Worlding women and international law

Abstract

Jeni Pettman convincingly demonstrated that International Relations (IR) is gendered and male (Pettman, 2005). But, in Worlding Women, she also insists women maintain their agency within the IR world. International law (IL) is readily, and perhaps unsurprisingly given their disciplinary overlaps, easily and accurately substituted into her claim. Since the publication of Worlding Women in 1996 and the ground-breaking publication of The Boundaries of International Law by Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin in 2000, international (legal) feminist scholarship has grown tremendously (2000). Nonetheless, Pettman, Charlesworth and Chinkin’s claims remain essentially true that despite representing half of the world’s population, women remain narrowly considered in international legal analysis because the discipline’s homosocial structures fail to recognise much beyond the white Western heteronormative male. This chapter considers where worlding women within IL now stands and makes a modest proposal for feminist treaty interpretation (FTI) as a space of both future change and to redress past exclusions