The US, Canada, and Cuba are the only American countries that have not signed on to the Organization of American States’s Bélem do Pará Convention (Inter-American Convention on the Prevention, Punishment, and Eradication of Violence Against Women; see →). In the case of the US, its refusal to sign may be attributed to the country’s attitude of exceptionalism when it comes to international treaties, but the exception itself might be attributed to a percieved position of one nation-state (or individual) as the upholder of a God-appointed universality, not unlike the universality that produces “the woman” as an other. While I was looking for a proper tone for this article, I thought of using a paragraph from John L. O’Sullivan’s famous essay “Great Nation of Futurity” (1839), for its clarity in expressing how claims of universality are bound to both tutelage and to a peculiar notion of equality: “Our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity … because the principle upon which a nation is organized fixes its destiny, and that of equality is perfect, is universal. It presides in all the operations of the physical world, and it is also the conscious law of the soul—the self-evident dictates of morality, which accurately defines the duty of man to man, and consequently man's rights as man.” The narrativization of an always-already existing equality that only needs to be perfected through the incorporation of difference into its definitions plays a specific role in this argument: the other always appears as a newcomer, predicated upon an essence, as a deviation from the norm. Women “came out of the kitchen” where “domestic abuse” takes place (“self-evidently” a private individual matter) and it is under this premise that their rights could become equal to those of men. I believe that the neocolonial conditions of Latin American countries allowed for mass movements that specifically acknowledged this violence as both systemic (not personal) and lethal. The danger here, of course, is portraying the problem as peculiar to “underdeveloped,” “backwards,” “uncivilized” peoples and nations who “live in the past,” whereas the media-hyped discourse coming from the Great Nation of Futurity is merely concerned with sex in the workplace as a cog in the well-oiled machine of meritocracy and, of course, as usual, with “foreign aid.”
