Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on Gender and Human Rights

Taís Penteado's paper discusses the complexity of subordination in legal contexts, particularly in the case of the Brazilian Supreme Court's criminalization of LGBTQphobia. Penteado argues that legal decisions based on the anti-subordination principle should consider the diverse ways inequalities manifest to address them effectively and highlight the dynamic nature of power relations and the challenges posed by intersectionality, and proposes a "Joint Venture Theory of Legal Interpretation," suggesting that civil society participation should be considered in legal interpretation to create more inclusive and effective legal outcomes.

Arti Gupta's paper identifies the danger of relying upon the past to confer legitimacy on non-normative sex and gender in India. The paper explores how totalizing accounts of history and appeals to "Indian culture" have been used to cast both "homosexuality" and "homophobia" as colonial impositions. Gupta's analysis further notes how these dueling narratives are instrumentalized by political actors, such as postcolonial elites or the Hindu Right, to evade responsibility and advance romanticized and essentialized visions of history, culture, and identity.

Alaa Hajyahia explores the practice of wearing Islamic veils in public spaces in Europe, using a representative case study to detail how the Muslim woman is constructed by the European Court of Human Rights. Hajyahia argues that in cases involving Muslim women, the European Court of Human Rights maintains, protects, and enforces white power and control as defined by critical race scholars, all under the guise of gender equality.

Fabiola Gretzinger details the history and successes of the #NiUnaMenos and the Marea Verde (Green Wave) movements throughout Latin America before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting the obligations of both governments and movements to ensure women's rights are strengthened and protected.

Miriam Zucker's paper deconstructs scholarly blindspots in discussions of oppressive intra-group treatment of vulnerable persons that are part of minority groups. Zucker argues that scholarship fails to account for the role of the state in the problem of intra-group vulnerability. Recognizing the responsibility of the state for this problem, the paper insists, can then form a basis from which to hold the state accountable and more effectively respond to vulnerable members’ interests and needs.

Laura Charney’s paper uses ethnographic data from personal interviews to center on the migrant and refugee experience. Rather than emphasizing smugglers as the primary source of violence, her research implicates securitization processes, state bureaucracies, and anti-trafficking and anti-smuggling humanitarian projects, all of which relegate migrants to a “rightless” zone of economic, political and social vulnerability.

Shireen Jalali-Yazdi presents a feminist decolonial intersectional framework of the killing of African American women, using it to undermine culturalist and racial explanations for the prevalence of feminicide in African American communities. The paper argues that the colonial conditions faced by African American men have contributed to the construction of feminicidal masculinities.

Katherine Fallah shines a light on law’s claims to authority over transgender identities and transgender bodies, and offers an alternate, intimate account of one transgender person’s interactions with law and society.

By Debolina Dutta

This paper examines how the activism of India’s largest collective of sex workers, in aligning sex workers’ rights with religious practices, provides counter-intuitive insights for feminist projects in India.

In this paper, Inga Helgudóttir Ingulfsen explores strategies to justify refugee exclusion that are employed by Twitter users who tweet with the hashtag #refugeesnotwelcome.

Far from empowering women or supporting the poor, Nike’s rebranding project is an attempt to discipline girls, and the NGOs that represent them, into behaviors that support the status quo, distract from corporations’ misbehavior and expand the power of the market as analyzed by Maria Hengeveld.

Lina Buchely analyzes the case of community mothers as street-level bureaucrats who produce the rule of law in their local spaces, within an institutional or democratic mechanism. This case study of community mothers, developed between June 2012 and February 2013, shows how street-level bureaucrats use the rule of law as a tool of empowerment.

By Heidi Matthews

Since the end of the Cold War, feminist scholars and activists have succeeded in making rape and other sexual violence crimes a top priority on the international criminal law agenda. This paper argues that the "feminist failure narrative" should be contested on the ground that it contributes to the depoliticization of international criminal law and offers a framework for re-politicizing international rape law.

In June 2011, the International Labor Conference adopted the Domestic Workers Convention (the Convention), the first international labor standard to set out legal obligations that specifically protect and improve the working lives of domestic workers. Kali Yuan argues that previous regulatory attempts to protect domestic workers have been inadequate and, although it is an improvement, the Convention is currently also an insufficient legal instrument.

Genevieve Renard Painter develops a theoretical approach to justice and reparations that helps to explain the gap between the international normative framework and activist discourses.

Drawing on post-colonial feminist theory, Maggie Corser provides a critical assessment of United Nations (UN) gender-based violence theory and practice.

By Sherief Gaber

This paper critically examines the ways in which the rhetoric surrounding victims of human trafficking can impact women and sex workers.

By Alice Edwards

The UN's approach to recognizing violence against women is to guarantee equality and non-discrimination on the basis of sex. This article examines whether this is an effective approach for dealing with the gender gap in the international human rights framework.

By Patricia Palacios Zuloaga

This paper examines the lack of gender-relevant cases before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the unfortunate handling of most of those cases that it did not consider through an analysis of the male-dominated nature of law as well as an analysis of how domestic and international judicial systems respond to women’s concerns.

By Susan Harris Rimmer

There is official silence on the number and treatment of the children born of conflict in East Timor, a lack of attention in the transitional justice mechanisms in place in regard to the human rights violations that produced their situation, and no official policies to deal with the needs of these children or their mothers, or the discrimination they may face. The challenge posed by these children and women to the social fabric of Timor reveals important gaps and silences within the international human rights law framework which might nonetheless be addressed by some fairly straightforward policy innovations.

By Fleming Terrell

This paper argues that State-based fora cannot adequately hold individual perpetrators and State sponsors of sexual violence in armed conflict accountable. Accordingly, it posits that “unofficial” mechanisms- created by private individuals without authorization from any State- be considered as means to eliminate impunity for sexual violence committed during armed conflict.