Pluriloguing with ourselves: non-dominant feminisms in global governance (a conversation with Gina Heathcote and Amena Yassine)

2:00 pm to 3:30 pm

What are the current dialogues that occur (or not) between non-dominant (i.e., non-Western, non-White, and non-Anglophone) feminist actors in global governance? In this conversation between Professor Gina Heathcote (Newcastle Law School) and Dr Amena Yassine (Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs), they explore this question by looking from the following departure points:
 

Gender Redux: International Legal Patterns and Repetitions (Professor Gina Heathcote)

Similar to gender in the everyday, gender in international law is everywhere and nowhere. In this talk, Heathcote examines the state of gender and feminist knowledge in times of genocide, the climate emergency, the disintegration of stable patterns of global governance, and the rise of significant anti-gender agendas globally. She makes two arguments. First, that the global north 'problem' of contemporary crisis ignores the long-term knowledge of resistance and protest to the very same forms of disorder, whether environmental, state violence, or intersectional and quotidian harms, discrimination, and inequality linked to histories of colonialisation, occupation and intervention. Second, she reflects on the deep structural dimensions of international law that have thus far resisted feminist-informed change, arguing for attention to legal pluralism as a means to understand feminist resistance, protest, and legal change that undoes rather than reinforces the status quo. 
 

The Rise of Women’s Organisations of Diplomats: Rethinking Diplomacy and Statecraft from the MarginsAmena Martins Yassine (Brazilian Ministry of Foreign Affairs)

Since the early 2000s, 19 networks of women diplomats have emerged as transformative spaces of creative agency in diplomacy at local, regional, and global levels. In this conversation, Martins Yassine explores how Women's Organizations of Diplomats (WODs) are (re)enacting diplomacy, statecraft, and foreign policy from within. Drawing on the concepts of transmaterial diplomacy and domestic estrangement, she examines how WODs (re)negotiate who can embody and enact state sovereignty and present diplomacy as a conflicted field where identity and authority are continuously (re)configured. Operating in highly hierarchical, secretive, and formal settings that have historically defined modern diplomacy, WODs (re)enact diplomacy in a more decentralized, horizontal, and inclusive way. This unsettles the masculinist grammar of global politics and gestures toward plural, decolonial futures of statecraft and foreign policy. On the other hand, WODs also face constraints that limit their agency, reinforce structural hierarchies, and continuously (re)shape their own identity. Here, ambiguity and contradiction are not obstacles to change but its very condition. Through entanglements, where bodies, materiality, and discourse intra-act, WODs reveal how transformation can unfold through the ongoing (re)configuration of matter, meaning, and agency.

Further information and queries, please contact Dr Juliana Santos de Carvalho, js2912@cam.ac.uk

This public keynote is part of a workshop supported by the British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants scheme (grant no. G132124), the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and the University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies.