Not Waving but Drowning: Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights in the United Nations 18 Harvard Human Rights Journal 2005

18 Harv. Hum Rts. J. 1 (2005)
Not Waving but Drowning: Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights in the United Nations

handle is hein.journals/hhrj18 and id is 7 raw text is: Not Waving but Drowning:
Gender Mainstreaming and Human Rights
in the United Nations
Hilary Charlesworth*
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning
-Stevie Smith1
I. INTRODUCTION
The term gender mainstreaming has become a mantra in international
institutions as a technique for responding to inequalities between women
and men. The force of the term derives from its implied contrast with the
notion of specializing in issues of gender, or what might be called gender
sidestreaming. The idea behind gender mainstreaming is that questions of
gender must be taken seriously in central, mainstream, normal institu-
tional activities and not simply left in a marginalized, peripheral backwater
of specialist women's institutions. The strategy implicates what Olympe de
Gouges identified in the eighteenth century as the paradox of feminism:
whether women's rights are best protected through general norms or through
specific norms applicable only to women.2 This dilemma pervades modern
international legal responses to the unequal position of women: the attempt
to improve women's lives through general laws can allow women's concerns
to be submerged in what are deemed more global issues; however, the price
of creating separate institutional mechanisms for women has been the build-
ing of a women's ghetto with less power, resources, and priority than the
general human rights bodies.3
* Professor of Law, Regulatory Institutions Network, Research School of Social Sciences and Professor
of International Law and Human Rights, Law Faculty, Australian National University. This Article is
based on a presentation at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program's 20th Anniversary Confer-
ence on October 16, 2004, in a panel titled The U.N. and Human Rights: Criticism and Proposals.
Thanks to Andrea Motbey and David Skillman for their research assistance. Thanks also to Sara Charlesworth
for her ideas and help.
1. Stevie Smith, Not Waving But Drowning, in OXFORD BOOK OF TWENTIETH CENTURY ENGLISH
VERSE 341 (Philip Larkin ed., 1973).
2. SARI Kouvo, MAKING JUST RIGHTS?: MAINSTREAMING WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS AND A GEN-
DER PERSPECTIVE 104 (2004).
3. See HILARY CHARLESWORTH & CHRISTINE CHINKIN, THE BOUNDARIES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW:
A FEMINIST ANALYSIS 219 (2000).

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