Overview

This presentation examines how intersectionality is mobilized and represented in the context of the Inter-American system of human rights, which includes the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). Drawing from reports published by this regional system of human rights and interviews with Black women’s and feminist non-governmental organizations (NGOs) based in Brazil, I explore how both the NGOs and the Inter-American system frame intersectionality in cases of violence and discrimination against women. The main question is how human rights institutions produce knowledge on women’s human rights and intersectionality, what counts as women’s human rights, how they approach intersectionality (e.g., from a structural or an individualistic perspective), and what remedies they design to confront what some NGOs call ‘patriarchal racism’. This investigation is guided by the conceptual framework of ‘silence’ (Bhambra and Shilliam, 2009). In this perspective, ‘human rights’ is a contested project that both includes and excludes what and who might be viewed as a subject of human rights. ‘Silence’ as a concept is not simply about absence, but rather about issues of voice, representation, and responsibility.


Nota biográfica

Cecília MacDowell Santos holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of California-Berkeley and a Master in Law from the University of São Paulo. She is Researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra and Professor of Sociology at the University of San Francisco (USF). At CES she is a member of the Research Group on Democracy, Citizenship and Law (DECIDe), co-coordinates the PhD program on "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies" and teaches for this and the PhD program "Law, Justice and Citizenship in the 21st Century". Her current research interests center on two subject areas: discourses and practices on violence against women and legal mobilization of human rights at the local, national and transnational scales. 

Organisation: Doctoral Programmes "Human Rights in Contemporary Societies" and "Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship "