"I'm doing it for myself!": the aggressive promotion of the individual self as the dark side of women's rights.

The chapter will try to explore what lies behind a human rights discourse that portraits practices such as female circumcision, veil wearing or arranged marriages as against women’s rights. It will be argued that it is often not humanitarianism what lies behind such a kind of discourse, rather “humonetarianism” . The dark side of the human rights discourse is that, by framing as acceptable only its own individual-centered approach, it attacks practices that express solidarity towards one’s own community. This attitude promotes the interest of capital that hugely profits from increasing people’s individualization in societies. The more a society is individualized, in fact, the more individuals turn themselves to the market in order to satisfy their daily needs; communities, to the contrary, are much less market dependent since their members can rely for their needs on market-free relational mechanisms. In the prevailing westernized human rights discourse relational practices are constructed as oppressive against women, therefore put under attack, whilst very similar, but market friendly, ones are depicted as the product of women’s agency, therefore encouraged. How much is agency a powerful mind manufacturing concept? How great is the toll that women have finally to pay for complying with such a kind of constructed freedom? The A. will try to answer these questions using a comparative legal approach, that will force her to look in the mirror from the start.