Universalism, difference, and body politics: The UN Commission on the Status of Women, 1946-1975

Universalism, Difference, and Body Politics examines the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), the main UN body in charge of women's rights in order to provide a new interpretation of the role of gender in shaping the emerging international order of human rights. The study outlines a complex scenario of women's activism, one that flourished between 1946 and 1975 despite and because of Cold War rivalries, decolonization, and the contentious politics of economic development. The project follows three main dynamics: the Commissioners' work in establishing international legal instruments, the role of colonized woman in promoting these mechanisms, and the contribution of women from newly-formed countries in shaping the UN based agenda on women's rights. The dissertation employs a transnational feminist lens to demonstrate the centrality of the CSW for the establishment of the UN-based system of human rights. This approach brings to the forefront the foundational role of the encounters of people and ideas dedicated to raising the status of women. In the context of this dissertation, transnational encounters committed to women's rights produced two main processes, one practical and the other theoretical: the one involved verbal and conceptual exchanges to support women's rights advocacy within the global setting of the UN; the other involved identifying the mechanisms that states typically have used to exclude women.;Commissioners worked in the so-called three worlds of the postwar system. Women delegates from the Soviet-bloc were particularly active in denouncing the violation of women's rights in the so-called West and assuming the role of defenders of the women in the Third World. Commissioners from the West had to face the contractions of racial politics at home while promoting equality and social justice within the UN setting. Ultimately, Commissioners from the newly formed countries struggled with anticolonial politics, the challenges of the post-colonial state, and the promotion of international cooperation. In this dissertation, women's delegates' voices emerge to claim a place in the complex history of the rights of women within the new human rights system of the United Nations.