ABSTRACT
The fundamental questions, then, involve how, and when, formal law is useful for attaining gender equity in international and domestic law. Clearly, law alone is insufficient to drive change in support of the expansion of women’s rights and gender equity. For women’s rights and gender equity in particular, reliance on formal legal rules may be problematic, as law itself is critiqued as patriarchal, hierarchical, and rigidly formal in ways that do violence to women’s claims, as well as the claims of LGBTQ people. Elizabeth Mills focuses on embodied experiences of inequality under the wall through an examination of the ways in which international discourses and institutions shape domestic legal frameworks governing gender and sexuality, particularly in determining which bodies are made visible, effaced, or entirely ignored. The issue of Global Discourse is the product of a multidisciplinary scholarly collaboration focused on questions related to gender, sexuality, and the law.
