Drawing on my work on the CEDAW Convention and its repercussions, I see gender equality norms as dynamic and contested in terms of content and never perfectly realized (perhaps not even realizable) as social practice. The content dynamic is visible in the becoming of the Convention and its monitoring committee itself: Over time, CEDAW has been celebrated as a milestone for women’s rights, attracted disappointment because of its outdated focus on women rather than gendered power relations, it has been used for effective domestic advocacy and also rejected for not representing the world’s women. Processes of translation toward real-life contexts navigate these shifting assessments (and co-create them); it is instructive to ethnographically trace translation work, yet neither an International Relations perspective nor an Anthropological view can make sense of both the generality and the specificity inherent in these processes.
