Introduction

In the preceding chapters we notice that there are strategic reasons to focus on a specific priority but these strategic reasons do not undermine the normative view, observed in activist practice taken together, that all rights are indivisible and that all rights-bearers are interrelated through multiple and integrated relations of power. Yet, experience-based inquiry cautions activists and theorists alike against attempts to disaggregate rights claims in both our analysis and our activism. So while such disaggregation may be necessary for certain strategic action or for certain sociological research,1 it is not supportable in praxeological inquiry and is normatively indefensible. To do so whether for the exigencies of activism or research is problematic. In this chapter, I will show that some women's human rights praxis is inconsistent with an immanent universal theory of human rights.

Curb cutting human rights activism is a way of doing women's and feminist activism that, even though fragmented for strategic or logistical reasons, works within an understanding of immanent and universal human rights as individual, interrelated, and structurally sustained. In this chapter we will listen to what activists say about their work for human rights and observe that sometimes they practice a curb cut feminist form of analysis and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they practice their work in ways that clear a path for themselves or others to advocate for other issues and other people, and sometimes they conduct their work in ways that close off avenues for future change.