To all of you who struggled for women’s & human rights back then and still do so now – the International Women’s Day is for you!
Discrimination, violence, threats and offences towards women, unfortunately, still remain today…– Lena Olsson
The Raoul Wallenberg Library has almost 500 titles under the categories the Human Rights of Women and Gender Equality. The amount shows how important the topic is for the library such as the Raoul Wallenberg Library, but also points on the interest among students, teachers, and researchers.
The RWI-library follows the ongoing changes, trends, interests and included in the collection are today gender equality, feminism, domestic violence, trafficking in women and HBTQ+. Gratifying is that the interest continues and more studies and research can be conducted in all aspects of human rights of women and gender equality- the literature is there!
Something for everyone!
Living a feminist life
Ahmed, Sara (2017). Living a feminist life. Durham: Duke University Press
In Living a Feminist Life Sara Ahmed shows how feminist theory is generated from everyday life and the ordinary experiences of being a feminist at home and at work. Building on legacies of feminist of color scholarship in particular, Ahmed offers a poetic and personal meditation on how feminists become estranged from worlds they critique—often by naming and calling attention to problems—and how feminists learn about worlds from their efforts to transform them. Ahmed also provides her most sustained commentary on the figure of the feminist killjoy introduced in her earlier work while showing how feminists create inventive solutions—such as forming support systems—to survive the shattering experiences of facing the walls of racism and sexism.
Feminist and queer legal theory: intimate encounters, uncomfortable conversations.
Fineman, Martha Albertson, Jackson, Jack E. & Romero, Adam P. (red.) (2009). Feminist and queer legal theory: intimate encounters, uncomfortable conversations. Farnham: Ashgate
‘Feminism and queer theory make for unlikely bedfellows. In this substantial collection, the editors have drawn together a diverse collection of essays that lay bare the tensions and alliances between feminist and queer approaches to legal theory. The volume includes 21 substantive chapters, around half of which are entirely new works, the others being either re-printings or re-workings of earlier published essays. In the introduction, Fineman argues that “there is much to be gained from negotiating the fault lines and building off the highly critical intellectual energies that the queer-feminist tensions have produced” (p.6). This sets the scene for the theoretical fireworks that the substantive chapters set light.’
Feminist Constitutionalism: Global Perspectives
Baines, Beverley, Barak-Erez, Daphne & Kahana, Tsvi (eds. (2012). Feminist constitutionalism: global perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
The title might give the impression that this book is only of interest for readers with legal knowledge, but I, without that background find this book interesting and gave me new insights. In her foreword, MacKinnon a well-known feminist scholar, contends that feminism is both a new perspective and a “tool for intervening in the legal sphere”.Constitutionalism affirms the idea that democracy should not lead to the violation of human rights or the oppression of minorities. This book aims to explore the relationship between constitutional law and feminism. The contributors offer a spectrum of approaches, and the analysis is set across a wide range of topics, including both familiar ones like reproductive rights and marital status, and emerging issues such as a new societal approach to household labor and participation of women in constitutional discussions online.
The book is divided into six parts: feminism as a challenge to constitutional theory; feminism and judging; feminism, democracy, and political participation; the constitutionalism of reproductive rights; women’s rights, multiculturalism, and diversity; and women between secularism and religion.
Thus, this volume begins the conversation about what kinds of legal institutions are possible and what types of sensitivities are needed when constitutions take seriously freedom, equality, and dignity, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, class, ability, age, sexual orientation, and gender.
Myths about Women’s Rights: How, Where, and Why Rights Advance
Cherif, Feryal M., Myths about women’s rights: how, where, and why rights advance, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2015
The review of this book catch well this books content. It’s a book for all who are interested in gender and politics and the link between. ‘The private is political’ is a well-known slogan. Is it true?
“Almost half the books link sex and gender to power and legitimacy, thereby creating tools for analysing politics in contexts such as Putin’s Russia. In this, they address a key theme of this special issue: feminist movements’ diverse interactions with states and examine questions about the value of engaging with institutional politics. The other half explore issues that arise when sex and gender are linked to power and legitimacy, issues such as women’s variable progress in post-conflict states and how diversity can be incorporated into feminist theories of sex and power. What unites the books is the proposition that the personal is political, that is, that sex and sexuality—deeply personal relations—are part of politics, not just as political scandals on Twitter or ads on Facebook commercializing sex.
Review by Vickers, J. (2017). The Personal is Indeed Political: Sex, Gender and the State. Canadian Journal of Political Science, 50(2)
Gender, Judging and the Courts in Africa
Dawuni, Josephine (red.) (2022). Gender, judging, and the courts in Africa: selected studies. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge
Women judges are playing increasingly prominent roles in many African judiciaries, yet there remains very little comparative research on the subject. Drawing on extensive cross-national data and theoretical and empirical analysis, this book provides a timely and broad-ranging assessment of gender and judging in African judiciaries.
Employing different theoretical approaches, the book investigates how women have fared within domestic African judiciaries as both actors and litigants. It explores how women negotiate multiple hierarchies to access the judiciary, and how gender-related issues are handled in courts. The chapters in the book provide policy, theoretical and practical prescriptions to the challenges identified, and offer recommendations for the future directions of gender and judging in the post-COVID-19 era, including the role of technology, artificial intelligence, social media, and institutional transformations that can help promote women’s rights.
Bringing together specific cases from Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania, and South Africa and regional bodies such as ECOWAS and the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and covering a broad range of thematic reflections, this book will be of interest to scholars, students, and practitioners of African law, judicial politics, judicial training, and gender studies. It will also be useful to bilateral and multilateral donor institutions financing gender-sensitive judicial reform programs, particularly in Africa.
The Open Access version of this book, available here www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9780429327865/gender-judging-courts-africa-jarpa-dawuni