Mediating Gender Violence:

Abstract

Based on fieldwork with human rights organizations in New York City and Belize, Central America, this dissertation explores--through the prism of ethics--how non-governmental organizations (NGOs) represent violence against indigenous women--in text, image, and action--as human rights "evidence." By ethics I mean the deliberate use of morals, stated or unstated, in the representation of human rights abuses. In New York, my research focuses on the production, launch, and circulation of a United Nations shadow report on violence against indigenous women. In Belize, I contextualize indigenous women's experiences of gender violence within an indigenous movement to obtain collective land rights, a national women's movement, and national rhetoric on culture and gender. In both locales, I consider and compare: 1) how the "ethical" stance of NGOs shapes human rights activism; 2) how NGOs create visual and discursive "evidence" to represent violence and indigenous women's experiences; and 3) very real neoliberal state repression that immobilizes social movements for human rights and social justice. My concern is with the ways social movement NGOs struggle to maintain their feminist and social justice objectives as they interface with the demands of a transnational human rights system, and the strategies they use as they suffer from vilification, marginalization or mainstreaming, and lack of resources. Far from protective, human rights claims, explored here as "evidence," often obscure both social inequalities and the response of state-level policies to these inequalities, especially for marginalized women.