Foreword

Abstract

Extract Decades ago, feminist art historians could confidently write: ‘It is no longer necessary to assert that there have been women artists.’1 In international law—where ‘the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations’ are a means of determining the law itself2—the same cannot be said. Feminism arrived later and began with a different question. ‘Why has gender not been an issue in this discipline?’ Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright asked in a revolutionary article in 1991.3 A wealth of feminist approaches to international law followed but left relatively untouched the ‘where are the women?’ question that had been a wedge in the door in the humanities. This volume changes that in compellingly rich and varied fashion. However, Portraits of Women in International Law: New Names and Forgotten Faces? confronts the challenge of adding faces of women across the history of international law and recognizing their contributions at a time when even the most revelatory of portrait galleries, such as this one, is simultaneously desired and suspect.4 On the one hand, universities, like other spaces, are increasingly recognized as ‘occupied’, in Sara Ahmed’s term: ‘This occupation leaves traces on walls; portraits of past leaders can surround you … [U]se leaves traces in places’.5 Portraits of Women in International Law thus brings much-awaited change to the mental, and potentially physical, hallways of international law. Its forty-two portraits begin as early as the fourteenth century and span the globe. In them, gender intersects with race, colonialism, class, sexuality, and other forms of difference. The subjects are groups as well as individuals, material as well as ideational contributions to international law, forgotten names as well as familiar faces (in the title’s phrase). On the other hand, the idea of a canon as a collection of revered masters or valued texts has become suspect. Whereas some feminists argue that the problem with the literary canon is that it is unrepresentative of female tradition, for others the problem is that a canon exists at all: a female canon would be no less oppressive because it would necessarily represent only a particular socio-demographic group of women. ‘Canon building is empire building. Canon defense is national defense’, wrote the novelist Toni Morrison bluntly.6 And, in international law, Gerry Simpson wrote: ‘Monuments, as we know, do not simply fail to remember: they actively “un-remember” that which is not commemorated.’7 Can the canon be rehabilitated by recognizing the contributions of ‘old mistresses’ as well as masters (as feminist art historians archly put it) or is the idea itself unsalvageable?8