The Subject of Women’s Rights: An Investigation of CEDAW’s (Straight) Construction of Family-­Related Human Rights

Abstract: The history of international human rights law shows that the articulation of human rights has often been scripted around the experiences of some rather than all. For example: men. As the creation of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) has tried to address specifically the oppression of women, has this fragmentation of some rather than all repeated itself? This study focuses on CEDAW’s family-related provisions and assesses whether they consider women of all sexual orientations as proper human rights subjects. That is, it is investigated whether CEDAW takes into account differences amongst women in regard to their sexual orientation and/or the sexual relation they are in. The method employed in this study is a feminist and queer critique of human rights, focusing on the socially and legally created norm and its assigned deviants. This analytical strategy is applied to the family-related provisions of CEDAW as well as the interpretive and monitoring work of CEDAW’s monitoring body, the CEDAW Committee. The key findings of the study show that CEDAW’s provisions relating to family issues do not value the diversity of women. Instead they are mostly scripted around the lives of heterosexual women, rendering heterosexual women the invisible norm as well as the main subject of women’s rights. It is moreover maintained that CEDAW is complicit in reinforcing a certain type of family (the monogamous heterosexual family) and in rendering this unit central to a woman’s life. While the CEDAW Committee has sometimes tried to include in the scope of CEDAW the experiences of lesbian, bisexual and queer women, its understanding of intersectional discrimination in regard to women’s sexual orientations has not yet infiltrated its ideas about the family. The main conclusion drawn from this research is that, in focusing on eliminating discrimination against women within the monogamous heterosexual family, CEDAW is complicit in legitimising this specific family unit, leaving unnoticed the wider oppressive aspects of it. The study recommends that the Committee adopts a general recommendation, reconceptualising the chapeau of Article 16(1) of CEDAW so as to instruct states to allow and enable women to develop freely their own understanding of family and to value and respect different forms of families, without discriminating amongst them.