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2. While referring to Moira Gatens’ social imaginaries, critically reflect on the following proposition: it is proper that women’s rights be set in social organizations, institutional structures, and cultural traditions and understandings.

PowerPoint:

a mind set problem with political economic and social consequences

Sexual difference - public vs. private

Most violations take place in the private realm which means it escapes public scrutiny and state reach

This invisibility means the perpetrators are not held accountable

What it means to be a man or a woman is set in social organisation, institutional structures, cultural representation, ideals, and understandings of self and others

Our own fictions are made real. We live them (facebook), we structure social and cultural life through them, and we punish those who transgress or question these fictions

imagination is nurtured - creates webs of meaning - engagement with reality takes place

The Social Imaginary - The ways in which a community governs and imagines itself become embedded, over time, in institutions, language, behaviour and social norms that constrain action and determine meaning, independently of the wishes of individuals

Societal, cultural, institutional barriers that have been made possible and that are nurtured by large social narratives including education, taken for granted positional this is the way reality works in our society, attitudinal positions that are often in question

The way we structure ourselves and Institutions are supported by large social narratives (education, social media), imaginaries, that often obfuscate women's

Can be religious, political, economic, racial imaginaries

"the always present backdrop to meaningful social action includes images, symbols, metaphors, and narratives which structure forms of embodied identity and belonging, social meaning and value and which attract strong affective investments

should be examined by unpacking it

All societies dominate masculine interpretations remain

It has been mostly one kind of body, one kind of imagination, one set of affective investments which have framed the terms through which humanity is grasped:

Man - humanity and the universal

Woman - the particular an precarious position in relation to humanity (man)

Thus 'woman' or 'man' are powerful fictions which are supported by essentialist ideologies

Imaginaries must challenge these essentialist ideologies

HR discourse depends on enforceability of matching obligations

Norms can change by offering a competing imaginary that will generate contradictions

contradictions within and between social imaginaries, coupled with human and political will, are the engines of social change

Challenging sexual inequality will inevitably involve challenging broader clusters of social meaning

Human

rights

discourse as an international imaginary that aims to challenge national and

cultural norms

3. Which norms produce the idea of people without rights and as such not worthy of recognition and representation, and outside the reach of law?

4. Critically reflect on the following: ‘To assert that all men are created equal is an obstacle on the road of Human Rights for it consists in identifying others with one’s own self’.

Moira Gatens:

History: it was not that women were incapable of imagining different ways of organising social and political life. It was rather that their attempts to shift the social meanings of womanhood were not sufficiently influential in debates about the scope of natural and conventional authority

Rights are dependent on the enforceability of matching obligations

Women's right to be free from domestic violence becomes viable only when husband and fathers recognise their obligation not to batter

Sexual difference is one of the primary 'anthropological divisions' which is always immediately political

fiction is not truth but imaginary rights can still amount to something

A social norm is a collective expectation about what is to count as appropriate behaviour for a particular identity in a particular context

Social norms link together emotions, imagination, and intellect, that is, they act on and through our embodied selves

Unlike rationality, social norms are not outcome oriented

The past plays an essential role in the case of social norms

This difference highlights a contrast between the focus on the rational self interest of the individual compared to the focus on the survival of a community (men as self interested and women as serving the community)

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