Introduction to the Symposium on Feminist Approaches to International Law Thirty Years on: Still Alienating Oscar?
By challenging the system, feminist theory could identify possibilities for progressive development of international law.5 The authors queried “whether an altered humanized international law has capacity to achieve social change in a world where most forms of power continue to be controlled by men?”...
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Veröffentlicht in: | AJIL unbound 2022-09, Vol.116, p.259-263 |
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Sprache: | eng |
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Zusammenfassung: | By challenging the system, feminist theory could identify possibilities for progressive development of international law.5 The authors queried “whether an altered humanized international law has capacity to achieve social change in a world where most forms of power continue to be controlled by men?”6 Mapping feminist approaches to international law, the article marked a watershed moment—just as scholars and practitioners were demanding recognition of the embedded, yet ostensibly invisible nature of gender in international law. By the end of the twentieth century, the ad hoc war crimes tribunals had developed a jurisprudence recognizing rape and other forms of sexual violence as forms of torture and as constituting other violations of human rights and humanitarian law,8 in part due to significant contributions by gender law experts, including Patricia Sellers, a contributor to this volume who served as the legal advisor for gender for both the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. [...]wave feminists of color and Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars built on this criticism, pointing out the failure of formal equality law to address inequalities at the intersections of race, economic disadvantage, geography, and other vectors of disadvantage.17 One of us (Wing) has edited collections of essays on critical race feminism, which emphasize the unique disadvantages faced by women of color.18 The other of us (Powell) has published at the intersection of race, gender, and economic precarity.19 Along with other critics of first wave feminism, queer theorists have also attacked mainstream feminist theory for its heteronormativity and inattentiveness to sexual orientation as well as the instability of gender as a category of analysis.20 Intersectional and queer theory critiques have helped pave the way for further critiques based on additional bases, inter alia, including sex positivity, transfeminism, ecofeminism, and postmodern feminism.21 Many subfields of international law have now incorporated intersectional analyses22—ranging from international criminal law23 to international refugee law.24 In this symposium, we have enlisted a group of leading scholars and practitioners who have theorized about and litigated feminist approaches to international law in a variety of regions and contexts. Karen Engle of the University of Texas School of Law looks back at the origins and |
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ISSN: | 2398-7723 2398-7723 |
DOI: | 10.1017/aju.2022.43 |