Prospects for International Gender Norms

Abstract

The Symposium, provocatively entitled After Gender?: Examining International Justice Enterprises, held at Pace University Law School, White Plains, New York, on November 12, 2010, was organized around four "conversations" between selected participants and finished with a keynote presentation by Janet Halley (Harvard). 1 Prior to the Symposium, telephone hook-ups were organized so that those involved in each of the four conversations could identify some key questions that they would discuss. I was one of the participants in Conversation 4, Prospects for International Gender Norms, along with Ali Miller (Berkeley) and Arminu Gamawa (Harvard SJD). With help from Darren Rosenblum (Pace), Jillian Petrera (Pace student), and Janet Halley, our panel identified three questions that provided a framework for our discussions at the Symposium. These questions are used here to provide a structure for my reflections. What do you consider utopia for international gender law, and what stands in the way of its realization? In my early days as a critical/feminist scholar of international law, an eminent professor, for whom I have great admiration, blithely dismissed my research as "utopian." The implication was that it lacked practical applicability and/or that I had flouted disciplinary conventions and boundaries - or worse, that I did not understand them - which left me out of touch with everyday reality and outside the bounds of academic credibility. While I take the criticism that my work lacks applicability to real-life everyday problems very seriously, I want to ...