A/HRC/41/47 C. Subordination 19. Guideline 3 of the principles and guidelines identifies the adverse impact of leprosy on women and children and recommends the adoption of necessary measures to eliminate discrimination against more vulnerable groups to leprosy-related violations. 20. It is the view of the Special Rapporteur that vulnerability must be approached as a result of disadvantage caused by unequal power relations and not as an ontological feature of a group of persons.9 This is particularly important in the case of women and children, who are often silenced as political subjects by essentialist views that overlook their agency in the face of disadvantage and impair their participation in decision-making processes. For such reasons, the pervasive structural disadvantage that allocates women and children to the context of intersecting vulnerabilities and multilayered discrimination is addressed by the Special Rapporteur as subordination. 10 21. Subordination is understood as the historical devaluation of some groups of people under hierarchical social structures that, by producing and reproducing an unequal distribution of power, severely constrain their autonomy and participation. Subordination is the structural landscape where the vulnerability of women and children is framed, with accompanying corollaries of subdued participation, neglected intentionality and unrecognized agency. 22. If a shared subordinate status is the uniting bond between these two groups, women and children should nevertheless not be treated as a composite concept. Such an approach mirrors the widespread and pervasive exclusion of both groups from culture, public life and politics and into their opposites, that is, biology, private life and nature. For this reason, the Special Rapporteur unpicks the composite concept and highlights women and children as distinct social groups. 23. Article 1 of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women explicitly identifies as its object the elimination of any distinction, exclusion or restriction made on the basis of sex. Anchoring the target group of the Convention thus allows for universalizing protection onto what is a highly diverse group. Not only is gender the product of power relations that, throughout historical dynamics, imprints patterns of difference that are enacted in and by hierarchized social relations; the embodiment of womanhood is also anchored in iniquities and is far from giving rise to a universal experience. Nor is the concept of woman a discrete and unitary category. In fact, a monolithic model of woman can exclude and affirm inequality by rendering invisible other axes of oppression interconnected with structures of power, as shown by intersectionality theory. At the same time, recourse to strategic essentialism 11 may be necessary to develop a more positive stance from which common subordination can be interrogated and challenged. The aim should then be that equality becomes compatible with diversity. Therefore, the Special Rapporteur looks at women affected by leprosy as a plural group that, its contingency notwithstanding, experience shared patterns of subordination and structural violence. 24. Article 1 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child defines a child as a person below the age of 18, unless the laws of a particular country set the legal age for adulthood younger. Making use of age to define who a child is allows for universalizing protection, as in the case of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. However, it seems to be more difficult to acknowledge the historical dynamics that produce different versions of childhood, which is equally traversed by power relations, than it is to recognize gender as a social construct. Childhood is seldom seen as a subject of articulate scrutiny, reinforcing the lens through which children are seen as weak, vulnerable and incapable; as adults-to-be. The Special Rapporteur approaches children affected by 9 10 11 On vulnerability, see A/HRC/38/42. The Special Rapporteur agrees with general recommendation No. 19 (1992) on violence against women of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women, which addresses how the subordinated social location of women contributes to gender-based violence. G.C. Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, Routledge, 1988). 5