Eye Magazine

‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’ was also the title of a significant speech given by Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1995 at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, in which she said, ‘If the term “women’s rights” were to be interchangeable with the term “human rights”, the world community would be a better place, because human rights affect the women who raise the world’s children, care for the elderly, run companies, work in hospitals, fight for better education and better health care.’[1]

The exhibition offers a wide range of compelling images and text that reflect on the cross-cultural realities of gender discrimination and inequality, sexual abuse and violence on women, and the damage of gender stereotypes. The exhibition is also a kind of ‘paradigm-shifting space’, where the narrative of women’s oppression becomes a powerful statement about women as global agents of social change.

The exhibition’s scope is transnational, especially given the argument that human rights impose a western model of the individual that can ignore the values of non-western countries. Many of the exhibited posters demonstrate that women’s rights violations are institutionalised practices the world over.

Isabelle R. Gunning, Professor of Law at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, has made a valuable contribution to the debate about women’s rights as human rights by arguing that ‘culturally challenging practices such as genital mutilation require the critic to engage in “world travelling”’, both actual and virtual. By that, Gunning means that each of us must examine our own historical and socio-cultural contexts. We are all observers who must recognise the complexities of the sociological contexts of every woman.[2]

Prof. Resnick’s exhibition invites the viewer to examine their own location in the world and the specific lens through which they may observe these challenging images of abuses and defenses worldwide. The exhibition also gives us important information about each poster’s ‘location’ on the world map, which helps us to understand the particular conditions to which each poster and designer have responded. Women’s rights are powerful ‘hinges’ around which transnational social change can occur.

These posters permit a different narrative of women’s agency to unfold – one not conveyed solely through images of women’s ‘strength’ and ‘power’.

These posters depict women wrestling with patriarchal norms of power without becoming its victims. These women are represented in the process of becoming agents of change. This shift from an individual to a global perspective in the narrative of women’s oppression is made clear in the written captions that accompany many of the posters.

Particularly effective in this way are the UN Women posters by Memac Ogilvy (Dubai, United Arab Emirates). They confront the viewers with the default settings of Google search-engine results for phrases such as: ‘Women cannot …’, ‘Women need …’, ‘Women should …’ ‘Women shouldn’t …’ and then add a new sentence completion to the demeaning ones that had come up. By doing so the posters reaffirm calls for change: ‘Women cannot accept the way things are’; ‘Women need to be seen as equal’; ‘Women should have the right to make their own decisions’; ‘Women shouldn’t suffer from discrimination anymore.’

‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’ is a courageous and timely exhibition designed to awaken in viewers a sense of collective responsibility to challenge gender inequality and discrimination and, as Resnick writes in the catalogue, to promote ‘women’s empowerment and participation in society.’

All the exhibition’s 50 posters will provoke a healthy discomfort and empathetic response in viewers. Together, they make a powerful statement about the importance of cultural responsibility when discussing women rights as human rights. The show runs until 29 October 2016 at the President’s Gallery of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

1. Hillary Rodham Clinton, ‘Women’s Rights are Human Rights’, speech delivered at the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, 5 September, 1995, quoted in ‘Analysis of Hillary Clinton’s Speech: “Women’s Rights are Human Rights”’, Women in the Workplace, 9 April, 2012.
2. Isabelle R. Gunning, ‘Female Genital Surgeries and Multicultural Feminism: The Ties That Bind; The Differences That Distance’, Third World Legal Studies, Volume 13, 1995, Women’s Rights and Traditional Law: A Conflict, p. 17.

Marika Preziuso PhD, assistant professor of World Literature and Women’s Literature at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA

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