Feminism is about striking down gender hierarchies that exist in various forms in all societies. The notion of human rights envisions dignified lives for all humans based on their equal value. Both feminism and human rights are multivocal discourses and struggles for social transformation and justice. Despite these parallels, feminist and human rights ideas and activisms have long developed in separation, with some exceptions such as the women’s suffrage movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Both discourses have gained international significance in the second half of the 20th century. Since the 1980s, there is significant engagement between human rights and feminist thinking that has produced a transdisciplinary array of literature. For this bibliography, human rights are framed as a discourse of Eurocentric origin that has become a global standard starting with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. It is also a framework that has attracted many forms of criticism, e.g., that it is an expression of Western imperialism, statism, individualism, and androcentrism. The structure follows the twofold engagement of feminists who have made the human rights framework fruitful for their goals: the first is the attempt to incorporate women, as the slogan “women’s rights are human rights” suggests; the second is to analytically read gender as a relationship of power into the human rights framework. This bibliography emphasizes global level dynamics and draws only occasionally on regional or domestic processes. However, feminist human rights work has been developed from many parts of the globe and typically takes an intersectional approach in which gender hierarchies are not targeted in isolation, but in combination with other forms of discrimination. Attempts to engender the human rights framework have expanded even further to critique binary and heteronormative gender orders and the exclusions they produce. In response, defendants of non-egalitarian gender orders have become more forceful in reclaiming traditional gender-binary and -complementary values. Besides the vast amount of academic literature, activists have played a tremendously important role in shaping feminist and human rights ideas. Therefore, the bibliography contains a mix of scholarly and practitioner writings, as well as some particularly influential feminist organizations. The sections evolve chronologically, but the contributions selected mutually influence and respond to each other: The global rise of women’s movements; feminist critique of human rights androcentrism; global institutions promoting gender equality; substantive concepts of women’s rights and gender equality; human rights, anti-essentialism and gender fluidity; and antifeminism: reclaiming traditional gender orders.
