| Summary: | The thesis studies how capitalist logic is ingrained in the fabric of women’s rights; and argues that it limits women’s rights’ ambitions and possibilities to emancipate women. The inquiry is based on two case-studies of adopting international women’s rights: the UN Convention on Marriage (UNCM) granting women a right to reject forced marriage; and CEDAW, granting women a right to family planning in its Art. 16 e). The thesis, in the context of the case-studies, shows that a combination of capitalist imaginaries of women’s needs, means of emancipation and the deference to ‘autonomous’ economic forces are imprinted in the legal form of women’s rights. These imaginaries come together in a core unemancipatory dynamic of the rights. This dynamic is such that the aim of the legal form signified under ‘rights’ is not women’s attainment of power or entitlements, but a creation of conditions for women to join the course of ‘autonomous’ economic forces which will then presumably lead to this attainment. This technology within the rights then functions to distribute emancipation and subordination according to the structures of patriarchal and racial capitalism. This perspective helps explains why poor and non-Western women are structurally subordinated by and within the merit of the mentioned rights, despite these rights being adopted to empower these exact women.
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