Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law: Between Resistance and Compliance? (original) (raw)

Abstract

When I was travelling in the Irish countryside a few years ago, I was entranced by the way-marker signs at road junctions, indicating the direction and travelling distance to various towns in the vicinity. Each sign was a tall, black-and-white-banded pole, with various arrow-shaped plaques naming the towns one might visit: Limerick, nine kilometres, Sligo, six kilometres, Galway, only three kilometres. These signposts, and their location at the junction of small, twisting roads deep in the countryside, struck me as harbingers of future possibility. At each junction, a traveller could choose from an array of options: if we head south, Tipperary awaits, but if we take a right turn Ballybofey-Stranolar lies in our path. Which to choose from? All of them, in their equalizing white backgrounds and black lettering, beckoned. Feminist Perspectives on Contemporary International Law, edited by Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson, reminds me of these road signs from the Irish countryside. 1 The ten substantive chapters assembled in this volume offer different directions and themes one might find, or perhaps seek out, in feminist engagements with international law. The substantive chapters span theoretical traditions, from psychoanalysis to feminist geography, and subject matters, from transitional justice to trafficking. I read these various chapters as offering a look into the possible directions or destinations that feminist scholars could explore as they head in this direction or as they travel along that road. It may be that my reading of this book is not quite what the editors intended. There is a definite bent in this collection-suggested by the book title-to exploring questions and debates internal to the feminist community of scholars working within the international law academy. Kouvo and Pearson, in their introductory chapter, describe this edited book as a "'stock-take' of where feminist perspectives on international law are today vis-à-vis women of the world and the mainstream of international legal scholarship and practice." 2 The book is divided into three parts:

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References (12)

  1. Diane Otto, "Remapping Crisis through a Feminist Lens" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 75.
  2. Dania Thomas, "Women Workers Take Over Power at the Margins: Economic Resistance, Political Compliance" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 193.
  3. Hilary Charlesworth, "Talking to Ourselves? Feminist Scholarship in International Law," in Kuovo and Pearson, supra note 1.
  4. Split Decisions: How and Why to Take a Break from Feminism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), discussed in Charlesworth, supra note 10 at 20.
  5. Charlesworth, supra note 10 at 32.
  6. Yoriko Otomo, "Searching for Virtue in International Law" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 33; and Zoe Pearson, "Feminist Project(s): The Spaces of International Law" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 47.
  7. Vasuki Nesiah, "Missionary Zeal for a Secular Mission: Bringing Gender to Transitional Justice and Redemption to Feminism" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 137; Sari Kouvo, "Taking Women Seriously? Conflict, State-building and Gender in Afghanistan" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 159; Ulrika Andersson, "Trafficking in Human Beings: Vulnerability, Criminal Law and Human Rights" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 177; Thomas, supra note 9.
  8. Edwards, supra note 3 at 133.
  9. Kouvo, supra note 21 at 176.
  10. Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson, "Concluding (or Beginning?) Thoughts: Postcards to the Future" in Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 1, 213.
  11. Elizabeth Adjin-Tetley et al, "Postcards from the Edge (of Empire)" (2008) 17 Social and Legal Studies 5.
  12. Kouvo and Pearson, supra note 24 at 213.