Same-sex marriage is one of those things where different parts of the world just can't seem to see eye to eye. Will it ever happen in the Middle East or several regions of Africa? Nope. Russia? Nope. Parts of Asia? NOPE. But here in Taiwan it has progressed, and in the U.S. as well within the last decade. 

Same-sex marriage rights could be interpreted as a collective right, as in that states should recognize the right for gay and lesbian people to marry (rather than have laws that specifically define marriage as being between a man and a woman) or they could be viewed through the lens of basic individual rights that all people have.

Part of the controversy over same-sex marriage stems from religion, as several religions consider marriage to be holy (or, as the Catholic church refers to it as one of the primary "sacraments" in the faith.) Religious institutions also have the right not to be compelled to compromise in their beliefs or teachings, but same-sex marriage laws also don't force churches to marry gay people. There is a clear division between a legal marriage, represented by a state's government, and a religious marriage as performed by a priest, imam, rabbi, or another religious leader. 

Remember that feminism is a critical theory -- it's a response to a male-dominated political, economic, and social landscape. 

Specific claims related to womens' rights often center on ideas of equality, that women should have the same status and rights as men. This can be seen in efforts to pass an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (which started in the 1970s and is still ongoing, yikes!) or in a country like Saudi Arabia where there are still significant gaps between men and women, but also some recent "baby steps" to improve the status of women and grant them more rights and privileges.

Womens' rights can also encompass rights that are specific to women, such as the right to bodily autonomy and the debate over the legal status of abortion. Some abortion rights activists discuss the issue in terms of the effects that pregnancy can have on a woman's body (and health!) and that forcing a woman to carry a child to term is an infringement on her liberty and rights to make decisions over her own body. 

This is also covered on another page, but labor unions played a large role in establishing workplace rights that many people around the world benefit from today (and there is often a clear disparity in places that have not had a widespread, or successful, labor movement coughtaiwancough.)

The labor movement started in Western Europe and North America during the Industrial Revolution based on claims that workers deserved better. Their goals centered on fair pay, humane treatment, and improved safety, for the most part. Many of these issues are still contested in several parts of the world , like when Mingdao told MDID teachers that we had to come to school and *sign in* on the school birthday at a specific time and place, but since classes were canceled we'd actually be losing a portion of our pay for that day.  Oooooh boy that didn't make people happy. While Taiwan does not have a great labor movement history, the modern-day labor bureau in Taiwan is equipped to handle disputes like this, but luckily this particular issue was resolved amicably. If this happened in a place with strong labor unions, that never would have happened to begin with.

This happened just on April 1st (no fools): an Amazon warehouse in New York voted to unionize, making this one of the biggest developments in U.S. labor in decades. The union organizer was a worker fired from Amazon several years ago (for trying to form a union); freed from his job, he continued his efforts and a majority of the warehouse's workers agreed to form a union. After celebrating, the organizer said, "We want to thank [Amazon founder and boss] Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we was signing people up. We were out here getting signatures." THIS MAN IS A LEGEND (not Bezos, he sucks.) A similar union vote last year in an Amazon warehouse in Alabama did not succeed. 

We covered this a bit last year in class, and there is some overlap here with the idea of collective rights. For this section, we'll just focus on the claim itself and the rationale.

Indigenous peoples around the world often make significant claims regarding their rights to make decision over their traditional lands. In some countries, like the U.S., Native American groups were re-settled onto "reservations" during the 1800s and early 1900s, and these spaces are supposed to be essentially sovereign territory, with the local tribe having the final say over the land. When this land is set to be used for commercial activity, it often sets up a confrontation between big business and native groups. The most prominent U.S. example are pipeline protests; the pipelines proposed to carry oil or natural gas across a reservation, but the source of the gas was not the reservation itself. Still, if there were to be a malfunction, native lands would be damaged. Native groups fiercely protest these pipelines, and are often brutally put down by the police or state National Guard.

In Taiwan, a lot of indigenous claims center on cultural practices, like the hunting of boars or the use of traditional weapons. These claims are specific to indigenous groups since they refer to their unique cultural practices and their traditional lands; a tribe member would not be allowed to hunt boar in Taichung Central Park using the same claims. 

This is one area where legitimacy comes back into consideration. Sometimes, states or other political actors take actions that they say are meant to protect or help people, but they have a negative impact on human rights in some way. If you've ever flown out of an airport in the US, you'll know what I mean; you get searched a lot, your shoes need to come off, and in recent years they have these crazy body scanning machines that are meant to detect a wide range of dangerous objects (better than metal detectors) but also have the side effect of showing the airport security folks some pretty private parts of your body. And, there's no evidence that these measures are actually helpful. 

Since the beginning of the pandemic, debates over health control measures have come up around the world. Debates over whether vaccine requirements, QR codes everywhere, vaccine passports, etc. violate rights to freedom of movement and privacy have raged (note: mostly in countries with a lot of COVID cases and deaths.) Taiwan's anti-COVID measures have been pretty heavy-handed--quarantining every positive case, mandating ten days away from work for anyone who had been in the same area as a positive case, masks required everywhere outside, etc.--though questions of human rights haven't come up here all that much. If the anti-COVID measures weren't effective, it would raise a lot more questions about whether they violated rights, or whether they could be viewed as legitimate.

Amnesty International has a page on human rights and national security. 

You can replace "women" here with basically any minority or marginalized group that experiences systematic mistreatment. 

And it's the "systemic" part that I want to focus on here. When we talk about gender discrimination in global politics, we're not talking about one woman being mistreated; we're talking about a whole array of political systems, social practices, and cultural beliefs that hold women back. 

Discrimination against women comes in all kinds of forms. Pay gaps, being passed over for promotions, sexual harassment in the workplace, victim blaming in cases of rape and sexual abuse ("what was she wearing?"), being restricted to the home, cultural taboos and superstitions about periods and menstruation, being blamed for the existence of sin by the Catholic church, making up half of the population but only a small portion of elected offices, making up half of the population but only a small minority of boardroom seats, women's sports being "harder" to broadcast and less popular to watch despite a high level of competition, a lack of bodily autonomy, being sold off as brides in arranged marriages, etc. Need I continue?