Gender and the Law Blog

Book Review, Julie Suk, After Misogyny: Lessons from Comparative Constitutionalism

Linda McClain, Care Work, Gender Equality, and Abortion: Lessons from Comparative Constitutionalism, JOTWELL, reviewing Julie Suk, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It.

Julie Suk’s ambitious book, After Misogyny: How the Law Fails Women and What to Do About It, contributes to a feminist literature on equality and care spanning centuries and national boundaries, yet offers timely diagnoses and prescriptions for the United States at a very particular moment. That “moment” includes being four years into the COVID-19 pandemic and over one year into the post-Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey world wrought by Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. That moment also includes a sense that transformative political and constitutional change are necessary but difficult because (as Suk and Kate Shaw recently noted) Americans have “lost the habit and muscle memory of seeking formal constitutional change” —and because of problems like polarization, gerrymandering, and restrictions on voting. Drawing on her expertise in comparative constitutional law and gender equality, Suk offers “comparative lessons” from feminist lawmaking and constitutionalism elsewhere to help move the U.S. to a democratic constitutionalism that is post-patriarchy and post-misogyny. (Pp. 212-14.) In this review, I explore some of those lessons concerning governmental commitments to supporting care and gender equality and to fostering reproductive justice.

Australian Inquiry Into Accounts of Birth Trauma

CNN covered a recent proceeding hearing personal accounts of birth trauma in Australia in its article, "MeToo" for Mothers: Australian Inquiry Hears Troubling Accounts of Birth Trauma.

The inquiry was called after dozens of women complained about their care in one part of the state, but the deluge of submissions suggests the problem goes far wider.

 

More than 4,000 submissions were received in just six weeks, mostly from mothers who say they were ignored, belittled, and denied the opportunity to give informed consent.

 

Some lost their babies, others carried their infants home along with mental and physical trauma – for which many blame themselves.

The proceeding opened with comments like these: 

“No means no, except apparently in childbirth, and it’s time to change that,” Hannah Dahlen, a professor of midwifery at Western Sydney University, told the inquiry when it opened on Monday. “This is the MeToo movement of birth.”

The committee member who convened the proceeding told CNN: 

Committee Chair Emma Hurst says the point of the inquiry isn’t to lay blame on individuals. “It’s about finding out where the system is failing and making sure we can work towards changing those systems so it doesn’t continue to happen to other women.”  

 

Jessie Allen on "Property and More-Than-Human Personhood"

Jessie Allen has posted on SSRN the forthcoming work Property and More-than-Human Personhood. The abstract previews: 

It was international news when the New Zealand Parliament, in a 2017 settlement of Māori land claims, declared that the Whanganui River “is a legal person and has all the rights, powers, duties, and liabilities of a legal person.” Such grants of non-human personhood seem peculiar. They contradict a conventional understanding that Western legal doctrine inscribes a sharp boundary between human owners of property and objects of that ownership, and only the owners have power. That anthropocentric view is part of what has made AngloAmerican property law an instrument of violent dispossession and extraction. But it is not the only way to read property doctrine. This article uses mainstream current and historical legal sources— recent U.S. case law and Blackstone’s Commentaries to tell a different story, one in which the line between persons and property has always been vanishingly thin.

Drawing on philosophical critiques of modern Western anthropocentrism and the work of Indigenous scholars, the article reveals how everyday property doctrines can accommodate a more holistic worldview. Blackstone is associated with an extreme vision of private property as exclusive individual human control over an objectified world. But viewing his canonical work through a less dualistic lens, the human subjects he describes can appear less potent than the landscape they inhabit. Blackstone’s “permanent and immoveable” land is not just a physical object, and real property combines material and “incorporeal” entities that both restrict and enable owners’ actions. This interactive more-than-human agency persists in land today, for example, in the counterintuitive doctrine of adverse possession and through servitudes that “run with the land” to shape human conduct.

This article is the first to show how traditional Western property law can be reimagined to share legal personhood – and power. Recognizing how longstanding property doctrines support more-than-human personhood matters for two main reasons: (1) It grounds novel grants of non-human personhood in a durable, widely accepted legal framework; and (2) it undermines the hierarchical anthropocentric version of property law that has facilitated and justified Western domination of both non-Western humans and non-human others. The goal is to envision a legal system that will help bring about more sustainable, morally responsible relationships among humans and between humans and others.

Kashyap on "A Critical Race Feminism Critique of Immigration Laws that Exclude Sex Workers: Moving from Theory to Praxis"

Monika Batra Kashyap has published A Critical Race Feminism Critique of Immigration Laws that Exclude Sex Workers: Moving from Theory to Praxis in volume 38 of the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice (2023). The abstract is here: 

This Article is the first to apply a critical race feminism (CRF) critique to the current immigration law in the United States, Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) § 212(a)(2)(D)(i), which excludes immigrants for engaging in sex work. This Article will use critical historical methodology to center the role of women of color as the primary targets of not only the first federal law to criminalize sex workers, but also the first explicitly racist immigration law in United States history. The Article will also employ theories of anti-essentialism and intersectionality to show how INA § 212(a)(2)(D)(i) both silences the voices and experiences of women of color sex workers and refuses to recognize the impacts of multiple intersecting systems of oppression. Finally, the Article will connect the critique of INA § 212(a)(2)(D)(i) to the anti-carceral feminist movement to decriminalize sex work in order to move from theory to praxis, and to inspire advocacy strategies and law reform efforts that point to a broader project of transformation. The ultimate goal of this Article is to strengthen links between critical race and immigration law scholarship so that scholars can continue to use CRF as an exploratory analytical tool to examine the intersections of race, class, and gender within immigration law.

Bruce Ching on "Through a Lens of Genocide: A Different Approach for Hate Crimes Legislation"

Bruce Ching has published a new article, Through a Lens of Genocide: A Different Approach for Hate Crimes Legislation, in 75 Rutgers U. L. Rev. 535 (2023). Here is the abstract. 

Hate crimes perpetrators select their victims based on the victims’ identity groups. Policies underlying legislation against hate crimes recognize that such crimes inflict greater harm on society than do the same actions committed for non-biased motives. Genocide may be conceptualized as hate crimes writ large; conversely, a new model of hate crimes legislation might be patterned on legal concepts of genocide scaled down to state or local levels. This new recognition could successfully address criticisms from both liberal and conservative factions along the political spectrum, offering a model that state and local governments could invoke for dealing with bias-motivated incidents that feature the perpetrators’ systemic intent, without focusing on more marginal occurrences. Thus, the hybrid model of hate crime as genocide could appeal to the remaining legislatures that have refused to adopt hate crime statutes, as well as to prosecutors who have had reservations about charging suspects under existing hate crimes statutes. The conceptualization of hate crime as genocide on a state or local level could also encourage local authorities to take action when federal law enforcement is either unable or unwilling to do so.

Samuel Singer and Amy Salyzyn on "Preventing Misgendering in Canadian Courts"

Samuel Singer and Amy Salyzyn have posted "Preventing Misgendering in Canadian Courts: Respectful Forms of Address Directives" on SSRN. This work is forthcoming in the Canadian Bar Review. 

Trans people face significant access to justice barriers and regularly experience discrimination within the Canadian legal system. In this context, respectful forms of address directives seek to prevent the misgendering of courtroom participants by having lawyers and parties proactively identify their titles and pronouns. Multiple Canadian courts have now introduced such directives.

This article situates forms of address directives as simply another control on courtroom speech that contributes to the fair, orderly, and efficient administration of justice. Drawing on examples, including the honorifics used for judges and the evolution of oath and affirmation requirements for witnesses, we detail how courtroom rules have evolved to reflect societal change. The article argues that forms of address directives are an important procedural tool to advance the administration of justice by facilitating equal access to the courts for trans people, providing consistency with the broader legal system’s recognition of trans rights, and facilitating the efficient and orderly administration of justice.

The article then counters arguments that forms of address directives constitute improperly “compelled speech” in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guaranteed free expression rights and addresses concerns that these directives may limit a lawyer’s ability to zealously advocate for their clients.

We conclude that forms of address directives are a simple and important mechanism to help address misgendering in courts while emphasizing that much substantive work remains to address trans people’s legal needs in Canada.

Gender Equality Provisions in Trade Agreements

Katrin Kuhlmann & Amrita Bahri, Gender Mainstreaming in Trade Agreements: ‘A Potemkin Façade’? in Making Trade Work for Women: Key Learnings from the World Trade Congress on Gender, Forthcoming (forthcoming September 2023)

The distributional outcomes of trade agreements have historically been uneven, creating both “losers” as well as “winners” and benefitting certain stakeholders while leaving others without benefits or even with negative repercussions. In particular, distributional outcomes can vary between women and men, since they play different roles in society, markets, and economies, and they enjoy different opportunities as well. At times, and sometimes by their very nature, trade agreements can restrict opportunities for women and further increase the gender divide. But in recent years, there has been a drastic upsurge in the number of countries that are incorporating commitments on gender equality in their trade agreements.

Currently, of all free trade agreements in force, around one-third have at least one explicit provision relating to gender equality. Yet almost no trade agreement so far contemplates how gender-related commitments could be implemented or enforced, and no trade agreement approaches gender on a holistic level that can meaningfully address distributional issues. Most legal provisions incorporated in trade agreements so far have been drafted in the spirit of best endeavor cooperation and are often blamed for being mere “Cinderella” provisions. In order to reverse the distributional inequities, a more comprehensive approach based on women’s roles and economic realities is needed, as is further research on what would improve distribution of opportunities for women. With more and more countries considering gender mainstreaming, this raises an important question: Is “gender mainstreaming” in trade agreements used as a “Potemkin Facade” to hide larger distributional issues? This paper will not fully answer this question, but it will expand upon possibilities and offer reflections to spark debate and discussions on this concern.

The Evolving Concept of Gender and Intersectional Stereotypes in International Norm Creation and AI

Rangita de Silva de Alwis, The Evolving Concept of Gender and Intersectional Stereotypes in International Norm Creation: Directions for a New CEDAW General Recommendation, U. Penn. J. Law & Public Affairs (forthcoming) 

A mapping of recent Concluding Observations issued to States parties by the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC), the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), and the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) provides an analysis of the evolving human right standard by which to examine gender and intersectional stereotypes. The mapping exercise focused on cultural practices and gender stereotypes in the Concluding Observations reveals the CEDAW Committee is more likely than any other above-mentioned treaty body to discuss stereotypes. This provides us with a textual understanding of how stereotypes, culture and traditional practices often overlap and intersect. While gender stereotypes have replaced more overt forms of gender discrimination, these subtle stereotypes constitute different challenges as they are less visible to the untrained eye. The second part of the paper examines how a new generation of stereotypes are being baked into Artificial Intelligence (AI) through AI training data. While writing this paper, Open AI released ChatGPT and other Generative AI and Large Language Models which demand critical examination for emerging forms of gender bias. Last summer, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, known for his love of poetry, previewed Open AI’s newest model on Generative AI and asked the chatbot to translate the Persian poet Rumi into Urdu, and then English. He recalls that he exclaimed: “God, this thing.”

Despite the strides in AI innovation, the dangers of potential gender bias are real. Prometheus stole fire from the Greek Gods and was punished for his folly and hubris. He still provided humans with the fire of life and was pardoned by the great Zeus himself. As much as these new technologies have the potential for great good and can advance medicine, science, health care, food security and other forms of human endeavor, they also have great potential for harm and pose risks to human rights. The CEDAW’s new General Recommendation (GR) 40 and the GR 41 (in the pipeline) can create important new normative frameworks that propose a human right-based approach to mitigate the emerging gender stereotypes of new technologies.

Transdisciplinary Coalition Publishes "Menstrual Justice: A Human Rights Vision for Australia"

A transdisciplinary coalition of scholars, activists, and policymakers have published Menstrual Justice: A Human Rights Vision for Australia. They offer policy recommendations "regarding the discrimination and mistreatment often experienced by people who menstruate in the areas of children’s rights, disability rights, gender rights, health, human rights, Indigenous women’s health, industrial relations, law, political economy, psychology, public health, sociology, and tax law and policy." 

We need laws that clearly outlaw workplace discrimination and harassment against menstruators, so no one is fired for bleeding on the job or being late to work due to period pain. We need public awareness campaigns and curricular expansion focused on health information and the eradication of menstrual stigma to curb poor menstrual health. We need access to resources and healthcare for residents in institutional settings that supports their autonomy over menstruation and menopause. We need provision of Indigenous intergenerational teaching about menstruation and menopause.

* * * 

Our recommendations include the areas of public awareness, curriculum, schools, workplaces, public buildings and housing, institutional settings and discrimination and coercion. Many of these recommendations are no cost or low cost but could have a large impact on gender equality and would improve human rights for women and other people who menstruate.

Book The Cambridge Companion to Gender and the Law Asks To What Extent is the Legal Subject Gendered

Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez & Ruth Rubio-Marín, eds.,  The Cambridge Companion to Gender and the Law  (Cambridge U. Press 2023)

To what extent is the legal subject gendered? Using illustrative examples from a range of jurisdictions and thematically organised chapters, this volume offers a comprehensive consideration of this question. With a systematic, accessible approach, it argues that law and gender work to co-produce the legal subject. Cumulatively, the volume's chapters provide a systematic evaluation of the key facets of the legal subject: the corporeal, the functional and the communal. Exploring aspects of the legal subject from the ways in which it is sexed and sexualised to its national and familial dimensions, this volume develops a complete account of the various processes through which legal orders produce gendered subjects. Across its chapters, each theoretically ambitious in its own right, this volume outlines how the law not only acts on the social world, but genders it.

Center for Reproductive Rights publishes report on "Failures to guarantee the sexual and reproductive health and rights of refugees from Ukraine"

The Center for Reproductive Rights published a report on "Care in Crisis: Failures to guarantee the sexual and reproductive health and rights of refugees from Ukraine in Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia."  The report chronicles how millions of people, mostly women and children, have migrated from Ukraine to the EU, including Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. 

However, Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia are some of the most challenging contexts in Europe when it comes to sexual and reproductive healthcare and gender-based violence support services. Decades long failures by national governments to invest in and prioritize these forms of care and support, combined with restrictive and unclear legal and policy frameworks and ongoing stigma and rollbacks on sexual and reproductive rights, heavily constrain access to good quality care.

 

As millions of women and girls from Ukraine arrived in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia, serious concerns arose regarding their ability to obtain essential forms of healthcare, services and support. It became clear that violations of fundamental rights within Ukraine were being compounded by rights violations outside of the country. There was particular concern for refugees who had suffered conflict related sexual and gender-based violence in Ukraine, including rape and other gender-based crimes.

 

Between July 2022 and April 2023, our organizations undertook in-depth, multi-country fact-finding to examine the gaps and barriers in access to sexual and reproductive healthcare and gender-based violence support services that are faced by refugees from Ukraine in Hungary, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. Over nine months, we collected information from semi-structured interviews with over 80 experts, professional stakeholders and refugees from Ukraine based across these four countries.

The article describes the legal barriers, cost barriers, and information barriers, as well as the poor quality care, stigma, and discrimination that these refugees faced in each country. The report offers concrete recommendations to each of the countries.

Understanding Gender Through an Economic Frame and the Lens of Decertification of Legal Sex

Davina Cooper, De-producing Gender: The Politics of Sex, Decertification and the Figure of Economy,  
Forthcoming, Feminist Theory, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14647001221148639

This article explores the contribution that the figure of economy can make to understanding gender in contemporary Britain, focusing on gender as a social quality and legal category that is produced, allocated and used. The article proceeds in two parts. The first part considers the politics of sex-based feminism and gender-as-diversity through an economic frame. The second part focuses, in detail, on one specific juncture where these diverging politics meet: decertification – a law reform proposal to dismantle the system for assigning, registering and regulating legal sex. Decertification is a controversial strategy. Advocates argue that self-expression and interpersonal communication, whether through gender or against it, is hindered by a state-based disciplinary certification system. Critics disagree. They argue that dismantling legal communication about a person's sex makes it harder to put categories of female and woman to remedial use. Drawing on other uses of certification, including commercial ones, this article suggests that certification not only communicates information about a process, quality or thing; it also contributes to their production. The impact of decertification on how gender is produced, what gets produced as gender and the uses to which gender is put are central to determining whether decertification is beneficial to a progressive transformative gender politics.

Gendered Barriers to Access for Legal Aid Programs in Canada

Gillian Petit & Lindsay Tedds, Systematic Barriers to Justice: Financial Eligibility for Legal Aid- A Gendered Analysis 

Provinces and territories across Canada offer legal aid programs to facilitate access to justice for those who are economically disadvantaged. While requirements differ by province/territory, eligibility for legal aid is dependent on having a case of merit and having income and assets below a certain threshold. In this paper, we focus on income thresholds for legal aid, and empirically measure their impact on gendered access to family legal aid. We find that legal aid income thresholds pose a higher access barrier to single women living in MBM poverty in BC, Alberta, and Ontario compared to single men living in MBM poverty, families with children living in MBM poverty, and residents of Quebec. We show this is due to different distributions of income and the placement of the legal aid income threshold. This analysis is an example of how GBA+ should be applied to examine systematic barriers to program access.

Pizzarossa et al., on "Self-Managed Abortion in Africa"

Scholars Lucía Berro Pizzarossa, Michelle Maziwisa, and Ebenezer Durojaye have published "Self-Managed Abortion in Africa: The Decriminalization Imperative in Regional Human Rights Standards, in the Health and Human Rights Journal (May 2023). The abstract provides:   

Self-managed abortion holds particular promise for revolutionizing people’s access to quality reproductive care in Africa, where the burden of abortion-related mortality is the highest globally and where abortion remains criminalized, in violation of various internationally and regionally recognized human rights. Increasingly safe and effective, self-managed medication abortion is still subject to many restrictions, including criminal laws, across the continent. Drawing on recent evidence and human rights developments around self-managed abortion, this paper explores whether and to what extent Africa’s regional legal framework builds a normative basis for the decriminalization of self-managed abortion. We conclude that the region’s articulation of the rights to dignity, to freedom from cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, and to nondiscrimination, among others, provides strong grounds for decriminalization, both concerning individuals who need abortions and concerning the constellation of actors who enable self-management.

Introduction to Frontiers of Gender Equality--Transnational Legal Perspectives

Rebecca J. Cook, Introduction, "Many Paths to Gender Equality," in Frontiers of Gender Equality: Transnational Legal Perspectives (Rebecca J. Cook, ed. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023)

In this Introduction to the book Frontiers of Gender Equality: Transnational Legal Perspectives (2023), editor Rebecca Cook shows how a chorus of voices introduces new and different discourses about the wrongs of gender discrimination and explains the multiple dimensions of gender equality. This volume demonstrates that the wrongs of discrimination can best be understood from the perspective of the discriminated, and that gender discrimination persists and grows in new and different contexts, widening the gap between the principle of gender equality and its realization, particularly for subgroups of women and LGBTQ+ peoples.

Frontiers of Gender Equality provides retrospective views of the struggles to eliminate gender discrimination in national courts and international human rights treaties. Focusing on gender equality enables comparisons and contrasts among these regimes to better understand how they reinforce gender equality norms. Different regional and international treaties are examined, those in the forefront of advancing gender equality, those that are promising but little known, and those whose focus includes economic, social, and cultural rights, to explore why some struggles were successful and others less so. The book illustrates how gender discrimination continues to be normalized and camouflaged, and how it intersects with other axes of subordination, such as indigeneity, religion, and poverty, to create new forms of intersectional discrimination.

With the benefit of hindsight, the book’s contributors reconstruct gender equalities in concrete situations. Given the increasingly porous exchanges between domestic and international law, various national, regional, and international decisions and texts are examined to determine how better to breathe life into equality from the perspectives, for instance, of Indigenous and Muslim women, those who were violated sexually and physically, and those needing access to necessary health care, including abortion. The conclusion suggests areas of future research, including how to translate the concept of intersectionality into normative and institutional settings, which will assist in promoting the goals of gender equality.

New Book, Gender Dynamics and Feminist Perspectives on Transboundary Water Conflict and Cooperation

Jenniver Sehring, Rozemarijn ter Horst, Margreet Zwarteveen    eds., Gender Dynamics in Transboundary Water Governance: Feminist Perspectives on Water Conflict and Cooperation (Routledge 2023)

This volume assesses the nexus of gender and transboundary water governance, containing empirical case studies, discourse analyses, practitioners’ accounts, and theoretical reflections.

Transboundary water governance exists at the intersection of two highly masculinised fields: diplomacy and water resources management. In both fields, positions are mainly held by men, and core ideas, norms, and guiding principles that are presented as neutral, are both shaped by men and based on male experiences. This book sheds light on the often hidden gender dynamics of water conflict and cooperation at the transboundary level and on the implicit assumptions that guide research and policies. The individual chapters of the book, based on case studies from around the world, reveal the gendered nature of water diplomacy, take stock of the number of women involved in organisations that govern shared waters, and analyse programmes that have been set up to promote women in water diplomacy and the obstacles that they face. They explore and contest leading narratives and knowledge that have been shaped mainly by privileged men, and assess how the participation of women concretely impacts the practices, routines, and processes of water negotiations.

Evaluating the New EU Directive on Combating Image-Based Sexual Abuse

Carlotta Rigotti & Clare McGlynn, Towards an EU Criminal Law on Violence Against Women: The Ambitions and Limitations of the Commission’s Proposal to Criminalise Image-Based Sexual Abuse,New Journal of European Criminal Law IJECL 2022, Vol. 0(0), 1-26

In March 2022, the European Commission proposed a new landmark Directive on combating violence against women and domestic violence which includes measures on the non-consensual distribution of intimate and manipulated images. We refer to this form of violence against women as ‘image-based sexual abuse’, a term that encompasses all forms of the non-consensual creating, taking or sharing of intimate images or videos, including threats to share such material and altered material. In this article, we provide a new analysis of current Member State laws covering all forms of image-based sexual abuse, as well as the first detailed examination of the Commission’s proposals to tackle this form of violence against women. We suggest that the Commission’s proposal is characterised by both its ambition and limitations. It is ambitious in its attempts to set minimum rules in challenging areas of criminal law and, in doing so, recognises the serious harms of image-based sexual abuse. At the same time, by seeking to expand the reach of EU criminal law, inevitably requiring compromise, the scope of the proposed measures is somewhat limited. Such compromises and limitations risk entrenching hierarchies between different forms of abuse and, ultimately, the proposal fails to provide a comprehensive response reflective of victims’ experiences

The New Colombian Law on Abortion Allowing Interruption Until Week 24 Based on the Right to Health, Substantive Equality, and Freedom of Conscience

Isabel Cristina Jaramillo Sierra, The New Colombian Law on Abortion, International Journal of Gynecology and Obstetrics 159.3 (Jan. 2023): 345-350

On February 21, 2022, the Colombian Constitutional Court decided that the existing regulation of abortion was unconstitutional and repealed it (Sentencia C-055/2022). The new abortion law, as per the Court’s decision, considers the voluntary interruption of a pregnancy a crime only when it happens after week twenty-four and does not fall under the health, rape or malformation indications developed through precedent from 2006 to 2022. The decision is generally binding and of immediate application. The decision’s rationale builds on the right to health, substantive equality, and freedom of conscience. It acknowledges severe restrictions in access to abortion faced by Colombian women and the costs these restrictions have on their lives. It also recognizes that the indications model forces women to obtain permission from medical doctors to access abortion, and thus fails to recognize women’s freedom of conscience.

Exploring the Formal and Informal Definitions of Sex and Gender and the British Proposals to Reform How the Categories are Used in Law

Davina Cooper, What Does Gender Equality Need? Revisiting the Formal and Informal in Feminist Legal Politics,  Journal of Law and Society 2022, 49 (4) 800-823

This article explores the political conflict over reforming how sex and gender categories are used in British law, focusing on the speculative legal proposal to ‘decertify’ sex and gender. Three interconnected arguments are advanced. First, diverging views on decertification are both about and seek to marshal competing perspectives on the value and risks of formalization and its undoing. Second, understanding these views, and decertification more generally, benefits from an account of the formal and informal as interconnected movements of (un)settling, (un)acknowledgement, system (un)intelligibility, and (non-)deference which remains irreducible to the presence or absence of state and law. Third, while formalization can pin down responsibilities and entitlements, it can also fix unequal and exclusionary status relationships. Focusing on positive action in the final part of the article, I consider how movements of formalization and informalization interrelate and the choices available, in conditions of decertification, if positive action is to counter gender inequality.

International Conference on Family Planning Session Recordings Available

The International Conference on Family Planning was held in Thailand in November 2022. Conference tracks included content related to universal health care coverage, gender equality, reproductive rights, quality of care, contraceptive technology, reproductive health among youth, reproductive health in humanitarian settings, and the impact of COVID-19 on reproductive health. 

Use this spreadsheet to search for sessions presenting research and advocacy that supports your work!