- Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin and Shelley Wright, ‘Feminist Approaches to International Law’ (1991) 85 American Journal of International Law 613, 621.
- Chandra Mohanty ‘Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses’ (1988) 30 Feminist Review 64.
- Mohanty uses the term “women of colour” interchangeably with Third World women in order to designate them as a “political constituency”. Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’ in Chandra Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres (eds), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991, 7. See also Mohanty, ‘On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s’ (1989–90) Cultural Critique 179, 182.
- Bell Hooks, ‘Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness’ in B. Hooks (ed.) Yearning Race, Gender and Cultural Politics, Boston: South End Press, 1990, 151.
- International Law Research Guide, University of Melbourne 1993, Topic 3, 8.
- Bernice Johnson Reagon, ‘Coalition Politics: Turning the Century’ in Barbara Smith (ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, 1983.
- Teresa de Lauretis, ‘Upping the Anti (sic) in Feminist Theory’ in Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds), Conflicts in Feminism, New York: Routledge, 1990, 261. See also de Lauretis, The Technologies of Gender. Essays in Theory, Film and Fiction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
- de Lauretis, ‘Upping the Anti’, op. cit., n. 7, 261–267.
- Cora Kaplan, ‘The Language of Crisis in Feminist Theory’ in Glynis Carr (ed.) Turning the Century’: Feminist Theory in the 1990s, Lewisburg, Pa: Bucknell University Press, 1992, 69 (her emphasis).
- Ibid., 73.
- Ibid., 70.
- Linda Alcoff, ‘Cultural Feminism Versus Poststructuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory’ (1988) 13 (3) Signs 405.
- e.g. Combahee River Collective, ‘A Black Feminist Statement’ in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds), This Bridgi Called My Back: Writing? by Radical Women of Colour, New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press, 1983.
- Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar, ‘Challenging Imperial Feminism’ (1984) 17 Feminist Review 4–7.
- Ibid, 5.
- Judith Butler, ‘Contingent Foundations: Feminism and the Question of “Postmodernism” in Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (eds), Feminists Theorise the Political, New York: Roudedge, 1992, 7–8.
- Ibid., 13–16.
- I am grateful to Adele Murdolo for pointing out this limitation in Butler's theory of gender as performance. See Maria Katsabanis and Adele Murdolo The World According to EfFie’ (1993) 8 Lilith 71.
- Butter, ‘Contingent Foundations’, op.cit., n. 16, 7–8, (my emphasis).
- Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Bodies and Knowledges: Feminism and the Crisis of Reason’ in Linda Alcoff and Elizabeth Potter (eds), Feminist Epistemologie?, New York: Routledge, 1993.
- Ibid., 207.
- Mohanty, ‘Feminist Encounters: Locating the Politics of Experience’ in Michelle Barrett and Anne Phillips (eds) Destabilising Theory: Contemporary Feminist Debates, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992, 74, (her emphasis).
- Ibid 74. _
- Audre Lorde, The Master's Tools will Never Dismantle the Master's House’ in Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (eds) This Bridge Called My Back Writing by Radical Women of Colour, New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Colour Press” 1983, 99.
- eg. Alcoff, op. cit., n. 12; Butler, op. cit., n. 16; and Sneja Gunew and Anna Yeatman (eds), The Politics of Difference, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1993.
- In the Australian context see the work of Sandra Berns, Margaret Davies and Judith Grbich.
- Margaret Thornton, ‘Hegemonic Masculinity and the Academy (1989) 17 International Journal of the Sociology of Law (1989) 115–130.
- Indeed, some white feminists law academics have strenuously resisted the suggestion that they submit their positions as knowers to a reorganisation on the grounds that masculinist law academics feel no such compulsion to question their speaking positions. This was a dominant response to my paper, ‘Social Injury in a Poststructuralist Context’ delivered at the Feminist Legal Theory Conference, Columbia University, June 1993.
- Vicki Kirby, ‘Feminisms, Reading, Postmodernisms’: Rethinking Complicity’ in Gunew and Yeatman, op. cit., n. 24, 20.
- Ibid. 20, 24–5 (her emphasis).
- Ibid. 30.
- See for example, Linda J. Nicholson (ed.) Feminism/Postmodernism, Routledge: New York, 1990. Mohanty identifies some problematic effects of postmodern critique of essentialist notions of identity for example, the production of pluralist discourses grounded in an “individualised identity politics” in ‘Feminist Encounters’, op. cit., n. 22, 74–5.
- In their introduction to a recent feminist law text, British law academics Anne Bottomley and Joanne Conaghan express a fear that poststructuralist feminists like Carol Smart might see their work as “anti- theoretical”. See Feminist Theory and Legal Strategy, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1993, 3. Smart disavows any claim to a theoretical high ground in the same article they cite. Carol Smart, “The Woman of Legal Discourse’ (1992) 1 Social and Legal Studies 29.
- In their work on feminist education theory, Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore argue that the “turn to poststructuralism highlights the complicity of all discourses in disciplinary power”. Carmen Luke and Jennifer Gore, Feminisms and Critical Pedagogy, New York: Routledge, 1992, 9.
- Bat Ami-Bar On, ‘Marginality and Epistemic Privilege’ in Alcoff and Potter, op. cit., n. 20, 94.
- Rosemary Hennessy, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse, New York: Routledge, 1993, xvii.
- Reagon, op. cit., n.6, 368.
- For example, Ian Brownlie, Principles of Public International Law (6th ed.) Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1987 or D J. Harris, Cases and Materials on International Law (4th ed.) London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1991.
- This overview is based on the Melbourne University International Law Reading Guide. For a more transgressive approach to the field, one informed by poststructuralist theory, see Anne Orford's international law course outline, La Trobe University, 1994.
- It is notable that while this question has been removed from the 1994 Melbourne University International Law Reading Guide, it has been replaced by the equally telling question: “what do feminist voices ‘add to international lawyers' understanding of their discipline?” (my emphasis).
- See for example, Anthony D'Amato, ‘Is International Law Really “Law”?’ (1984–5) 79 Northwestern University Law Review 1293; Thomas M Franck, ‘Legitimacy in the International System’ (1988) 82 American Journal of International Law 705; Bruno Simma and Philip Alston, The Sources of Human Rights Law: Custom, Jus Cogens and General Principles’ (1992) 12 Australian Yearbook of International Law 82; Prosper Weil, Towards a Relative Normativity in International Law?’ (1983)77 American Journal of International Law 413; Alfred P. Rubin, ‘Enforcing the Rules of International Law (1993) 34 (1) Harvard International Law Journal 149.
- Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument, 1989; David Kennedy, ‘A New Stream of International Law Scholarship (1988) 7 Wisconsin International Law Journal 1; Christopher C. Joyner and John C. Dettling, ‘Bridging the Cultura! Chasm: Cultural Relativism and the Future of International Law (1990) 20 California Western International Law Journal 275; Dencho Georgiev, ‘Politics or Rule of Law: Deconstruction and Legitimacy in International Law’ (1993) European Journal of International Law 1.
- Rebecca J. Cook, ‘Reservations to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women’ (1990) 30 Virginia Journal of International Law 643; Belinda Clark, The Vienna Convention Reservations Regime and the Convention on Discrimination Against Women’ (1991) 85 The American Journal of International Law 281.
- Christine Chinkin, A Gendered Perspective to the International Use of Force’ (1992) 12 Australian Year Book of International Law 279; Hilary Charlesworth, The Private/Public Distinction and the Right to Development in International Law’ (1992) 12 Australian Yearbook of International Law 190.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1.
- This device of an encounter is borrowed from Mohanty, ‘Feminist Encounters' op. cit., n. 22, 75.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2.
- Sharon K. Hom, ‘Female Infanticide in China: The Human Rights Specter and Thoughts Towards (An)other Vision’ (1991–2) 23 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 249, 253; Mohanty, ‘Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism’ in Mohanty, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, op. cit., n. 3, 15.
- Gayatri Spivak, ‘Questions of Multiculturalism’ in Sarah Harasym (ed.) The Post-Colonial Critic, New York: Routledge, 1990, (her emphasis).
- Ibid., 62.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2, 61–2. Spivak has also critiqued “the inbuilt colonialism of First World feminism towards the Third” in French Feminism in an International Frame’ in Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, New York: Routledge, 1987, 153.
- Mohanty, ‘On Race and Voice’, op. cit; n. 3, 180 (her emphasis).
- Ibid., 181–2.
- Her emphasis.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2, 61. Mohanty uses the lower case “western” and “third world” in this article, but not in her later work. For consistency, I have converted quotations into the upper case.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2, 62.
- Ibid., 63.
- Ibid., 63.
- Ibid., 64–5.
- Ibid., 78.
- Ibid. 79.
- Ibid., (her emphasis).
- Ibid., 80–81.
- Ibid., 81 (my emphasis).
- Ibid., 82.
- Isabelle R. Gunning ‘Arrogant Perception, World-Travelling and Multicultural Feminism: The Case of Female Genital Surgeries (1992) 23 Columbia Human Rights Law Review 189, 199.
- As noted above, most feminist intervention in the human rights field have been undertaken from a liberal humanist perspective. However, for important exceptions which draw on poststructuralist theories see Jacqueline Greatbatch, The Gender Difference: Feminist Critiques of Refugee Discourse’ (1989) 1 International Journal of Refugee Law, 518 and Anne Orford, ‘Liberty, Equality, Pornography: The Bodies of Women and Human Rights Discourse’ (1994) 3 Australian Feminist Law Journal 72. For an analysis of aspects of international law informed by post-colonial theories see Anne Marie Goetz, ‘Feminism and the Limits of the Claim to Know: Contradictions in the Feminist Approach to Women and Development’ (1988) 17 Millenium 477.
- Their emphasis.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit, n. 1, 614.
- Ibid., p. 644.
- Mohanty, ‘Feminist Encounters’, op. cit., n. 3, 78.
- Ibid., 615, 644.
- Ibid., 621. Their ‘evidence’ here takes the form of unfounded assertions by the European feminist Birgit Brock-Utne in Women and Third World Countries—What Do We Have in Common?'(1989) 12 Women's Studies International Forum 495.
- Ibid., 616; quoting Carol Smart Feminism and the Power of Law, London: Routledge, 1989, 75. Nor are they daunted by Catherine MacKinnon's claim that for women, affirming difference means to affirm the qualities and characteristics of powerlessness” which they quote in Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1, 616
- eg. Joan W. Scott ‘“Experience”’ in Butler and Scott (eds), op. cit., n. 16; Mohanty ‘Feminist Encounters’, op. cit., n. 22.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1, 618. The footnote to Mohanty appears here.
- Her emphasis.
- Mohanty, ‘On Race and Voice’, op. cit., n. 3, 181–2.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1, 619. The example given of such a “misunderstanding” is that of the “tension” between First and Third World feminists over the correct approach” to what the authors call, “the issue of female genital mutilation”.
- My emphasis.
- Ibid., 620.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2, 65.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1, 618.
- Ibid., 621. Their source here is once again Brock-Utne who, while noting that analogies can be misleading and warning against “the fallacy of unilinear mechanistic thought”, proceeds on regardless. Brock-Utne, op. at., n. 74, 497.
- Charlesworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1, 618.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2, 77.
- Ibid. See Charleworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1 throughout.
- Ibid., 621.
- Ibid., 621. It is difficult to know how they could make this claim in the face of clear evidence that, for example, the “hatred of the feminine” which is “expressed” in men's serial killings of girls and women is far more prevalent in Western than in “nonwestern” countries.
- Mohanty, op. cit, n. 22, 78.
- Ibid., 83.
- Charleworth, Chinkin and Wright, op. cit., n. 1, 625–7.
- Ibid., 628–34.
- Nicholas Rose, ‘Beyond the Public/Private Division: Law, Power and the Family (1987) 14 Journal of Law and Society 61, 67. See also Janet Sharistanian (ed.) Beyond the Public/Domestic Dichotomy: Contemporary Perspectives on Women's Public Lives, New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.
- Aida Hurtado, ‘Relating to Privilege: Seduction and Rejection in the Subordination of White Women of Color, (1989) 14 Signs 833, 849. Cited in Mohanty, ‘Cartographies’, op. cit., n. 3, 9.
- Mohanty, ‘Cartographies’, op. cit., n. 3, 28.
- Greatbatch, op. cit., n. 68, 523.
- e.g. Andrew Byrnes, The “Other” Human Rights Treaty Body: The Work of the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women’ (1989) 14 Yale Journal of International Law 1, 54; Shelley Wright, ‘Economic Rights and Social Justice: A Feminist Analysis of Some International Human Rights Conventions (1992) 12 Aust Year Book. Int. Law 241, 258–9.
- Rebecca J. Cook, The Women's Convention: Opportunities for the Commonwealth’ (1990) Commonwealth Law Bulletin 610, 614. Australia reserved the application of article 11 (b) regarding maternity leave with pay or with comparable social benefits without loss of benefits. The fact that most Western states were slow to ratify the convention, and that the United States still has not, rarely attracts even passing comment from Western feminist analysts of the Convention. See Margaret E. Galey, International Enforcement of Women's Rights' (1984) 6 Human Rights Quarterly 463, 481.
- Carol Smart, The Woman of Lega! Discourse’, op. cit., n. 32, 32–33.
- Hilary Charlesworth, The Public/Private Distinction and the Right to Development in International Law (1992) 12 Aust Year Book Int. Law 190, 197–8. 103 Hilary Charlesworth, ‘The Gender of Jus Cogens (1993) 15 Human Rights Quarterly 63, 72. 104 Mohanty, op. cit., n. 2, 67.
- My emphasis
- Charlesworth, The Gender of Jus Cogens', op. cit., n. 95, 70–2.
- Ibid., 74.
- W. Riphagen, ‘From Soft Law to Jus Cogens and Back’ (1987) 17 Victoria U. Wellington. L Rev. 81.
- Christine Chinkin, The Challenge of Soft Law: Development and Change in International Law’ (1989) 38 Int. Comparative Law Quarterly 850.
- Surakiart Sathirathai, ‘An Understanding of the Relationship Between International Legal Discourse and Third World Countries’ (1984) 25 Harvard Int. Law Journal 395, 415.
- Annie Bunting, Theorising Women's Cultural Diversity in Feminist International Human Rights Strategies’ (1993) 20 Journal of Law and Society 6, 10.
- Ibid., 6 and 17. Also symptomatic of a failure to engage with what Third World and Black feminists are actually saying is Bunting's conflation of bell hooks' position, one appreciative of the postmodern challenge to black essentialism, with Nancy Hartsock's problematic dismissal of postmodern theory. Ibid., 22. Cf. Bell Hooks, ‘Postmodern Blackness' in hooks, op. cit; n. 4.
- Their emphasis.
- ‘An Introduction to the Symposium: Feminist Inquiries into International Law’ (1993) 3(2) Transnational Law and Contemporary Problems I, vi–vii.
- Charlesworth, “Women and International Law” (1994) 19 Australian Feminist Studies 115, 117–9.
- Ibid., 119.
- See for example, Ann Russo, ‘We Cannot Live Without Our Lives’ in Mohanty, Russo and Torres (eds), op. cit., n. 3.
- Mohanty, op. cit., n. 22, 75.
Australian Feminist Law Journal
Volume 4, 1995 - Issue 1