On a 2004 trip to India for the World Social Forum and to see grantees of the Global Fund for Women, just over a month before

In this paper, I employ a feminist methodology of social criticism for political theory to ask what theory or theories of human rights are visible in women’s human rights activism and whether these theories can be useful tools of cross-cultural and intra-cultural social criticism. I find a critical theory of human rights. This theory of universal immanent human rights is non-foundational and yet has the critical teeth necessary 1) to serve the strategic purposes of women’s activists, 2) to engage with and transform notions of human rights that are culturally or politically bound, and 3) to engage with critical concerns about the power of a unifying narrative to marginalize as it unifies. I then apply the universal immanent human rights theory to the problem of oppositional stance between material and identity based rights claims and to related dilemmas in human rights theory and activism.