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The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis. By Hilary Charlesworth and Christine Chinkin. Manchester (UK): Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 337. Index. 55, cloth; 17.99, paper.
Much has happened in academic circles in the decade since Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright first opened the eyes of most English-speaking international lawyers to the gendered boundaries of international law through their pathbreaking article in this Journal.1 In 1991, the U.S. academy was still debating whether gendered was a word at all, much less an acceptable (or respectable) mode of analysis for a notoriously state-centered system of rules. Not long before, the first academic conference devoted to feminist deconstructions of international law (at Australian National University in 1990) had reportedly "alienated" the mainstream (specifically, that most eminent of international lawyers, Oscar Schachter).2 As if "alienating Oscar" had not been enough, Chinkin and Charlesworth had the temerity soon thereafter to apply feminist analysis to a multitude of sacred cows, including international lawyers' equivalent of "high" politics, the concept of jus cogens.3 Their critiques initially
produced shock and even ire. Academic grenades were lobbed at those "radical feminists" not content with reformist moves within specialities presumed to be suited to "women's concerns," such as human rights! Others, more sympathetic to the enterprise, questioned the feminist turn to the personal (and sometimes passionately expressed) voice of experience, warning that abstract doctrine has its uses and that one "can reconceive international law every now and then, but not all the time."5 Today, with both Chinkin and Charlesworth on the Journal's Board of Editors, and with feminist modes of analysis nearly as ubiquitous as the New Haven Schools the self-proclaimed academic and political goals of this new book seem almost (but not quite) passe. Many of us are ready to concede as canard what the authors here specifically set out to disprove, namely that the feminist reconception of international law is only "an eccentric sideshow, irrelevant to the mainstream of the discipline" (p. 19).
The Boundaries of International Law, a longoverdue synthesis of a vast amount of scholarship, remains necessary-for both practical and academic reasons. For all the progress made by feminist theory (particularly in parts of Europe, Australia, and the United States), all too many international lawyers out...