Description
An important dimension of thinking about queering responses to transnational (in)justices is considering historical queer exclusions. The adoption of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) Agenda by the UN Security Council constituted a forum-shift by women’s rights advocates away from the human rights system. The resolution reflected a strategic decision to bring women’s rights to the Security Council and forum-shift away from the consensus-based human rights system. Rather than focus on the compelling reasons to turn to the Security Council as a powerful forum to include discussions of gender and highlight women’s experiences, we instead consider the implications of this forum-shift for the concept of gender promoted by the WPS agenda. We look to this forum-shift in order to better-understand the persistent challenges that limit queer-inclusive and feminist WPS initiatives today. Queer critique points to the theoretical boundaries that underpin these practical exclusions, most notably boundaries between feminist and queer theory, but also boundaries with masculinities and trans-theorising. Queer critiques of the WPS agenda might be summarised as the agenda’s underpinning heteronormative assumptions, its continuing attachment to a gender binary, and emphasis on sexual danger combined with silence towards homophobic and transphobic violence. An investigation into the forum of WPS as space for promoting gender justice seeks to elucidate these critiques by revealing their origins within well-established limitations and exclusions of gender work in international law, in particular international human rights law. (This abstract represents research for a paper co-authored with Dr. Catherine O’Rourke (Durham University), forthcoming in Human Rights Quarterly).
