ABSTRACT
A growing number of accounts of the history of feminist engagement with international human rights law celebrate its victories while also endeavouring to shed light on its limited emancipatory effects (Gaer 1998, Fraser 1999, Engle 2005a). Previously, I have crafted one such history that examines the female subjectivities produced by this engagement with law, highlighting its propensity to reproduce, through a variety of imperial techniques and historical residues, conceptions of women that fail to constitute them as fully human (Otto 2006: 318). As revealed by this genealogy, one recurring problem is the resort to ‘protective’ responses to women in international human rights law’s texts and practices, which assume women’s vulnerability and dependency and therefore women’s need for ‘special protections’, despite the commitment to equality. In turn, the interdependence of the male/female gender binary empowers and privileges corresponding male subjectivities which are constituted as fully human, which includes the expectation that they provide protection for women. The result is the continued naturalization of gender identities that normalize women’s secondary status and men’s power and authority. The representation of women as always lacking would seem to confirm Luce Irigaray’s argument that women are ‘unrepresentable’ in masculinist discourses of identity (Irigaray 1985), although I am not prepared to reach this conclusion just yet. Instead, the conclusion that I draw from my historical account is that the feminist project in international law has ‘barely begun’ (Otto 2006: 356). I urge the need to reimagine sex/gender as multiple and shifting, rather than dualistic and always already asymmetrical, if we are ever to disrupt the persistent reiteration of protective stereotypes of women in the international legal lexicon.
