Legal Feminism and the UN's Gender Mainstreaming Policy: Still Searching for the Blind Spot?

Abstract

This article primarily assesses feminism’s achievements and challenges, particularly within the framework of the UN gender mainstreaming policy. The first part of the article explored different feminist inquiries into general law to question whether such inquiries have been successfully or properly reflected in the UN gender mainstream process. The second part focused on the progress made by the UN Security Council through its series of resolutions on Women, Peace and Security to examine the ways in which international institutions and international legal categories tend to exclude women and the issues of most concern to women. This analysis, owing much to the extensive literatures on female analyses on international law in the last two decades, led to the conclusion that despite the significant progress that has been made by feminist international lawyers, there remain many ongoing challenges before international law may fully embrace and reflect ‘true’ feminist values.