Acceso usuarios
Loveday Hodson
Feminist engagement with international law is coming into its own. From the early days of Charlesworth, Chinkin, and Wright's tentative yet electrifying alchemy of international law and feminism in 1991, feminists have enthusiastically taken up the implicit challenge those authors made to their colleagues to contribute to the creation of a richer and deeper understanding of the discipline. While feminist scholarship is rich in its complexity and diversity and does not represent a single unified approach to international law, feminist scholars have a shared interest in addressing discrimination and injustice experienced by women.
One key contribution of feminist scholarship has been its revelation of the unattractive underbelly - the structural biases - of international law that traditional scholars, uncomfortable with any apparent lack of finesse in the discipline, take considerable (typically unacknowledged) pains to gloss over. In particular, feminist scholars have pointed to the patriarchal structures upon which the male-dominated discipline is founded and to the very real suffering that occurs in its blind spots. Chinkin, Wright, and Charlesworth, for example, have focussed their attention on the biases inherent in the discipline's normative principles, such as the public / private divide that leaves women's suffering and abuse liable to be met with inaction. State sovereignty, a cornerstone of liberal accounts of international law, has also been seen to render women "analyt ically invisible because they belong to the State's sphere of personal autonomy". Other scholars have critiqued specific areas of international law, arguing, for example, for the recognition of women's rights as human rights and for the urgent need to enhance international law's inadequate response to sexual and gender-based violence.
Today international law is in something of a period of uncertainty. The unprecedented harm unleashed in the name of the war against terror and globalization has, �
