Welcoming Charlesworth, Chinkin & Wright

We at IntLawGrrls are delighted to welcome comments from Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright.
Today the three offer comments to wrap up our month-long series reviewing the impact of their ground-breaking article, "Feminist Approaches to International Law," 85 American Journal of International Law 613-645 (October 1991).

Hilary Charlesworth

► We've already had the pleasure of introducing Australian National University Law Professor Hilary Charlesworth as an IntLawGrrls contributor, and have welcomed numerous posts relating to her and her work.
► Christine Chinkin is Professor of International Law at the London School of Economics and a barrister. In 2005, she and Hilary won the American Society of International Law's Goler T. Butcher Medal "for outstanding contributions to the development or effective realization of international human rights law."  An Overseas Affiliated Faculty Member at the University of Michigan, Christine also has been a Visiting Professor at Columbia University and Australian National University.
Her publications cover a broad range of fields and topics, from human rights and women's rights in particular to international criminal justice to international dispute resolution to the laws of occupation. She is inter alia a co-editor of The UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women: A Commentary (2012), which IntLawGrrl Lisa R. Pruitt reviewed in this IntLawGrrls post, and a co-author of The Making of International Law (2007).

Christine Chinkin

Christine's activities, which are too numerous to list here, include being an Editor of the American Journal of International Law and a member of the Advisory Board for the Leiden Journal of International Law, the European Journal of International Law, and the British Yearbook of International Law.  Christine has been a consultant on gender issues for many organizations, including Amnesty International, the Council of Europe, the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the UN Development Program, the UN Division for the Advancement of Women, and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She has also been a member of the Kosovo Human Rights Advisory Panel and the UN Human Rights Council Fact-Finding Mission to Gaza.
► Shelley Wright left Australia and the University of Sydney in 2002 to take up the Northern Directorship of the Akitsiraq Law School – a law degree program offered to Inuit students in Iqaluit, Nunavut. All but one of the graduates of this program were women. She was in the Arctic, where she's pictured below, for almost 3 years.
Shelley then moved down to Vancouver, Canada, where she is Chair of the Department of Aboriginal Studies at Langara College. In Shelley's words:

'Although I still have a strong interest in women's issues, this has been overtaken to some extent by a major interest in Aboriginal rights both within Canada (including especially Inuit) and internationally. I am no longer focusing primarily on international law or feminist perspectives, but instead incorporate all these interests into teaching courses in Aboriginal Studies (including Global Indigenous Perspectives and Aboriginal Women in Canada as well as other courses) and my current research project on the Arctic and climate change.

Shelley Wright

'The continuing interest in the work that Hilary, Chris and I did changed our lives as well as helping to change the direction of thinking about what seemed to us at the time the last bastion of male privilege in law – international law. In many ways it still is of course, but in other ways international law has changed dramatically, not only in better recognizing women's issues but also the perspectives and rights of Indigenous peoples and other vulnerable groups. I credit my own feminist background in helping make it easier for me to see the differing perspectives of Indigenous peoples, although in many ways Aboriginal women's issues and feminism are not always a comfortable fit.'

In their joint post below, Hilary, Christine, and Shelley discuss the making of their article and reflect on the piece 21 years after its publication.
Heartfelt welcome!

Looking back on Feminist Approaches

(Co-authors Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright reflect on their 1991 AJIL article "Feminist Approaches to International Law," and so conclude IntLawGrrls' month-long series on this trail-blazing work)

We are so grateful to Jaya Ramji-Nogales for organizing this IntLawGrrls series, to Jaya and our colleagues Sari Kouvo, Aoife O'Donoghue, Fiona de Londras, Siobhán Mullally, Doris Buss, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, and Diane Marie Amann for their generous posts, and to the readers who commented on those posts. It has been heartening to read the responses to our article and to see different ways of understanding it.
Our article, "Feminist Approaches to International Law," came to life in a haphazard way.
During a long dinner at the Australian Jessup Moot finals in February 1989, the three of us had discussed our separate interests in feminist legal theory and the difficulties in applying feminist thought to international law. A conference paper, we thought, would test and refine our fuzzy ideas. We decided to offer the paper for the mid-year annual meeting of international lawyers organized by Professor Don Greig at the Australian National University. We expected that our paper proposal would be rejected as too off-beat and provocative, so we were surprised, and rather daunted, when Professor Greig accepted it without hesitation.
We began writing the paper with no sense of where we would end up, and would regularly share bouts of long-distance panic by phone between Sydney and Melbourne. We wondered constantly whether we would ever manage to pull it all together.
In the end, facing a room full of our curious colleagues, Shelley began with a general overview of feminist legal theory; Christine followed with a discussion of legal instruments and the gender imbalance within international organizations; and Hilary (heavily pregnant) ended with a discussion of the international right to development as an example of how the gendered nature of international law serves to disempower and marginalise women. We did not see ourselves as adding anything to feminist theories, but rather as professional borrowers, using feminist insights to illuminate our discipline.
The reaction to our paper was mixed.
Several people were enthusiastic, while many of the audience looked discomfited and embarrassed (perhaps on our behalf!). One senior figure in the Australian international law community said in the discussion following the paper that the ideas were quite unrealistic, as they would mean enlarging the scope of international law and depriving our discipline of its distinctive character. Some of our colleagues advised us to get back to “real world” international law, for the sake of our careers. Another type of reaction was interest in the paper as an intriguing academic sideshow.

With some hubris, we decided to submit the revised paper to the American Journal of International Law, as it represented for us the mainstream of the discipline that we wanted to challenge. We expected a peremptory rejection, but instead received a guardedly positive response from Professor Tom Franck (left), the Editor in Chief. He was sympathetic to the topic, but he and the Journal’s readers did not think our draft was our ‘best shot’. His proposals for revision were, characteristically, insightful, and made the paper much tighter. Although we only saw this later, this interchange was typical of Tom’s openness to new ideas, his encouragement of junior scholars and his rigorous thinking.

After the article appeared in the Journal's October 1991 issue (right), we found that we began to be asked to appear at symposia and on panels to present what were seen as controversial and contentious feminist ideas – but the ideas were rarely taken up or engaged with. As the three of us became more closely associated with “feminist approaches to international law,” our colleagues were sometimes rather disconcerted if we spoke on international law issues without taking an explicitly feminist approach.
Over the years feminist work in international law has attracted both strongly negative responses and support from unexpected sources. It is striking that feminist analysis is debated mainly by feminists and is rarely taken up even by other critical scholars. The adoption of some feminist vocabulary by international institutions, such as gender mainstreaming, has by and large provided an alibi for the status quo.
Perhaps, we often think, the article created a splash without waves, but it’s been wonderful to learn through this series that it has been helpful to some members of a younger generation of scholars.
Looking back over the article, we see aspects that appear naïve or inconsistent, and we each still struggle with what feminist approaches might mean in international law. However, the impact of the article for us was as much personal and emotional as it was intellectual or academic. The article brought us into contact with a wonderful group of people across the globe. We ourselves have sometimes disagreed vigorously about the directions of our work, yet through it all have maintained close ties of friendship, a great and sustaining gift.

Teaching Feminist Approaches

(Today IntLawGrrl Diane Marie Amann contributes to our October series celebrating "Feminist Approaches to International Law")

The first words uttered were not encouraging:

'Any time I see Catharine MacKinnon's name in an article, I know I'm not going to like it.'

So declared one of the twelve members of the first seminar I ever led, International Criminal Law, in Fall 1996. As sometimes happens in this course, students were divided almost evenly between human rights activists, mostly women, and military history buffs, mostly men. The declarant was in the latter camp. Prompting his declaration was the following quotation, drawn from a 1987 book by the University of Michigan law professor:

Catharine MacKinnon, 1995

'And Catharine MacKinnon argues: "For women to affirm difference, when difference means dominance, as it does with gender, means to affirm the qualities and characteristics of powerlessness."'

As many readers will recognize, the passage occurs early in "Feminist Approaches to International Law," written by Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright. The article had been published five years before our seminar, in the October 1991 issue of the American Journal of International Law. It examined international law through a multifaceted feminist lens, discussing inter alia:
► Difference in voices of women and others whom tradition had deemed subordinate;
► Data that demonstrated that men overwhelmingly held the important positions; and
► A masculine normative structure that worked to exclude issues of foremost importance to women from the scope of international legal regulation.
Having found in the article much food for thought, I assigned it for our seminar session entitled "Sexual Offenses As International Crimes." My goal was to use issues raised to lay a foundation for studying how sexual violence had come to be prosecuted in the ad hoc tribunals for Rwanda and for the former Yugoslavia. (Evincing the novelty of this development, "Feminist Approaches" was the oldest reading assigned for that day. Others included a 1994 article by Kathleen M. Pratt and Laurel E. Fletcher, a 1996 news story by Marlise Simons of the The New York Times, circa-1992 Yugoslavia tribunal texts, and the 1996 debate respecting witness protection.)
My student's declaration, however, did not bode well for this goal. His categorical rejection risked polarizing the class, and so blocking the hoped-for discussion of the evolution of international jurists' approach to accountability for sexual crimes committed amid armed conflict.
I am pleased to report that reason won out.

How feminist positioning in transitional justice has been influenced by Feminist Approaches

(Today IntLawGrrl Fionnuala Ní Aoláin contributes to our series celebrating "Feminist Approaches to International Law")
 
The feminist presence in transitional justice is complex, multilayered and still in the process of full engagement. As my own work has illustrated, little gender analysis and little attention to ‘women’s issues’ entered into the discursive fray in the public and political arenas where the terminology of transition and accountability emerged. Moreover, the full relevance of feminist theorization is only slowly being revealed by ongoing debate and critique. As we create a feminist presence in transitional justice scholarship and also rework the patriarchal assumptions that underpin the field, the work of Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright is an essential starting point.

As confirmed in "Advancing Feminist Positioning in the Field of Transitional Justice", an article of mine recently published in the International Journal of Transitional Justice, any investigation of distinctly feminist responses to transitional justice would commence with the formidable groundwork laid by Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright in the early 1990s.
Their collective scholarship draws on wider feminist theorizing and recognizes how ‘law privileges a male view of the universe,’ (Charlesworth, 1994) with an emphasis on the incorporation of the public/private distinction, ‘operating in the public realm of the collectivity, leaving the private sphere of the individual untouched,’ (Charlesworth, 1999) with evident consequences for women. These entrenched and deeply gendered practices in international and comparative law making have had a healthy cross-pollination with the emergence of the subfield of transitional justice.
The identification of women’s interests with transitional justice practices has a short record. Moreover, only relatively recently has some distinctly feminist language and methodology emerged in the field.
As feminist engagement deepens, it meets a field that is rapidly expanding, and has the fortune and disadvantage of being termed an ‘industry.’ The growth of transitional justice is both an opportunity and a warning. A new context gives rise to new opportunities, ideas and sites of intervention.

Equally, newness often hides deep pitfalls of structural and entrenched gender discrimination, those cogently identified in the co-authored work published in a 1991 issue of the American Journal of International Law and celebrated in this series, "Feminist Approaches to International Law". These snares identified (male hegemony, lack of representation, masculine institutions, the selectivity and pace of reform in international law) have the tendency to come repackaged in the transitional context, where the presumed contours of the field give hope for gender transformation, but rarely deliver.
 Feminists would do well to pause and reflect on the state of the field of international law generally and emerging sub-fields such as transitional justice in particular. For transitional justice scholars we should think about how best to avoid the constant sense of just catching up to the where the field has expanded, so as to frame a feminist vision of transition that is not only responsive to expansion and opportunity but could actually offer on its own terms the basis of engagement. How would a feminist vision incorporate non-hegemonic practices and be aware of the complexities and contradictions of its own dominant discourses? Given the diversity of transitional sites, can we meet the complexity of the situated female subject and ‘unpack the material and discursive effects’ of the legally infused categories and processes that go hand in hand with transitional justice?
I argue that a greater awareness of the complexity of feminist positioning towards transitional justice is a means to guard against the reproduction of hegemonic feminist discourses and the perpetuation of elite feminist stratification towards the subjects and locales of transition. We must:

Feminist Approaches: A voyage of rediscovery

(Today IntLawGrrl Doris Buss contributes to our series celebrating "Feminist Approaches to International Law")

In preparation for this celebration of Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright’s Feminist Approaches to International Law, I unearthed my old paper copy of the article, which I had read and re-read, and read again, when I first encountered it as an LL.M. student at the University of British Columbia in the early 1990s.

These days, with digital libraries, I rarely read a hard copy of anything, let alone a journal article. So dusting off my copy of CCW, as I referred to it over the years, made me feel a bit like an archivist, finding an ancient but highly valuable scroll. And inside the scroll, I found some lost (to me, at least) insights about feminist method and feminist politics. Re-reading CCW has been a voyage of re-discovery.
My copy of Feminist Approaches, pictured above, is dog-eared, marked up and photocopied so many times the print is barley legible. Flipping through this manuscript in the twenty-first century, the archivist in me finds multiple traces of late 20th century reading techniques: ‘highlighting’ in different Day-Glo shades of yellow and orange, comments scrawled in the margins, and eventually, the addition of yellow post-it notes, also now dog-eared. (I would like to disown these marginalia – and the misunderstandings they evidence – but, sadly, I detect traces of my own handwriting.)
Without wanting to over-play the metaphor ‘artifact’ (and the painful admission of aging it suggests), one can read Feminist Approaches as a bit like an ancient scroll whose prophecies and treasure maps continue to offer a way to view the present and future.
The first few paragraphs of Feminist Approaches make it clear that CCW were mapping a richly conceptual engagement with feminist analysis which the authors, quoting University of Washington political scientist Nancy Hartsock (below left), defined at pp. 613-14 as

'a method for approaching life and politics, a way of asking questions and searching for answers, rather than a set of political conclusions about the oppression of women.'

Feminist Approaches outlined a set of directions, and some future possibilities (‘prophecies’ is perhaps a bit of a stretch) about the difference feminist method could make to international law.
CCW suggested that:
► International law – its “organizational and normative” structures (p. 614) – was gendered male;
► Seemingly neutral concepts like the ‘state’, when examined more closely, would be revealed as thoroughly gendered, premised on a conception of the world that reflected the lives of (certain) men; and
► With more digging, international law’s silences – the many ways in which women and women’s interests were absent or marginalized from the discipline and practice of international law – could be excavated. CCW wrote in Feminist Approaches (p. 615):

'By taking women seriously and describing the silences and fundamentally skewed nature of international law, feminist theory can identify possibilities for change.'

And, indeed, change has happened in international law and practice since CCW wrote Feminist Approaches.
Many of the discipline’s silences about women are being revealed and challenged. Less successful but still important, the conceptual boundaries of the discipline have been explored and contested, and some have even shifted in response to, for example, the involvement of civil society actors in international matters. Women scholars, lawyers, activists and decision-makers are now more visible in international institutions than was the case in 1991. Clearly, ‘change’ has happened – and not happened – in a vast number of ways.
But in the space of all that change, CCW’s arguments for and use of feminist method remain as compelling and illuminating as they were over twenty years ago.

Attending to method in Feminist Approaches

(Today IntLawGrrl Siobhán Mullally contributes to our series celebrating "Feminist Approaches to International Law")

Feminist Approaches to International Law I think, for the first time, explained clearly to me what precisely was wrong with the practice and theory of international law.
As an undergraduate law student, I had read and studied feminist legal theory, having been introduced by Professor Gerard Quinn to the work of a new generation of critical legal scholars. International law, though it was one of the few areas of law that captured my imagination as a student, seemed impervious to feminist critique. Its abstractions from context, from what one of the three Feminist Approaches co-authors, Hilary Charlesworth, described in a 2002 article described as the ‘everyday’ – la vie quotidienne – seemed to insulate this body of law from the scrutiny that had revealed the hidden gender of law in several other fields.
In the early days of my teaching career, I think I could recite much of this article by heart.
I read and re-read it so many times, heavily underlined and highlighted it, and literally excavated every word, in striving to understand both the limits of international law and the potential of feminist legal theory to push beyond its inherited traditions.
The impact of Feminist Approaches is reflected in its enduring relevance and the continuing urgency of the feminist work that it calls upon us to do. Its impact endures, because it connects, it makes sense of the world of international law that I and others have grappled with, but that seemed oddly removed from the complex and urgent questions that arise in small places, close to home.
Feminist Approaches to International Law revealed not just the need for ad hoc reforms, or a process of ‘adding women in’. It also systematically excavated the gendered nature of international law, the structures and concepts that defined the practice of international law and limited the direction of its (not always) progressive development. It pointed not only to the absence of women in the composition of many international law bodies, but also to the silencing of ‘different voices’ in international law, and to the role that gendered divisions between the public and the private played in reinforcing such silencing processes.
Here, I want to point to three of the enduring influences of Feminist Approaches that have informed my work on international law and that find resonance in much of contemporary feminist writing on international law.
► The first is the refusal to dismiss the transformative potential of human rights and of rights discourse, despite the trenchant opposition voiced by critical legal scholars dominant in the academy at the time of the article’s publication.

Citing the 1987 article ‘Alchemical Notes’, by Professor Patricia J. Williams (left), Feminist Approaches poses the challenge of rethinking and transforming the practice of rights. It recognises the symbolic force of a human rights claim – its ‘deliciously empowering’ potential – always yet to be realised. Much of my own work on ‘Reclaiming Universalism’ has sought to recognise this symbolic force, and the radical promise that underpins a universalising claim – the refusal to accept a denial of humanity that lies at the heart of a human rights claim.
► Yet, Feminist Approaches also signals the destructive potential of power, and the limits of rights, foreseeing a line of critique that was to emerge in later writing on ‘Governance Feminisms’ and the crisis governance mode of international law.

On Feminist Approaches to International Law

(Today IntLawGrrl Fiona de Londras contributes to our series celebrating "Feminist Approaches to International Law")

All of us who work as law professors have catchphrases that we use for our students to try to reinforce particular messages, and I am no different. One of my well-trodden nuggets is to analogise theory to a pair of glasses; to identify it as something that helps us to ‘see’ things differently and more clearly. If my somewhat crude analogy holds any water at all, Feminist Approaches to International Law is one of its finest exemplars.
By the time of this article’s publication in 1991, feminist legal theory had not only developed substantially as a body of legal theory but had become a standard and expected element in critical legal theory and jurisprudence education and scholarship. International law had, however, largely avoided its gaze. Without question, in Feminist Approaches to International Law, authors Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright exposed public international law from a feminist perspective, forcing a critical reappraisal to at least some degree. More than twenty years from its publication, an exercise in stocktaking seems appropriate.

Participation

Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright argue that women’s professional participation in international law is a matter of concern and, although the statistics in terms of women’s participation at the UN level, for example, may have improved since 1991 and specialised agencies been created, participation remains problematic.
This reflects three core concerns that public international law must grapple with if it is to maintain its legitimacy when interrogated from a critical perspective:
► Women remain underrepresented in domestic parliaments and lawmaking institutions from which many participants in international institutions are drawn;
► Although women’s participation in the professions and especially in professional training is generally increasing, it remains the case that the higher echelons of many professions—including especially law—remain overwhelmingly dominated by men, and it is generally from these professional strata that international professionals such as judges, Secretaries General and so on are selected; and
► International lawmaking is increasingly undertaken by the participation (either transparent or informal and undocumented) of industry, especially through transnational associations or organisations in which women’s disenfranchisement from senior executive positions across industry is replicated by lack of female representation and consequent lack of participation.
None of these trends has as of yet been convincingly addressed by international law. But all of them continue to plague its capacity to properly recognise and mitigate the gendered nature of law’s impact on human life. It would be a mistake to say that women are always more likely to take into account women’s experiences in a positive sense. But at the same time women must be represented in a meaningful way (preferably equally) in order for the institutions in question to maintain their legitimacy.

Welcoming Aoife O'Donoghue

It's our great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Aoife O'Donoghue (left) as an IntLawGrrls contributor.
Aoife has been a lecturer at Durham Law School since 2007.  She specializes in public international law, with a specific interest in international governance. Aoife's current research focuses on international constitutionalization and the legal structures that have developed within international law to regulate governance.
Aoife received her Ph.D. from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands; her dissertation examined the constitutionalization of international law. Aoife earned her bachelor's degree from University College Cork, and completed an LL.M in International Law at City University, London.
With another IntLawGrrls contributor, Dr. Máiréad Enright, now of Kent Law School, Aoife is a Co-Director of the Irish Feminist Judgments Project. Aoife is also co-convenor of the Law and Conflict at Durham research cluster.
In her introductory post below, Aoife continues our series reflecting on the twenty-first anniversary of the publication of Feminist Approaches to International Law, which Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright published in the American Journal of International Law.
Heartfelt welcome! 

The female academy in international law

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this introductory post as part of the series celebrating Feminist Approaches to International Law)
 
Over two decades, the legal academic behemoth’s resistance to feminist international legal analysis, so ably described by Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright in their seminal article, has, to an extent, subsided.
Arguments suggesting that since the article's publication international legal academia evolved to become less antagonistic and prejudiced to feminist analysis, becoming a tolerant and welcoming domain, possess some traction.
The active presence of this blog, the increasing number of core international generalist journals incorporating articles with and on feminist critique, as well as the appointment of women to some high-profile positions within the international legal order, evidence the change over the past twenty years.
In many ways, the mobilising call of the American Journal of International Law piece not only brought the feminist critique of international law to an audience that desperately needed to pay it attention – academia – but also bolstered the ability of other academics to use feminist critique to ask questions regarding international law’s historical narrative. This success should be celebrated; nonetheless, the necessity and extent of the revolution required, evidenced in the article, remains and nowhere is this more evident as within legal academia itself.
In this post I wish to focus upon the role of female academics, including both those who utilise feminist critique and those who do not, within the international legal order. I consider, first, whether the article's championing of the role of both feminism and women within international law has brought about any changes in establishing different voices within the legal canon, and second, what aspects of academia remain problematic.
Within the broad sphere of legal academia the importance of the female voice remains imperative; however, within international law its existence is even more critical. The presence of the female voice is particularly pertinent on account of:
►  International law's claims towards universality, which have long been critiqued, coupled with the
►  Key role played by academics as potential subsidiary sources of international law makes more than bare representation a necessity.
There have been female international legal academics who have been pioneers in breaking up the hegemonic male academy, such as Professor Suzanne Bastid (above right) of France, about whom IntLawGrrls have posted here and here. By and large, however, international law has been dominated by a succession of male superstars. Dating back to Grotius and Vitoria, carrying on through Oppenheim and Lauterpacht and continuing for much of the post-U.N. Charter era, the most well-known publicists were always male – thus shoring-up the continued domination of international legal academia to a limited Euro-centric/American male jurist.
Whenever, to quote Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, the ‘the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations, as subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law’ were considered, they were always male teachings. Little has changed. The same names re-occur continually, closing off a genuine opportunity for active engagement, by those within the ICJ and beyond, to consider a broader spectrum of legal thought.

Has international law re-imagined feminisms?

(Today IntLawGrrl Sari Kouvo contributes to our series celebrating Feminist Approaches to International Law)
 
Hilary Charlesworth’s, Christine Chinkin’s and Shelley Wright’s article Feminist Approaches to International Law – and the scholarship and activism that followed in its footpath – literally changed my life.
It shifted my interest in feminism and law from the Swedish and Nordic context to a global context.
It sent me travelling, via Geneva, New York, and Brussels, to Kabul and beyond.
Now re-reading the article, I envy the authors – or I envy the sense of purpose and vision that they managed to portray in the article.
The authors manage to, on the one hand, develop an analysis of international law that embodies feminism’s constant effort towards critical self-reflection and questioning about whether their analysis adequately represents:
► On the one hand, women’s experiences across the north-south divide and,
► On the other hand, feminism’s effort to deconstruct the masculine world of international law and reconstruct it as a tool for change for women.
In my view they manage to avoid some of the traps of feminist analysis, including that of ‘othering’ and victimizing the women whose experiences do not ‘fit’, and that of upping the emancipatory potential of international law just because the needs of change are so big.
I worry that, over the past two decades since the article was published, feminist scholarship and activism in international law have lost their way – or rather, they have lost their heart.
Allowing myself to generalize, I find that feminist scholarship on international law has become too concerned about whether it acknowledges all women’s agency on their own terms; while doing this, scholars have strayed away from the core analysis of dominance and power in international law and politics. This is important, because the 1990s’ ‘gender turn’ did make international law and ‘governance’ a possible career path for women. It moved the language of ‘gender’ and ‘women’s rights’ into the core of international law and politics. Women (feminists or not) and feminist analysis (albeit in a watered-down version) became part of – and tools for – the global enterprises of law, politics, economy and security.
Let me use a discussion from a recent conference at the Australian National University as an example.

One of the speakers at the conference told us about the efforts made in Australia to ensure that women would be allowed to participate in combat operations, including those in what apparently in military lingo was called the ‘sandpit’ (aka, Afghanistan). The speaker explained that after the legal hurdles of this equal rights battle were overcome, the few women who would choose this as their career path would still need to succeed in the physical parts of the training and be part of the bonding rituals of combat forces.
The bonding rituals apparently also included visits to strip bars.
My question to the speaker was:

‘I understand that ensuring that women are allowed to compete for positions in combat operations is an equal rights battle, but is it a feminist battle?’

While recognizing the importance of the equal rights struggle, I wanted to question the logic of promoting the equal rights of very few women to be part of combat forces, while at the same time accepting that this right apparently could only be enjoyed if women accepted largely sexist bonding rituals, and without reflecting on the bigger picture, on the role of national military forces in an era when military interventions seems to be an increasingly accepted tool of international law and politics.
That is, is it feminist to fight equality battles without reflecting on the institutions in which we fight these battles, or on what the results of our struggles are used for?

October Treat: Celebrating Feminist Approaches to International Law by Charlesworth, Chinkin & Wright

(1st in a series celebrating "Feminist Approaches to International Law")

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to kick off a celebration of the 21st anniversary of "Feminist Approaches to International Law." This seminal article by Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright was published by the American Journal of International Law in its October 1991 issue.
Just as we at IntLawGrrls honor our transnational foremothers in order to draw attention to women's oft-overlooked contributions to international law and policy, this month we celebrate the crucial role that this article has played in opening up space for women's voices in the international arena.
Over the next few weeks, we will welcome posts from several leading female international law scholars, each of whom will reflect on Feminist Approaches and its impact on her work.  Our list of participants includes IntLawGrrls contributors Doris Buss, Fiona de Londras, Sari Kouvo, and Fionnuala Ní Aoláin.  We also welcome a new IntLawGrrl, Aoife O'Donoghue, and will end the series with a contribution from the article's authors, Charlesworth, Chinkin, and Wright.  We begin the celebration today by offering a couple of thoughts on the article's ongoing contribution to the field of international law.

In Feminist Approaches – awarded the 1992 Francis Deák Prize by the American Society of International Law – Charlesworth, Chinkin, and Wright set forth numerous valuable critiques of international law and organizations. Here we focus on 2:
► Rendering women's perspectives visible in international law; and
► Promoting diversity of women's voices.

Visibility
Though we've made progress on both counts, women's work, to these ends, is not done. Despite substantial female interest and talent in the field, international law has long been dominated by male voices. There remains today a gender gap in the American international legal academy.
One measurement worth considering is women's leadership and participation in the American Society of International Law.
Early on, ASIL rejected applications from women like Belva Ann Lockwood, the 1st to argue before the U.S. Supreme Court, and Jane Addams, who would go on to win the Nobel Peace Prize. (Both have been honored as IntLawGrrls foremothers.) The Society admitted women as members in 1920, just as the 19th Amendment guaranteeing women's vote took effect.
A half-century later, Dr. Alona Evans (left) – a Wellesley professor who, as previously posted, was the 1st woman elected to the AJIL board and would become ASIL’s first woman president – published an article in a 1974 edition of AJIL. In it, she and her co-author, Carol Per Lee Plumb, assessed women's involvement in the Society. Their findings:
From 1943 to 1973, women constituted 6% to 7% of ASIL’s annual membership. During this period, there were only 2 female officers of the Society. From 1960 to 1973, only 21 women in total presented talks at the Society’s annual conference. From 1927 to 1973, women published only 30 articles in the AJIL, and in 1974 only 2 of the Journal’s 24 editors, or 8%, were women.
By way of comparison, IntLawGrrls' current findings:
As of 2012, according to the most recent information available on the Society's website, 27 out of 63, or 43%, of the its Executive Council are female. Since 1974, of 20 ASIL Presidents, 4, or 20%, have been women. (They include an IntLawGrrls contributor, Lucy Reed.) Seven of 25, or 28%, of the editors of AJIL are currently female. At this year’s annual conference, we counted 101 women presenting talks. In short, women have moved, from invisible to somewhat visible, within the Society and its principal publication. 
The gender consciousness raised by Feminist Approaches and the literature that followed has inspired efforts to increase gender diversity at ASIL and elsewhere in the field of international law.  But we've yet to attain full equality.
We resist in particular the “pink ghetto” phenomenon that attaches to certain subfields of international law. (It's a concern about which IntLawGrrls contributor Leila Nadya Sadat wrote a thoughtful article in the special issue of the International Criminal Law Review that IntLawGrrls edited last year.) While many of us research and write in the areas of international criminal law and international human rights law, we note that, like many women in the field, these are not our only areas of specialization. IntLawGrrls blog boasts female experts in fields ranging from military law to international investment and trade law, to international legal theory.  As with gender representation at ASIL, we've seen progress in the form of greater inclusion of female voices at international law conferences in a variety of subfields, but gender gaps persist.
 
Diversity
We also aim to extend international legal discourse beyond American voices.
As Charlesworth (below right), Chinkin (right), and Wright note in Feminist Approaches:

'[A] diversity of voices is not only valuable, but essential, and . . . the search for, or belief in, one view, one voice is unlikely to capture the reality of women’s experience. . .'

We at IntLawGrrls believe the same to be true for men’s experiences – notwithstanding that, in the United States at least, there is a tendency for American navel-gazing to pass for international dialogue.
If the discourse of international law is to live up to the name of, well, international law, our field must include in the conversation perspectives from every continent, class, ethnic or other group, sexual orientation, and gender.
Our blog will continue to try to expand the field beyond its current confines, taking up the challenge that Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright put to all of us more than 20 years ago.

We welcome posts from IntLawGrrls contributors and readers on the impact that Feminist Approaches has had on your work.  Please contact us at intlawgrrls@gmail.com if you are interested in contributing to our celebration of this article.