Gender Equality in Transnational Legal Perspective

This course is structured around three goals: i. to move beyond the formalistic approaches to gender discrimination to envision news ways of thinking about gender equality in specific contexts; ii. to provide retrospective views of the struggles to eliminate gender equality in international and regional treaty systems, and iii. to reconstruct gender equalities in concrete ways, including by the reframing of court judgments.  The course explores such questions as:  

• What methods, feminist and otherwise, are used to expose forms of gendered wrongs of different subgroups of individuals in different sectors such as education or health?
• How can the gender equality analysis be sharpened, for example by reference to different theories of equality?  
• How can counter- arguments to gender equality be more effectively addressed?  

Cases will be selected from various human rights treaty bodies to address forms of subordination that are of transnational concern, such as the contentious case that it is being brought under the Convention of the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women by Australia, Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands against Afghanistan.