often function much like universalist claims, only on a smaller scale, and that the same conditions apply to their invocation in any specific concrete situation that should apply in the case of Western universals, as indicated in the first part of the article. The theoretical considerations are throughout demonstrated using mostly South African examples.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge the financial research support received from the South African National Research Foundation during 2012. Also thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of Politikon, as well as to Azille Coetzee, for their constructive comments.

Notes

See on this topic also the important work by Douzinas (2000, 2007).

Common law in Zimbabwe outlaws homosexual activity. The Zimbabwean Criminal Law (Codification and Reform) Act 23/2004 broadens the definition of sodomy.

The appropriation of the power of female sexuality and reproductive capacity for other, even misogynist projects seems to have been pervasive throughout recorded history, and definitely not restricted to so-called non-Western cultures. In this regard, Irigaray's (in Speculum of the Other Woman, 1985) discussion of Plato's cave myth read as an overcoming of the maternal origin (the womb as a dark cave of imprisonment) and my own (Du Toit 2009, 161–166) discussion of Socrates' appropriation of birth metaphors to boost the status of his philosophical activity may serve as examples.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Louise Du Toit

Department of Philosophy, University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch, South Africa.