Abandoning the idealized white subject of legal feminism: A manifesto for silence in a Lusophone register

Abstract

AbstractThrough an account of white feminisms and white privilege, this article examines the tensions between local and international knowledge frames. The article considers the possibility of a feminist approach to global constitutionalism and argues for a twofold critique: first, a feminist interrogation of the dominance of a specifically male history of Western and Anglo-European knowledge frames; and second, a self-critique within feminist approaches to global legal regimes that acknowledges the complicity of mainstream feminist tools in the racist histories of knowledge production. To this end, the article examines the space of gender expertise to explore how this can be both an aperture for plural feminist encounters and a refinement of diverse feminist approaches into a form digestible by the contours of international institutions. To explore alternative, decolonized encounters, the article centres Lusophone African feminist silence and action in Luanda, the capital of Angola. The article explores how Angolan gender relations, informal labour and histories of protest unsettle the frame of a feminist manifesto, to argue for a place for active silence as a methodology for undoing the status quo of global constitutional expectations of how knowledge arrives at the global and transnational levels.