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FEMINIST DIALOGUES ON INTERNATIONAL LAW
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Heathcote, Gina. Feminist Dialogues on International Law : Successes, Tensions, Futures, Oxford University Press USA - OSO,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=5637279.
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Heathcote, Gina. Feminist Dialogues on International Law : Successes, Tensions, Futures, Oxford University Press USA - OSO,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=5637279.
Created from unsw on 2020-01-04 19:39:27.
iii
Feminist Dialogues
on International Law
successes, tensions, futures
GINA HEATHCOTE
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Heathcote, Gina. Feminist Dialogues on International Law : Successes, Tensions, Futures, Oxford University Press USA - OSO,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=5637279.
Created from unsw on 2020-01-04 19:39:44.
iv
1
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© Gina Heathcote 2019
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First Edtion published in 2019
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Data available
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Heathcote, Gina. Feminist Dialogues on International Law : Successes, Tensions, Futures, Oxford University Press USA - OSO,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=5637279.
Created from unsw on 2020-01-04 19:39:54.
ix
Table of Contents
List of Abbreviations xi
Prologue xiii
1. Feminist Dialogues 1
1. Introduction 1
2. Gender Law Reform 8
3. Feminist Successes, Tensions, Futures 14
4. The Structure of This Book 26
2. Expertise 30
1. Introduction 30
2. Approaching Expertise 35
3. Gender Effects/ Gender Affects 47
4. Intersectionality and the Politics of Listening 56
3. Fragmentation 71
1. Introduction 71
2. On Fragmentation and International Law 74
3. Fragmented Feminisms 82
4. Fragmented Subjects 96
.de 4. Sovereignty 103
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.OS 4. Splitting the Subject 125
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U d 4. Dialogues, Interrupted, as Feminist Methodology? 169
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Created from unsw on 2020-01-04 19:40:05.
x
x Table of Contents
6. Authority 173
1. Introduction 173
2. Law as Authority 178
3. Convergences? 182
4. Not Law? 189
5. Listen 193
Bibliography 201
Index 219
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Heathcote, Gina. Feminist Dialogues on International Law : Successes, Tensions, Futures, Oxford University Press USA - OSO,
2019. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/unsw/detail.action?docID=5637279.
Created from unsw on 2020-01-04 19:40:05.
xi
List of Abbreviations
AU African Union
CEDAW Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination
Against Women
CERD Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination
CTC Counter Terrorism Committee
DAW Division for the Advancement of Women
DBP Democratic Party of the Regions
DEVAW Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women
DRC Democratic Republic of the Congo
ECOSOC Economic and Social Council
ECOWAS Economic Community of West African States
GF/ GFeminism Governance Feminism
HIC High Income Countries
HRC Human Rights Council
ICAN International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons
ICC International Criminal Court
ICISS International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty
ICJ International Court of Justice
ILC International Law Commission
LMIC Low and Middle- Income Countries
MDG Millennium Development Goals
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
NGO Non- Government Organisation
OSAGI Office of the Special Adviser to the Secretary-G eneral on Gender Issues
and Advancement of Women
PBC Peace Building Commission
SADC Southern African Development Community
SDG Sustainable Development Goals
TWAIL Third World Approaches to International Law
UN United Nations
UN- INSTRAW United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the
Advancement of Women
UNGA United Nations General Assembly
UNIFEM United Nations Development Fund for Women
UNSC United Nations Security Council
UPR Universal Periodic Review
UK United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
US United States of America
USSR United Socialist Soviet Republic
WASH Water, Sanitation and Hygiene
WHO World Health Organisation
WILPF Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
WPS Women, Peace and Security
YFAS Youth Feminist Action School
Feminist Dialogues on International Law. Gina Heathcote. © Gina Heathcote 2019. Published 2019
by Oxford University Press.
xiii
Prologue
Two factors delayed the publication of this book and are worth mentioning to the
reader. The first involved the unexpected arrival of additional caring responsibilities
just as I had hoped to conclude the preparation of the manuscript in 2014. The
second factor has been the changing face of higher education, in the UK and be-
yond, towards a distinctly neoliberal model of university governance.
As the carer of somebody with a mental health diagnosis, the production of the
manuscript was delayed from September 2014 until early in 2018. I was fortu-
nate enough to encounter a sympathetic and supportive publishing team over this
period— thank you Emma, Merel, Kimberley, and Jack I am very grateful for your
patience. From 2014 to 2018, I also noticed a drastic change in the way academic life
was experienced: students became ‘clients’ and ‘customers’ in the UK as increased
undergraduate fees, to be repaid via a deferred taxation model, made excessive stu-
dent debt the new reality in the higher education landscape. The commodification
of knowledge meant that university outputs (both teaching and research) increas-
ingly needed to be quantified and economic factors (costs and profits) became the
easiest measure as the marketisation of higher education became the new reality.
This significantly changed perceptions about what to teach and what is valued in the
university, at least at the level of senior management and decision- making in UK
universities.
Both mental health and neoliberal governance techniques, in the university and
beyond, seem intertwined: and not just because both seemed to usurp my time and
leave little space for writing. Both mental health and neoliberal governance have
important gender dimensions and produce a useful way to introduce the central
themes of the book.
First, like feminist knowledge, both mental health and neoliberal governance
structures have simultaneously become objects of public consumption while also
suffering from the thin accounts dominating the popular discourse. For feminist
knowledge prevalent in global media spaces this can be characterised by the atten-
tion to gender with very little engagement with feminist histories, feminist diver-
sity, and feminist methodologies, or where feminist knowledge production occurs.
In a similar fashion, mental health awareness has become a prolific site of public
debate in Western states—o nline and within institutional structures. In the UK,
universities have been drawing attention to the worsening mental health crisis on
campus and the incapacity of existing support structures to manage the impact on
university students and staff. As the carer of someone suffering the effects and after-
math of a serious mental health diagnosis, what strikes me is the space between the
reality of living with a mental health diagnosis and popular accounts of the need to
acknowledge and speak about mental health— in all its messy, challenging, and non-
confirming behaviours and the many campaigns for #mentalhealth, #endthestigma,
#notalone, #headstogether that at once communicate an effective message yet erase
Feminist Dialogues on International Law. Gina Heathcote. © Gina Heathcote 2019. Published 2019
by Oxford University Press.
xvi
xiv Prologue
the reality of living with a mental illness. These campaigns seem to contribute to the
very odd period of history we find ourselves within; clicking a petition or posting a
meme as evidence of connection and concern, as a representation of activism, while
those suffering the physical and mental anguish remain isolated and unsupported,
misunderstood, and often chastised, dismissed, or ignored.
The politics of austerity, which have been very much at the centre of the UK pol-
itical landscape since 2009, continue to alienate and punish those who are unwell,
poor, or poor and unwell: stigmatising them for not contributing to society rather
than in need of society’s compassion and in need of the support of their commu-
nity. This is the neoliberal state at its heartless best. As I write the book which you
now hold in your hands (or on your screen), the nexus between neoliberalism and
the prevalence of messages that inundate the everyday via social media (whether
on gender #metoo, on mental health #endthestigma, or on other key preoccupa-
tions #occupy, #endneoliberalism, #nomorewar) seems to exist in the (necessarily?)
thin— or perhaps cartoon-l ike— perception of complex issues that become reduced
to a hashtag or a slogan.1 Similarly, this book is interested in how, when feminist
scholars and activists turn to international law to produce change, gender law re-
forms and change produced by gender law reforms are often a thin facsimile of the
original feminist intervention. Media attention and #hashtags are not inherently
good or bad; but there needs to be more discussion and analysis of the work they
do in minimising the history, effects, and complexity of knowledge while, para-
doxically, giving issues greater audience and engagement. Similarly, in this book,
I examine how the structures of the global order— relying on technologies of ex-
pertise and measurement—t ake up the messages but not the methodologies of fem-
inist approaches. I argue for renewed dialogues on feminism that engage feminist
methodologies with the foundations of global governance.
To make this argument it is necessary to accept gender as an embedded power
structure in global governance— such that gender perspectives are not something
to be added but rather to be understood as already configuring the global order.
That is, the recognition that gender does not happen in isolation is vital. Gender
is a component of power relations and constructs privilege and disadvantages. My
journey into navigating the world of mental health care has taught me something
similar. By this I mean that mental health has clear gender dimensions.2 It also has
class, race, and ableist dimensions, likewise sexuality matters and configures access
to resources and health care, just as religion does. A key battle in surviving mental
health care in the UK is challenging the intersectional assumptions about how you
have arrived at a clinic. Accessing health care therefore requires overcoming different
kinds of stigmas depending on who you are— and the intersection of these markers
makes this a considerably more complex barrier for some. This illuminates how the
structures around us also contain, and operate through, assumptions with regard to
1 However, also see alternative approaches to digital activism discussed in chapter 6. Gail Lewis,
‘Questions of Presence’(2017) 117 Feminist Review 1; Jia Tan, ‘Digital Masquerading: Feminist Media
Activism in China’ (2017) 13(2) Crime, Media, Culture 171.
2 Gina Heathcote, ‘Eating Us out of House and Home’ (2016) 112 Feminist Review 8.
