Feuding in the family: Ethnic politics and the struggle for women's rights legislation

My dissertation asks why women's rights activists have had varying levels of success as they fought to pass legislation securing different women's rights. Paying serious attention to the increased relevance of ethnic identity in political life, I argue that the variance in success for women's rights legislation results from the impact of ethnic politics which affects struggles for each women's rights issues in different ways. More precisely, I contend that ethnic identity is gendered in ways that impact campaigns for some women's rights issues differently from others. I show how identity is produced through cultural practices that ascribe different power status to men and women because of their biology. Because the process through which ethnic identity is produced is gendered, ethnic identity is itself gendered. I further show how political competition between ethnic groups heightens the stakes for the continuation of cultural practices that produce a gendered ethnicity. When the competition between 'us' and 'them' is framed as a competition between ethnic groups, cultural practices take on critical importance because they serve to distinguish between 'us' and 'them.' In this context, attempts to secure women's rights by challenging cultural practices that are harmful to women face incredible resistance. Ethnically enterprising politicians seeking mileage within their ethnic group frequently paint struggles for women's rights that challenge harmful cultural practices as external threats to the ethnic group. It is at this nexus that ethnic politics negatively affects struggles for women's rights. Still, activists can still wage effective struggles for women's rights if they can successfully frame women's issues not as challenges to ethnic identity, but rather as human rights issues. As my study of the struggles for legislation guaranteeing women's political representation, and criminalizing female circumcision and sexual violence in Kenya show, the human rights frame has been a successful alternative for those women's rights struggles focused on securing women's bodily rights in the face of ethnic politics but has been a less successful alternative for those women's rights struggles for women's political rights.