TY  - JOUR
PY  - 2009//
TI  - Unsettling Power: Domestic Violence, Gender Politics, and Struggles over Sovereignty in Ghana
JO  - Ethnos
A1  - Hodžić, Saida
SP  - 331
EP  - 360
VL  - 74
IS  - 3
N2  - This article provides a new lens for analyzing power formations in human rights practices by examining Ghanaian struggles over a Domestic Violence Bill. While the hegemonic character of human rights advocacy is well-established, we know less about exercises of power in discourses and practices that oppose rights. I analyze how the Ghanaian government constructed the discourse of cultural sovereignty and deployed it against women's rights. The government legitimated this discourse by appropriating the voice of ‘the people’ and superimposing notions of ‘foreignness’ onto both the Bill and Ghanaian women's rights activists. Drawing on the historiography of colonialism and ethnography of political performance, I argue that this case illustrates how the discourse of cultural sovereignty is mobilized in a struggle over shifting configurations of gender, political activism, and state sovereignty.<p /> 
LA  - 
SN  - 0014-1844
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141840903053113
ID  - ref1
ER  -