'They would rather have the women who are humbled': Gendered citizenship and embodied rights in post-colonial Kenya

Abstract

For all the effort and attention Kenyan women receive from the international rights community and at times, from their own government, human rights frameworks are not significantly improving the lives of Kenyan women. Attempting to address this, a great deal of work has been done on monitoring and evaluating human rights based interventions, including tightening funding structures, making recipient organisations more accountable to donors, and assessing the progress of governments and non-government organisations in promoting human rights based reform. I take a different approach. Rather than assess individual projects or goals of aid, my approach questions the assumptions which underpin these interventions from their conception. Following Sally Engle Merry’s work on the vernacularisation of transnational gender rights projects, and taking Kenya as a case study, I argue that the local histories, understandings and hierarchies of gendered power must be understood in much more nuanced and critical manner that we are doing presently. Further, I contend that internationalist human rights discourses create certain kinds of subjects and requires these subjects to behave in particular ways. The current failure to recognize and make space for individual and cultural complexity means that human rights based interventions are only superficially affecting relationships and power dynamics in women’s lives, making substantive, long term change very difficult. My thesis is an interdisciplinary project, and combines an engagement with scholarly literature on gender, post-colonial feminism, human rights theory and practice, as well as Kenyan history and historiography, with research gathered during 13 months of field work. My field work is based on focus groups and interviews with women in Nairobi and rural areas around Lake Victoria and engages with the lived experience of African women. These discussions illustrate the ways in which the discourses of international human rights in fact reproduce the very patterns, structures, and hierarchies which are at the core of women’s disenfranchisement and marginalization. This project historicises women’s current experiences of human rights through Kenya’s late colonial and post-colonial history, and follows these colonial legacies into the modern period through four thematic cases: women as victims and objects of cultural violence; myths of the sorority of African women; women as victims of political and state violence; and women as actors in national political processes. These four cases carry two overarching concerns, firstly, that we need to challenge ourselves to locate women’s agency within their own politics and goals, rather than through what Saba Mahmood describes as the diagnostic and prescriptive lens of feminist analysis. And secondly, we need to be vigilant that our continued attention to the bodies of women does not re-inscribe the embodied-ness of women, and the disembodied-ness of men. In centring the lived experiences and views of Kenyan women, and historicising the production of gender, I critically evaluate the efficacy of modern human rights discourses and projects in local contexts, contributing to the post-colonial feminist project which explores the complex and intersecting dimensions of gender, race, and culture. Show more